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
So if you cant afford or find whole raw milk what should you by?
I have a question: what is the motivation of dairy/government/??whoever to market skim milk instead of whole? As I understand it, there is a lot more processing involved in skim vs. whole, so therefore I would assume that this would make skim milk more expensive…just curious. I am really moving toward whole foods in my diet, & am experimenting with whole milk in our diet as well. Also, what would you consider to be an adequate amount of milk per day? I would think the amount would be small, but am curious. Thanks!
Hi Angie, separating out the cream by the Dairy Industry for making ice cream is very very lucrative. This leaves a lot of skim milk left over which no one wants .. hence the push to market it as somehow a “healthy” choice which Americans always seem to fall for. Selling a food in pieces is always more lucrative than selling it whole.
Hi Angie I would like to answer this because our government has now decreed that everyone should consume low-fat milk to prevent heart disease and obesity. School children are being given Lite milk. When I asked NZ Heart Foundation why do they not restrict sugar in their ‘tick products’ they replied there is no conclusive evidence that sugar causes heart disease only fats cause heart disease.
Just found this blog and it’s nice to hear common sense. Throughout history the ability to obtain full fats, diary, and goods meats have been the difference between the healthy segments of the population and the have-nots who died in childhood and early adulthood. It’s beyond stupid that people believe things that our ancestors have struggled their whole lives to obtain to keep them healthy are suddenly ‘bad’ for us because we’re ‘civilized’.
A random milk-fact that I’m suprised someone hasn’t posted here yet, during the Great Depression unscrupilous companies were selling skimmed milk to the poor, it was called ‘blue milk’ for it’s blue tint (still readily apparent in today’s slightly-enhanced skim milk) and it did so much to damage the health of poor children whose parents thought they were managing to obtain real milk that the government outlawed it’s sale! My grandparents always drink skim milk and I always insisted on calling it blue milk, neither my brother or I would touch it when we were over visiting.
two major problems here:
1. “It’s beyond stupid that people believe things that our ancestors have struggled their whole lives to obtain to keep them healthy are suddenly ‘bad’ for us because we’re ‘civilized’.”
Oh really? Our civilization does not require us to hunt for food, which is why our ancestors could eat more fat. So actually its “beyond stupid” that you believe we can eat like our ancestors, and not exercise, and be in the same state of health.
2. “government outlawed it(skim milk)’s sale!”
Really? I have skim milk in my fridge. Good fight.
Hi,
I’m a 14 year old teenager.
Recently I’ve got fatter, I thought back and wonder if eating weetabix with skim milk might be the cause.
What do you think? Will that be the cause? Should I use whole milk instead?
Hi Justin, I’m not familiar with weetabix .. it sounds like a boxed cereal? If so, definitely the weetabix plus skim milk would put on weight! Boxed cereals are refined carbs which really pack on the pounds as it is and then adding skim milk on top of it just adds to the problem. Best to skip the weetabix entirely and just drink whole milk with a bowl of old fashioned porridge like oatmeal .. preferably fresh from the farm milk as processed milk from the store is allergenic and constipating.
Sarah, weeatbix are a wheat biscuit style breakfast cereal. Most of them are 99/100% wholegrain wheat. Which I guess is not great for some of us who need to watch their grain in take, not to mention how processed they are..
And they don’t do you any good if you have a weight issue, I would know, I used to eat these almost everyday for breakfast.
Then what should I give my daughter who just turned 1 to drink. I am not able to get whole organic milk here, but they do have a few health stores near me who has soy milk. And also, what type of milk should I give my other children. Organic dairy is very hard to come by around here.
Thank you!
Hi Amy, here’s a post I wrote about this. Whatever you do, don’t buy soy milk:
https://www.thehealthyhomeeconomist.com/2011/01/the-three-best-substitutes-for-a-child-allergic-to-milk/
have you considered relactating? Barring that goats milk is good, as is whole grocery milk if thats all you can get. NO SOY!! Soy is the worlds biggest hoax, talking people into eating weeds as health food is the biggest scam around. (for the record, im not being facetious about the relactating possibility, your daughter is still well within the recommended time frame for nursing, the WHO recommends a MINIMUM of two years at the breast, and relactating isnt that hard, even if you didnt nurse in the first place for whatever reason, look into it 🙂 )
I have an alternate theory why 1 in 3 Americans are obese.. They eat way too much fast food and they don’t exercise. Simple as that.
Amen!!
Atkins isn’t any more expensive than any other way of eating (WOE). If you want to eat well and be healthy, you have to make most of your own dishes and condiments at home, and that can get expensive very quickly, especially you make too much and end up throwing it out. Best to make small amounts to begin with and decide what you do and don’t like and then the cost isn’t as great for most. Now that my house is an empty nest, I had to re-learn how to cook for just DH and me. Not easy to do but do-able.
To Exhausted: Throw the Alli away, because what you’re paying for that can buy you quite a bit of good healthy food. I had a friend who ridiculously decided to try Alli and she had to wear an adult diaper everywhere she went. Even after she stopped taking the Alli, she had to wear it until the stuff cleared her system — which amazingly enough took almost three weeks. Alli is expensive, real food isn’t when you think of it in terms of gaining health rather than losing it. Also, Exhausted, if you stick with WAPF type foods, you won’t be exhausted.
I dug out my old Atkins New Diet Revolution Book last night and it’s already 10 years old — good grief where does the time go? So is there a newly updated version? I never followed it too much because I don’t need to lose weight, but I did read it because a lot of people were “into it” a while back. He recommended (at the last writing) buying full-fat mayonnaise. I wonder if that has changed, since so much of the purchased condiment line (ketsup, mustard, mayo, etc.) is made with soybean oil and all kinds of other nasty junk nowadays. Anyone know??
I agree totally about the importance of saturated fats, but we don’t want to buy whole milk and have the homogenized fat. We try and up our saturated fats in other ways…butter, avocados, nuts, seeds, etc. Wish we could get raw milk for the cream/fat.
I am so confused.
First I was on a low-fat diet and gained weight.
Then I was on the Atkins Diet and it was so expensive that I shook with fear every time I paid a grocery bill. Yeah, I’ve heard all about how it doesn’t have to be expensive, chicken, fish, etc.,etc., but when you are POOR and not on Food Stamps the Atkins Diet IS expensive.
Now I’m taking Alli and back on low fat. I actually get dizzy when I’m in the store and look around — low fat? low carb? Lo – hi – lo – hi – lo – hi ….
And being unable to exercise vigorously makes this all the more confusing.
Sometimes I wish all the advice givers would just shut up until the real FACTS of the matter are agreed upon. Every source of advice says that it has the facts, but it’s all opinions with anectotal evidence and some facts.
I know this sounded rude, and I am not asserting that you don’t mean well. It’s just that when the main schools of advice contradict each other flatly, what is a lay person to do?
p.s. Then toss in taking medication that promotes weight gain, so you are fat, sick, unlovely, unhealthy, and the target of scorn by people such as our First Lady, who has made it her little trip to tell people how to eat!
Hi Exhausted, why don’t you try it and then decide? This info is based on Traditional Cultures not modern health propaganda such as what you describe.
Here’s the thing. Each body is different. What works for one person may not work for another. Personally, I have diabetes and thyroid disease, plus a whole bunch of pain issues that prevent me from exercising as much as I would like (yes, I do like it) and need.
Many people can lose weight on a high-fiber, low-fat diet. I couldn’t, plus my blood sugar levels were dangerously high.
Now I’ve switched to the Paleo Solution, at my Dr.’s recommendation, and I feel great. I’m losing weight and my blood sugar levels are going back down. My blood pressure is good, too. My grown sons and one daughter-in-law is on it and they love it.
Physiologically, anyone should be able to lose weight if they have a calorie deficit and are doing some vigorous exercise at least a few times a week. You have to try different eating plans and see what works for you.. After all, you know your body better than anyone right?
As a chemist, this statement is untrue.
“Saturated fats and trans fats are similar in appearance, but they are mirror images, or isomers.”
A saturated fat has no double bonds, but is saturated with hydrogens. Trans fats contain at least one double bond with their substituents “trans” to each other. They are not mirror images, or isomers. Their chemical formula is not the same, so they cannot be chiral or an isomer.
-Trained Chemist