Cheese makes you fat and unhealthy, drinking milk and eating cheese does not improve the health nor necessarily increase bone strength in children or adults.
Cow's milk is a huge source of saturated fat in American children's diet. The lead physician-researcher of a brand new study concludes:
"The take-home message is that children should not be drinking milk as a means of losing weight or trying to control weight," said Catherine S. Berkey of Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women's Hospital."
12,000 children were studied and the more milk they drank, they more weight they gained with a 35% increase in overweight in kids who drank the cliched "three glasses of milk each day."
The National Dairy Council has spent $200 million on a "milk helps you lose weight" campaign over the past 18 months. As usual, they have bent the truth a little bit.
(The researchers went so far as to study whether replacing kids' sodas with milk would contribute to weight loss; It did not.)
The article in this month's issue of the very prestigious journal "Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine" lets us know that Dr. Berkey " . . . went into this project expecting that drinking milk would have some weight benefit for children. So I was surprised when it turned out the way it did"
This comes a couple months after the journal "Pediatrics" published a controversial study showing that drinking milk and eating dairy might not strengthen children's bones.
As this news cycle progresses, you'll see quotes from the dairy industry's hired doctors. These are the best quotes their money can buy . . .
"There are a number of studies that show a positive effect of milk," said Michael B. Zemel of the University of Tennessee, who receives some funding from the dairy industry. "Increasing dairy augments the effects of cutting calories."
This bears repeating: Cheese makes you fat and unhealthy, drinking milk and eating cheese does not improve the heath nor necessarily increase bone strength in children or adults.
JNG MD