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
Wow, and if you drink water it will kill you and that is a statistical fact… This is a joke let’s look at the variables of the western life style…hum
The ECONOMIC reason for pushing skim milk – the dairy industry gets to make TWO products from the same amount of WHOLE milk – SKIM milk and BUTTER! Before, when people drank whole milk there was less cream to make butter out of, so remove the cream, brainwash the public into believing Whole milk is unhealthy, and then the dairy industry can make a lot more butter more cheaply.
This is what a Vermont family farm selling raw “for pets only” milk and butter claims. It makes perfect sense.
Think about it – it is the Dairy Industry pushing Skim Milk, but NOT pushing butter “substitutes.” The butter “substitutes” are pushed by chemical companies. If whole milk was REALLY bad for you, then butter would be even worse, afterall butter is nothing more than churned cream!
It’s funny – I always thought Skim Milk and margarine were invented in the 1970’s – 1980’s. When I was a kid (in the 1980’s) is when Skim Milk REALLY started being marketed – my mother bought it once – I SPIT IT OUT – it was DISGUSTING! She NEVER bought skim milk again; although she did always buy lowfat (I made the switch to Whole Milk myself, later). As for butter vs. margarine, again, back in the 1980’s the media convinced my mother that we were being “poisoned” by real butter, so she switched to using margarine for cooking, but she still always bought butter for actual eating – NO ONE in my house would ever EAT margarine (on bread, for example) because it was (is) DISGUSTING! Then, finally, a few years ago when it was discovered that it was not BUTTER that was the problem, but the TRANS FATS in MARGARINE, she got SO MAD and has never bought margarine or any butter “substitutes” since. It was hard for me to transition – I’d never fried an egg in butter before! But, add a little Olive Oil to the pan first and then butter and it’s fine. But, I plan to switch to Palm or Coconut oil, because I’m wary of cooking with Olive Oil now.
One of my funniest memories was waking up really early one morning and finding my baby brother (~ age 2) sitting on the floor with the refrigerator door wide open eating an entire stick of butter! It was real butter – that was before my mother fell for the “butter is bad” propaganda.
@PDXLinds omg YES! Totally forgot about CwC… lol! But, but… everyone needs fat! Skim milk is the devil. Read this! http://t.co/lARgKCZ
Why Skim Milk Will Make You Fat and Give You Heart Disease – The Healthy Home Economist http://t.co/PaC60cc
My hypoglycemia has all but went away since I switched to butter and whole creamline milk. It is fantastic! And whole fats in meat is not bad either, bacon can actually lower your cholesterol if eaten in moderate amounts. Most of my problems came from eating fake sugars and trans-fats in processed foods.
Why Skim Milk Will Make You Fat and Give You Heart Disease The Healthy Home Economist http://t.co/x6H7PJe a reason to have whole milk…yumm
Excellent post. A lifelong sugar and refined carb addict with an extremely strong family history of Type 2 diabetes, i was diagnosed as a diabetic last year. After doing some research and rejecting the ADA low-fat “diabetic diet”, I cut out refined sugar and carbs from my diet and switched to whole milk organic yogurt as my main source of dairy. I have lost 40 pounds to date relatively painlessly and my fasting blood sugar is down 130 points. Total cholesterol is 150. Our bodies were not designed or did not evolve to eat so many refined carbs.
Our bodies are not designed to drink milk After a toddler ….. Oh and I’m diabetic and lost weight by making a decision to balance what I eat and I hate milk and is almost non exesistant in my diet.
I have asked myself many times how America has come to the place where Truth is ridiculed and thought to be a danger! WHY have we just believed everything the mainstream has “told” us!? Once you start looking deeper into almost any subject, you will be AMAZED at what is out there, just waiting for you! If there is one thing that I am very unhappy with concerning public education, it is that they have STOLEN the fun of learning for MOST kids! (NOT ALL!) We have the world at our fingertips, and we don’t LOOK! I hope that every parent out there starts to take the time to teach their children that learning and knowledge are FUN! I haven’t changed the subject here. I am a 52 year old healthcare professional and homeschool mom; I have been watching for years to see what makes kids tick. It is always the children of parents who take time to make it fun (public, private or home) that grab my attention. They have a special spark, from being allowed to question! Their experience is validated by wise parents who NEVER tell them not to ask, just do it, when they have a genuine desire to know! They welcome the debate and tell them all they can find about a subject. We would NEVER be in the position we are in now in America, if everyone was doing this. Please take time to explain to your kids WHY you believe something and show them how to find the TRUTH! Dig hard for it! Don’t give up! God bless Sarah! Keep it coming! We have some great discussions about your stuff!!!
Hey! I read this article in the paper about milk and I was wondering what you thought about it.
http://www.chicagotribune.com/features/food/sc-food-0513-kids-milks-20110518,0,3805595.story
Thanks!
This blog is PRICELESS!
I started losing some weight when I experimented with increasing the fat in my dairy. I started with 2%, then decided to try whole, and my dad (who is a heart patient) is really against my attempts to do this in spite of the fact that I lost 5 pounds (I haven’t been able to literally lose this amount of weight in years) and my face has a different glow to it with the mere loss of 5 pounds. I start using less of it for a couple of days and I gained a pound back.
I am worried about the homogenized milk issue. Is it a GUARANTEE that people who use homogenized milk will get sick later in life? What about people who may live in states in which raw milk is not legal? I feel that no matter what I do – use low-fat or whole milk – I’m doomed.
Whole milk is great … just get nonhomogenized. I would not drink whole milk if it homogenized even if organic. In states where raw milk is illegal you can still get nonhomogenized low temp pasteurized milk. Just ask your healthfood store to order Natural by Nature milk in glass bottles.