So are low fat dairy foods better for you?

I remember about 10 years ago going to a natural health seminar and the speaker pushing very hard to reinforce how we should not be eating low fat dairy foods and that butter and other higher fat dairy are really good for you.

I also remember the number of people walking out of the seminar talking about what an idiot the speaker was.

Everyone knows that for better heart health you need to reduce the amount of saturated fat in your diet and part of doing that is to eat and drink only low fat dairy foods.

We now have at least two generations which have grown up eating and drinking low fat dairy foods and find the taste of higher fat dairy foods to be strange.

Well it seems that the speaker who was considered silly at the time, actually had the right idea.

According to a recent study by Edith Cowan University in Western Australia there is no advantage to your health if you eat and drink low fat dairy foods compared to their higher fat types.

The eating habit study was done on 860 teenagers from early to late adolescence in Western Australia.

Edith Cowan University’s School of Medical and Health Science Researcher Dr Therese O’Sullivan said; “We have long been recommending people eat low-fat dairy on the assumption that because it has less calories and less saturated fat it is healthier for you, but there was very little out there in terms of good evidence that this is the case.”

The research can be found in Issue 8, Volume 1 of Nutrients Journal, also found that full-fat dairy may be just as beneficial for cardiovascular health as low-fat products.

Dr O’Sullivan stated; “When we examined the cholesterol profile of these teenagers we found that those who ate more low-fat dairy were no better off. In fact, we were able to show that for teenage boys, full-fat dairy consumption was associated with a slightly better cholesterol profile than low-fat dairy. Intakes of both low-fat and regular fat dairy products were associated with better blood pressure in boys.”

It is a generally held belief that full fat foods will increase the potential for obesity, so this had to be tested in the study. It was found that in fact this did not happen.

Dr O’Sullivan said; “Given that it has less calories per serve, it was assumed that low-fat dairy would help children and teenagers maintain a healthy weight, but we found that neither low fat nor regular fat products increased risk of obesity. This could be because children and teenagers are actually quite good at regulating their food intake, so eating full-fat dairy makes them feel more full, potentially reducing their consumption of other foods, but this is something that requires further research.”

This study only looked at teenagers, so it cannot yet be said that a similar result could also apply to older people, but if it does also apply them, there will be many changes to nutrition and the Healthy Food Pyramid.

So much more research will need to be done before a long held belief can be overturned.