The stories you want. The opinions that matter.
No, thanks
Tag: milk
Is Whole Milk Healthy? Don’t Raise That Glass Yet

Is Whole Milk Healthy? Don’t Raise That Glass Yet

By Rosalind Bentley, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution (TNS)

Just in time for the national caloric binge that is the winter holiday season, the federal government is expected to release the new Dietary Guidelines for Americans, the every-five-years report that tells us what we should eat.

Fresh vegetables and fruits will certainly be on the list. But after years of exile, full-fat whole milk and other whole-milk dairy products may make a return.

A growing body of research suggests that saturated fat in dairy, specifically in milk, may not be as harmful to overall health as previously thought, according to an article on the research by The Washington Post. Citing studies of thousands of people over 10 years, the Post said those studies showed people who drank more milk fat had lower rates of heart disease.

The government has been warning Americans off of saturated fat since the 1980s, and the new guidelines will not declare saturated fats to be suddenly risk-free. Nevertheless, the science surrounding milk fat in particular is nuanced and complex.

The current draft of the Dietary Guidelines do not embrace full-fat dairy, not even a little bit.

“The overall body of evidence examined by the 2015 (Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee) identifies that a healthy dietary pattern is higher in vegetables, fruits, whole grains, low- or non-fat dairy, seafood, legumes, and nuts; moderate in alcohol (among adults); lower in red and processed meats and low in sugar-sweetened foods and drinks and refined grains,” according to a report released by the committee in February.

So how did we get from there to here? To a point where after decades of shunning it, we might be able to pour whole milk on our cereal again without guilt?

A partial answer to those questions is that not all saturated fat is created equal, said Desiree Wanders, an assistant professor of nutrition and dietary researcher at Georgia State University. Milk contains nutrients that many other high saturated fats don’t, such as phosphorous, calcium and potassium, which have been shown to help combat high-blood pressure, Wanders said. In addition, milk fat has a form of fatty acids that could be “cardio-protective.”

“You can’t ignore the research,” Wanders said. “Most of the research coming out in the last 20 years says high saturated fat doesn’t necessarily promote heart disease. Dairy appears to have enough benefits to outweigh the negative effects of saturated fat. It’s not the saturated fat but the food it’s found in. Dairy is protective. Processed meat is not.”

Jamie Cooper, associate professor of food and nutrition at the University of Georgia, has examined the role of dietary fat and its effect on metabolism, inflammation and how full a person feels after eating certain foods. She agrees that there are huge differences in saturated fats, but she cautions people against interpreting the research to mean it’s OK to introduce a little more of it into the daily diet.

“Maybe saturated fats aren’t quite as bad as they were made out to be, but there are still a lot of detrimental effects of saturated fats,” Cooper said. “Dairy and dairy products have other beneficial nutrients in them. So if you’re going to have saturated fat, you might as well get them from dairy rather than deep-fried foods.”

But as an example of how divided the medical community can be when looking at the same studies and the same findings, take Dr. Jennifer Rooke, an assistant professor of community health and preventive medicine at the Morehouse School of Medicine. Rooke said she works with patients to remove all saturated fats from their diets, especially those from dairy products. She sees the cholesterol in saturated fats as the real culprit in heart disease.

“Saturated fat by itself does not cause heart problems, but the issue is that it’s impossible to separate it from cholesterol in food,” Rooke said.

As a result, Rooke advises her patients to avoid milk and milk products all together and to adopt a mostly plant-based diet. She avoids the terms vegetarian or vegan because they represent ideologies, she said, not necessarily good nutrition. The key is replacing the saturated fats with unsaturated fats found in foods like avocados, walnuts and almonds.

Ironically, even though Wanders and Rooke disagree on the role of dairy fat in the diet, they both agree on this: neither thinks people need any kind of milk past adolescence. But adults should continue to get calcium from food sources such as leafy, dark green vegetables and fish such as sardines, including the bones.

When it comes to nutrition guidelines, the public tends to appreciate clear and definitive statements, with little room for ambiguity.

“The public doesn’t like mixed messages and the guidelines lose credibility and people stop trying to follow them,” said Sandra Dunbar, a cardiovascular researcher at Emory University School of Nursing.

Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack and Health and Human Services Secretary Sylvia Burwell, whose departments jointly issue the Dietary Guidelines, ran into that sentiment during House Agriculture Committee hearings last week.

“We’ve had these guidelines that have pushed people away from eggs and butter and milk, and then they come back and say, ‘Well, we were wrong,'” said Rep. Collin Peterson, D-Minn. “From my constituents, most of them don’t believe this stuff anymore. You have lost your credibility with a lot of people and they are just flat out ignoring this stuff.”

Vilsack sought a middle ground.

“All of this is evolving,” he said. “You’re not going to ever have something that is just going to be fact about this, because science evolves, we learn more, we understand more, and I would hope that we would be flexible enough to appreciate that.”

Dunbar, the Emory researcher, says the Dietary Guidelines, no matter how definitive, can only take you so far.

“Diet is only one part of what influences cardiovascular diseases,” she said. “Not smoking, getting exercise, maintaining a healthy weight, all of those are key in determining whether saturated fat will promote heart disease. The question isn’t should you have whole milk or not.”

Still confused? Dunbar offers a fairly easy solution.

“When you get conflicting information, ask your health provider, ‘What is right for me based on my health history?'” she said.

Photo: It’s the saturated fat in milk that’s the culprit. Guy Montag/Flickr

Russia Dairy Plant Closed After Workers’ Milk Bath

Russia Dairy Plant Closed After Workers’ Milk Bath

By Sergei L. Loiko, Los Angeles Times

MOSCOW — A Siberian dairy plant was temporarily closed Friday after its workers had been found bathing in milk, a Russian consumer oversight agency reported.

Trade House Cheeses, a dairy producer in Omsk, about 1,600 miles east of Moscow, was closed for 90 days by regional authorities for an urgent inspection after complaints resulting from photographs and a video posted by one of its employees on a Russian social network.

In the photographs and video clips posted on New Year’s Eve by worker Artyom Romanov, a group of undressed employees relaxes in a container of milk as part of their New Year celebration. While still partly undressed, they then demonstrated cheese making in a clownish manner.

“But in reality our work is very boring.)))))” Romanov wrote in a caption accompanying the images.

“In a checkup we found the container where the workers were bathing and the bowls in which they were making cheese and a mass of other violations of sanitary-epidemic norms,” Marina Boyko, deputy chief of the Omsk region’s sanitary inspection agency, said in an interview with Lifenews, an online publication.

After the video appeared on NTV, a federal television network, many residents of Omsk refused to buy products made at the plant, an NTV report said this week.

“The production and service facilities are in an unsatisfactory sanitary-technical condition,” the statement read. “Conditions for personal hygiene are lacking.”

The appalling conditions and outrageous practices at this Omsk plant are quite a common occurrence these days in Russia as sanitary oversight has become virtually nonexistent, said Dmitry Yanin, a Russian senior consumer service expert.

“For five years Russia has been languishing in a so-called experiment of practically exercising no control over consumer production after a law was introduced limiting inspections of such facilities to only once every three years,” said Yanin, board chairman of the Russian Confederation of Consumer Societies, a Moscow-based group.

“What happened in this dairy plant in Omsk is of course a case of sheer idiocy, but nowadays there is nothing to prevent such idiots from indulging in similar outrages or routinely violating production and sanitary conditions elsewhere in the country.”

The plant in question could be closed for a thorough inspection five days after a prosecutor’s approval, Yanin said. “Which in many cases gives violators ample time to correct their problems before an inspection only to resort to malpractices again once the checkup is over.”

The average salary of a sanitary inspector is equal to $500 a month, but instead of raising that, the state decided to move in to prevent the inspector from taking bribes by in effect seriously curbing the inspector’s ability to control production norms and practices. More often than not, these practices lead to dire consequences, especially in food production and catering services resulting in thousands of cases every year, Yanin said.

In the western city of Kaliningrad 74 cases of acute food poisoning were registered this week resulting from eating shawarma (meat kebab) at a local cafeteria, Rospotrebnadzor Kaliningrad branch reported on its website.

Fifty-two of the cases were hospitalized in a regional infectious diseases clinic, Forty-seven of them were diagnosed with salmonellosis, the report said. The facility in question was closed for inspection.

“But for the video appearing on a social net and but for over 70 people poisoned from eating some horrible stuff, we would have never known about the risks of using these facilities’ products,” expert Yanin said. “The entire sphere of food production is now completely out of the state’s control, which means that none of us are safe when we buy food in Russia these days.”

Photo: Salim Virji via Flickr

Russia Dairy Plant Closed After Workers’ Milk Bath

Russia Dairy Plant Closed After Workers’ Milk Bath

By Sergei L. Loiko, Los Angeles Times

MOSCOW — A Siberian dairy plant was temporarily closed Friday after its workers had been found bathing in milk, a Russian consumer oversight agency reported.

Trade House Cheeses, a dairy producer in Omsk, about 1,600 miles east of Moscow, was closed for 90 days by regional authorities for an urgent inspection after complaints resulting from photographs and a video posted by one of its employees on a Russian social network.

In the photographs and video clips posted on New Year’s Eve by worker Artyom Romanov, a group of undressed employees relaxes in a container of milk as part of their New Year celebration. While still partly undressed, they then demonstrated cheese making in a clownish manner.

“But in reality our work is very boring.)))))” Romanov wrote in a caption accompanying the images.

“In a checkup we found the container where the workers were bathing and the bowls in which they were making cheese and a mass of other violations of sanitary-epidemic norms,” Marina Boyko, deputy chief of the Omsk region’s sanitary inspection agency, said in an interview with Lifenews, an online publication.

After the video appeared on NTV, a federal television network, many residents of Omsk refused to buy products made at the plant, an NTV report said this week.

“The production and service facilities are in an unsatisfactory sanitary-technical condition,” the statement read. “Conditions for personal hygiene are lacking.”

The appalling conditions and outrageous practices at this Omsk plant are quite a common occurrence these days in Russia as sanitary oversight has become virtually nonexistent, said Dmitry Yanin, a Russian senior consumer service expert.

“For five years Russia has been languishing in a so-called experiment of practically exercising no control over consumer production after a law was introduced limiting inspections of such facilities to only once every three years,” said Yanin, board chairman of the Russian Confederation of Consumer Societies, a Moscow-based group.

“What happened in this dairy plant in Omsk is of course a case of sheer idiocy, but nowadays there is nothing to prevent such idiots from indulging in similar outrages or routinely violating production and sanitary conditions elsewhere in the country.”

The plant in question could be closed for a thorough inspection five days after a prosecutor’s approval, Yanin said. “Which in many cases gives violators ample time to correct their problems before an inspection only to resort to malpractices again once the checkup is over.”

The average salary of a sanitary inspector is equal to $500 a month, but instead of raising that, the state decided to move in to prevent the inspector from taking bribes by in effect seriously curbing the inspector’s ability to control production norms and practices. More often than not, these practices lead to dire consequences, especially in food production and catering services resulting in thousands of cases every year, Yanin said.

In the western city of Kaliningrad 74 cases of acute food poisoning were registered this week resulting from eating shawarma (meat kebab) at a local cafeteria, Rospotrebnadzor Kaliningrad branch reported on its website.

52 of the cases were hospitalized in a regional infectious diseases clinic, Forty-seven of them were diagnosed with salmonellosis, the report said. The facility in question was closed for inspection.

“But for the video appearing on a social net and but for over 70 people poisoned from eating some horrible stuff, we would have never known about the risks of using these facilities’ products,” expert Yanin said. “The entire sphere of food production is now completely out of the state’s control, which means that none of us are safe when we buy food in Russia these days.”

AP Photo/Carrie Antlfinger