Joke: How do you dramatically increase sales of a new or unpopular food product to the American public?
Answer: Call it a health food!
This joke, while funny, is also very sad as it illustrates with humor what common sense, logic, observation, and facts cannot for the vast majority of Westerners. Time and time again, Americans are completely duped by the clever marketing of a food product, falling all over themselves to buy it just because it has been touted in the media and by their (equally duped) doctors as a food that will improve their health.
Don’t believe it? How about margarine? Americans, in the span of just a few short years after World War II, all but completely shunned butter and this behavior pattern continued for decades because saturated fat was supposedly the demon of heart disease. See my blog which explains the truth about butter. Americans are finally waking up to the fact that butter is a wonderful, truly natural health food. Margarine and fake butter spreads like Smart Balance are ironically the culprits that contribute to heart disease!
What about soy and soy milk? This is another supposed “health food” that has been proven to do nothing but cause an epidemic of hypothyroidism in the Western world (you know the symptoms: overweight, losing your hair, depressed, tired all the time). Soy in Asia, as it has been consumed for thousands of years, is always fermented for long periods of time before it can be safely consumed – and even then – in very small quantities! The modern processing of soy which involves grinding up the leftover soy protein, the waste product in the production of soy oil, and putting it in all manner of food products which line our grocery store shelves makes for a dangerous and health robbing line of consumer goods.
I also blogged recently about the latest healthfood scam:Â agave nectar. Here again, is an example of a new food that was marketed using the “health food” label. This approach to selling to the American people is obviously working as these products are readily available in most health food stores despite the fact that this product has a more deadly concentration of fructose than the high fructose corn syrup in soda!
Now, On to Skim Milk!
Hopefully, you are now convinced that labeling an item as a “health food” is a frequently used approach for selling something to the American public. Skim milk falls into this same category.
Prior to World War II, Americans didn’t ever drink skim or low-fat milk. Drinking such a product to stay “thin and healthy” would have been laughable. Americans would only drink whole milk. In fact, the larger the cream line on their milk, the higher the quality of the milk and the more likely the consumer was to buy it. Milk wasn’t homogenized in those days, so a consumer could easily see the distinct cream line on the milk to determine quality.
Cream has been considered a true health food for centuries. In Ancient Greece, Olympic athletes drank a bowlful of cream to give them strength and endurance before a competition. Why? Because cream steadies blood sugar for an extended period of time. No ups and downs in insulin when your diet has lots of wonderful saturated fat in it. It is only when you eat low-fat that blood sugar issues such as diabetes and hypoglycemia tend to arise.
So, how did skim milk come to be recognized as a health food in America? It all ties back to the demonization of saturated fats that began shortly after World War II. Americans started to abandon butter and cream in droves about this time because studies had apparently shown that saturated fat was linked to the growing number of heart disease cases in America. Never mind that atherosclerosis (clogged arteries) was virtually unknown prior to the mid-1920s when Americans drowned everything in cream and butter. Logic and observation clearly indicated that saturated fat could not possibly be the cause of heart disease – it was obviously something new that had been introduced into the American diet. Of course, this “something” is partially hydrogenated fats which were introduced around 1921 (Enter the first transfat … Crisco. Bingo! First documented heart attack from atherosclerosis in 1927, and it rapidly got worse from there). These factory fats are primarily responsible for the epidemic of heart disease yet saturated fats took the fall anyway.
With Americans abandoning whole milk due to its high saturated fat content, skim milk was touted as the new heart-healthy food. Americans bought the scam hook, line, and sinker. Skim milk was the new king of the dairy aisle. This behavior pattern has continued for decades despite the average American getting fatter and fatter and the cases of heart disease showing no signs of abating.
In the 1990s with the beginnings of the childhood obesity epidemic, doctors even started to encourage parents to switch their children to skim or low-fat milk around age 2. This foolish recommendation has done nothing but make kids fatter (source).
How does drinking skim milk make kids (and adults) fatter? This apparent paradox occurs when you reduce the saturated fat in a person’s diet and he/she turns to carbs (grains and sugars primarily) to fill in the gap. It is the grains and sugars that truly make you fat, not saturated fat. I’ve said before on this blog that the more butter and cream I eat, the easier it is to maintain my weight. MUCH easier. The same goes for all of us. If you drink skim milk, you will be missing out on the satiating, blood sugar and insulin steadying effects of saturated fat, so your body will automatically give you sugar and carb (grains) cravings to make up for it. The body is able to MAKE saturated fat out of sugars, hence the sugar cravings that are impossible to control when you eat a low-fat diet that includes skim milk.
Try it! Increase your consumption of butter, whole milk yogurt, and whole milk cheese for a few days and watch your sugar cravings rapidly diminish!
Another big secret is that Big Dairy adds skim milk powder to skim milk. Here’s an excerpt from “Dirty Secrets of the Food Processing Industry” from the Weston A. Price Website:
A note on the production of skim milk powder: liquid milk is forced through a tiny hole at high pressure, and then blown out into the air. This causes a lot of nitrates to form and the cholesterol in the milk is oxidized. Those of you who are familiar with my work know that cholesterol is your best friend; you don’t have to worry about natural cholesterol in your food; however, you do not want to eat oxidized cholesterol. Oxidized cholesterol contributes to the buildup of plaque in the arteries, to atherosclerosis. So when you drink reduced-fat milk thinking that it will help you avoid heart disease, you are actually consuming oxidized cholesterol, which initiates the process of heart disease.
One parting fact: pig farmers love feeding skim milk to their pigs. Why? It makes them REALLY fat! Still want to drink your skim milk? I hope not.
Still confused about fat? Please see my healthy shopping list for where to buy healthy fats and oils.
More Information
Why Milk Matters and Why it isn’t Just for Baby Cows
101 Uses for Raw Milk that has Soured
A1 and A2 Milk: Do Cow Genetics Even Matter?
A1 and A2 Factor in Raw Milk
I appreciate your blog. It’s actually great to see some real information being openly discussed. There are so many misnomers being propagated in health and food issues today. There is some truth to your argument as far as blood sugar levels, which are, in our society, a limitless roller coaster. Milk is a wonderful resource, girls especially should be drinking a great deal of it up to age 25. Either 1%, 2%, or Whole milk only to maximize absorbtion of Vitamin D.
Don’t take this the wrong way, but you should fully do your research before touting saturated fats as harmless. The nutritionist above was correct in her assumption that saturated fats are unhealthy, she just didn’t know why they are unhealthy. Reasonable. I can explain in simple terms. Chemically speaking, a saturated fat is a fatty acid chain with no double bonds, all of the hydrogen bonds are at their max bonded to the carbons, which in other words means “saturated.” So in other words, it would be correct to say that saturated fats = oxidized fats = trans fats… which are bad, as you are all aware. All of these are chemically similar, so much in fact, your body deems all of these as “foreign” and plasters it all over your arterial walls. Best to limit consumption of saturated fats, just like limiting trans-fats. Instead go for unsaturated fats. As for the argument about the heart attacks beginning in 1927. That logic is also faulty. Health care evolved in leaps and bounds in early times. In those days everyone died from consumption and fever, when today we know the specific cause. It certainly doesn’t mean heart attacks didn’t occur before 1927, it means no one knew enough to diagnose them. I really appreciate your blog and the attempt at spreading some knowledge. Your cause is worthy and great, you just need a chemist to chat with every once in a while…Everyone does. 🙂
Your comment is misleading. Saturated fats and trans fats are similar in appearance, but they are mirror images, or isomers. It is quite common for the body to recognize one isomer and not the other — for instance, all amino acids in all living things are the same isomer and the opposite one appears only in inorganic things. The wrong isomer just won’t bond properly in the body.
Saying that the body does not recognize saturated fat is clearly false — the body creates saturated fat for food storage. Most of the body fat of humans (like other animals) is saturated. It is convenient for storage and what your body likes to burn when you’re losing weight. Perfect “starvation food.” The fat coating your nerves and brain is also largely saturated. Not to mention that human breastmilk is high in saturated fat. Why would we produce a food for our babies that their bodies didn’t recognize and “plastered it all over their arterial walls”? Why aren’t breastfed babies dying of heart attacks?
Are you a real chemist or did you just take high school chemistry? This stuff about isomers isn’t all that advanced. If you are a chemist, perhaps studying some of the biological applications of chemistry might be useful. Because saturated fat and trans fat may look the same in a lab, but they are accepted completely differently by the body — even conventional nutrition admits this.
The bit after “it would be correct to say” is incorrect. In fact, most comments here are just as false or misleading as the “spin” of the food producers you malign. Trans fats are bad for you, saturated fats are neither good or bad for you, polyunsaturated fats are good for you. Neither is skim milk bad; but if you substitute the missing milk fat for more carbohydrate then you’ll be worse off.
And you’re not going to lose more weight if you switch to an organic diet (although you may watch what you eat a little more closely).
Please read “Good Calories, Bad Calories” to be better enlightened on the subject of why saturated fat isn’t harmful.
Or we could use logic “Don’t blame new diseases on old time food”… If primitive cultures survived healthfully eating sat fat w/o disease then how can we say it’s bad?
Peronsally, I’ve done a very high fat diet 65% with a lot of it saturated and had blood work with an NMR panel and all came back phenomenal, sometimes you just gotta say F-what mainstream says and try something out, see how you look, feel, perform and get blood work. Proof is in the pudding, not some shady agencies idea of what is “bad” for us.
Thanks Mark I like what you said as I feel it’s ok to eat animal fats and we should be wary of sugars. John Yudkin said rodents fed on sugar had such a huge amount of triglycerides in their blood it looked milky and their liver, gallbladder, became enlarged. NZ has introduced low-fat milk policy to prevent obesity and heart-disease. Figures on the pack shows low-fat varieties of milk are higher in sugars and carbs. I feel they are wrong depriving kids of whole milk but Government has all the say and Fonterra is dishing out low-fat milk for school kids just following Government orders. Their low-fat milk isn’t even fortified with vitamin D. The other silly thing is NZ Heart Foundation food pyramid restricts avocados and nuts because they contain fat !!
Oh, and I forgot, besides the skim milk and grains, don’t these weight watchers drink diet pop/artificially sweetened foods, also shown to increase weight due to lowering seratonin, one function of which to control appetite and that it makes you likely reward yourself with more food/sugar, after all you are eating zero-cal stuff and can justify it.
Good show, Sarah. Homogenation (as well as the milk powder) makes the fat globules one-tenth their natural size causing them to pass through the gut into the blood easier and faster. Now, since they are much smaller, well they stick easier to the smooth and rough parts of the veins, IMO.
Excellent point, Augie. Thanks for chiming in to mention that important piece of info! I wish I had included that in the blog post.
I have to chime in here! I have been drinking raw grassfed whole milk for the last 8 years and have lost several dress sizes in the process. Thank goodness for local farmers.
8 years ago, our m.d. suggested getting my then 3 year old daughter off organic commercial milk after she suffered multiple bouts of croup and congestion. After making the switch to first no milk, then raw goat milk, then raw cow milk, she quit having the congestion and croup symptoms. We all lost weight. I learned about this through WAPF much later and it confirmed what we had experienced as a result of a MD that was trained to recognize an “allergy” to commercial, pasteurized or “dead” milk.
Hi Arline, Why don’t you try it yourself and experience the wonderful results personally? Most folks won’t be able to get their head around the paradox that saturated fat doesn’t make you fat and guess what? They will stay fat and diabetic/prediabetic or super thin and hypoglycemic.
As Dr. Phil is fond of saying, “Some people get it, some people don’t.”
Those who are able to think outside the box and beyond a person’s credentials will see the truth based on observing their own personal health and weight situation improve by incorporating healthy, whole, saturated fats back into the diet.
One thing is for sure the more you read the more confused u get. This is the first time I have read you. What makes you the expert we should believe? What are your credentials ?
Hi Arline, you can read about my background by clicking “Sarah” in the navigation bar at the top of the blog. Not that credentials mean squat, by the way. MDs get next to no nutrition training whatsoever but somehow people hold them up as nutrition experts when they are completely clueless in the vast majority of cases.
SO true Sarah!
Why don’t you do your own research, Arline? You’re sitting there staring at the best information resource since the invention of the public library. You’d be amazed how much information is out there, some in scientific journals. I already posted this link earlier in the conversation:
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0FDE/is_1_20/ai_68913302/
As far as I’m concerned, if you drink skim milk “for the calcium” you might as well be drinking chalk water for all the good it’s doing you. Ironically you will see nutritionists and dieticians tell their clients to drink skim because there is more calcium–but what good does it do if you can’t absorb it?
I can only attest to the fact that my husband and i have both lost weight drinking whole raw milk. I had my gall bladder removed 4 months after having twins. I was trying to eat high fat foods to help keep enough calories to deal with nursing the twins. Since switching to the whole milk my husband and I have fixed his lactose intolerance and have both last weight. He has had to add 2 extra notches on his belt and I have gone down a pant size. I have also seen a lowered need for sugar and chocolate.
That’s a good point, Madame D. Generally speaking, though, the vast majority of folks who seek out and drink skim milk eat lowfat and most end up struggling with weight problems as a result of it. Choosing skim milk over whole milk simply for calorie reasons is not a good way to go either as calorie for calorie, fat does not go to your backside the same as grains/sugars do. If you are cutting calories, cut carb calories, not the nutritious, blood satiating fat calories from whole foods like fresh milk! All calories are not created equal by any means.
“If you drink skim milk, you will be missing out on the satiating, blood sugar and insulin steadying affects of saturated fat, so your body will automatically give you sugar and carb (grains) cravings to make up for it.”
That’s a pretty broad statement to be making. I drink skim milk but I have plenty of other sources of fats, both saturated and not, in my diet. I have a family history of diabetes and heart disease and it is in my best interest to maintain a healthy weight, which is more of a challenge now that I am over 40. Considering I still eat red meat, bacon, real ice cream, and cheese, I don’t feel like I need the extra calories from full-fat milk. I do indulge with clotted cream every once in awhile, too.
Ultimately, it’s an individual’s bad eating habits that cause them to gain weight, regardless of the foods they choose.
So would you kindly explain to me how I could have bad eating habits as a teenager and yet not gain weight? I was fully within normal range BMI until I was 21.
I have had my weight increase dramatically three times in my life. The first time, I went on the Pill. The second and third times each followed a pregnancy.
People talk so blithely about how “easy” it is to gain or lose weight. What they tend not to realize is that even a fat person is usually at weight equilibrium–that is, they’re neither gaining nor losing. It’s all well and good to look at a fat person’s eating habits and say “see, that’s how you got fat” if they’ve been the same weight for ten years. How do you know they had the same eating habits ten years ago? Chances are fair they didn’t.
If the answer were so simple, none of us would be obese.
@Madame Defarge – if it is diabetes you are trying to avoid, you would be far better off drinking whole fat milk rather than skim. When you take the fat out of milk, there is nothing left to buffer the rather large amounts of lactose (sugar) from entering your body at a rapid pace, causing a surge in insulin, and laying the groundwork for type II diabetes. With whole-fat milk, the fat prevents all that sugar from entering your bloodstream at once – it serves to “pace” the sugar, and your body can deal with it better. Besides, if you are eating all those other fatty things, why would you bother with skim milk?
Well said!!
Whole milk is always better than lowfat milk. The less fat you eat, the more carbs you will eat typically and carbs make you fat, not good quality whole fats. People who are afraid of fat tend to BE fat or super skinny and hypoglycemic.
Not to mention on the way to a raging case of osteoporosis. Check this out:
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0FDE/is_1_20/ai_68913302/
If they’re skimping on dietary fat intake they’re not only in danger of bone breakage in their old age from not absorbing enough calcium from the diet, but being overly slender they also lack the muscle mass to stimulate calcium uptake that way. Ask any bodybuilder why resistance and weight training lead to greater bone density, you’ll get an earful.