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 really what your saying is that apparently skim milk makes you crave sugars and carbs and those make you fat- not the skim milk (aka skim milk DOESN’T make you fat its the sugar and carbs…..). Wow what an article. Talk about using information and twisting things (including your title) to create fear mongering. There is no way that by eating regular yogourt, whole milk, and regular cheese will help you lose weight or eat healthier. This article should be labelled “how I trick people into getting fat without properly explaining the facts to actually eat healthy”. Skim milk IS good for you. If you plan to eat healthy, then you have to learn to CONTROL the cravings- no matter what form. And I don’t know where you got the idea that skim makes you crave sugar and carbs. Seriously, this article was so painful to read. You clearly don’t know what it means to eat to have a healthy lifestyle. The things that make you fat are partially food choices but mainly the way to eat healthy (and lose weight) is the will and desire for the person to resist cravings, to eat proper portions, drink more water, and to fit good activity into their daily lives. It’s people like you who burn the advances being made in teaching people how to live and eat better. Stop writing articles and get educated!
Thank you so much for that comment. I was honestly starting to worry that everyone on here had no brain at all.
Sarah, I wrote about your article here …
http://dotalanecdotes.blogspot.com/2012/09/skim-milk-makes-you-fat-what.html
I see in the comments that many good folks are debating the health pros and cons; I have no doubt about where I stand on the matter, but what if we just skip the health facts and go for taste? Or skip taste and go for natural state? It’s more fun than bickering over everything!
It is amazing how many here are brain washed into thinking that natural fats in milk is not good for you. The Article is dead on and if you are as smart as you think you are you will follow it .
There’s only a small portion of the population with the genetic make up to drink milk without some form of allergic reaction. They range from phlegm in the back of your throat or inner ear infections requiring holes poked into your ear drums, to mild gas to being doubled over in extreme pain. If you want the protein eat the cow, if you want the calcium eat dark leafy greens, & if you want the Vitamin D go play in the sun. Stay away from cheese while you’re at it, the only healthy dairy is eggs.
That’s not true Ken, I’m sorry to have to sound disagreeable but I have to inform you that you are mistaken. Everyone can properly digest milk if it is raw. When it’s raw milk contains the enzymes necessary to properly digest it. Doctors would have us believe some of us are “lactose intolerant” when the truth is milk is not digestible in the altered, dead state in which it’s sold to us in stores. If you want healthy gut bacteria Ken, drink raw milk or eat raw dairy products. 80% of the function of the healthy human immune system is the ecosystem of bacteria found in the gut.
Milk is bad for the majority of people anyway. Just don’t drink it at all.
So in the end, it is not really the skim milk what makes people fat. It all boils down to the principle of following a balance diet. Some kids get fat from milk because in many cases, that is their main meal. Some kids do not get milk and juice as a snack, those are sometimes a replacement because mom does not have *time* to cook.
Change your diet and eat a lot of fruit and vegetables and the sugar cravings will be satisfied with a piece of fruit.
This is without a doubt the biggest bunch of crap I have ever read. Who do you work for, Satan? You must be a complete idiot if you actually believe this garbage! I sincerely hope people will do their due diligence and research, research, research before they take one single word of your advice. God save us from liars like you!!!
Very insightful post, please keep doing so.
Thank goodness someone else has some sense on here! Thank you Tennicia!!. Ken, perhaps you should try reading some books, heck just read the article. She even states that the skim milk causes cravings for carbs and sugars that are the cause for weight gain….. so skim milk fine…. sugar and carbs bad…. weird…. but the title sounded so promising.
At least put somewhere in the title that it’s psychological what causes heart disease and fatness. You’re giving people the wrong idea.
I will not pretend to be familiar with the biochemistry and science involved in this issue, so my views will be expressed primarily from my background in the social sciences. Even if the science behind your blog is correct (though I certainly hope not, as I am a big fan of skim milk), I think your assertion is far too simplistic. Much has changed in the diet and lives of Americans since WW2, not just the introduction of low fat products. And, any of these things, on their own, could be the reason heart disease is so much more prevalent today, and certainly any combination of these factors would just compound the increase in clogged arteries, heart attacks, etc. Some things just off the top of my head…the mass consumption of fast food (virtually unheard of pre WW2), soft drinks, television usage and video games making us much more sedentary, the shift from manual labor, agricultural and manufacturing jobs to most people now sitting at a desk and pushing paper all day. Even the fact that life expectancy is so much longer now. It is quite possible that because people died at a much younger age (probably an average of 20 years younger than now), we just didn’t live long enough for arteries to get clogged; something else would kill us first.
Even if the science behind what you say is correct, there are so many additional factors that probably have a far greater impact on the health of Americans than low fat dairy products. overly processed fast food and sedentary lifestyles seem far more likely culprits.