Low-Fat Dairy Products Make You Fatter

Good grief! You can forget about losing weight buying all that low-fat milk, cheese & yogurt. All the advertising has been hogwash, because consuming the regular old full-fat dairy products actually reduces your risk of becoming obese. According to leading nutritionist Walter Willett of the Harvard School of Public Health, there is a "dairy fat paradox" that if you opt for low-fat versions of dairy products you are actually more likely to become more obese than people who eat the full-fat versions.

According to a recent Swedish study of 1782 men in the Scandinavian Journal of Primary Health Care, consumption of full-fat dairy products is correlated with a lower risk of developing central obesity – excessive weight gain around the abdomen. A separate and even more recent analysis of 16 relevant studies in the European Journal of Nutrition echoes the weight-gain link. Willett says the findings for body weight shouldn't be too surprising as many studies have not supported the idea that fat in the diet is specifically related to greater fat in our bodies. The idea that all fats are bad still persists in the minds of many people, despite layers of evidence that this is not true. If anything, low fat/high carbohydrate diets seem to be related to greater long-term weight gain.

Where did the idea that full-fat dairy is bad for you originate? This concept emerged in the 1950s and 60s when it was shown that saturated fat increased blood cholesterol levels. Because dairy fat has high saturated fat content (about 65 per cent), it was deemed to be harmful. Also, in the 1950s US physiologist Ancel Keys and his colleagues showed that areas with high consumption of saturated fat, largely from dairy fat, had much higher rates of heart disease than the Mediterranean countries, where dairy consumption is lower. To make matters even worse, many low fat dairy products replace the fat with sugar which almost certainly induces more weight gain than the full fat versions.