When it comes to dieting and wanting to lose weight there are certain things that we would all agree are going to be naturally good for. Ask anyone and they’ll be able to come up with a list of guaranteed tips that will help you to lose weight. And it will probably include ideas such as doing more exercise, eating less, cutting out sugary drinks, counting your calories and eating or drinking fat-free or low-fat options. But while these things are something that pretty much everyone would agree on, there is one in there that appears to actually be wrong.
When you talk about using low-fat options such as skimmed milk, it’s often assumed that it will be much healthier and better for you than using full fat milk. But to us that only to seems to be counter-intuitive to common sense and the way that we believe dieting works. After all, if you cut down on the amount of fat that you take in, it should be easier for you to lose weight. But according to new research, drinking skimmed milk might actually be making us bigger rather than helping us to lose weight.
It is generally thought that drinking skimmed milk is a very good idea for your health and could even be considered a healthy option when you come to make decisions about your lifestyle. After all, drinking skimmed milks allows you to get all of the benefits of milk including calcium, vitamin D and protein, without having to drink full fat milk which is much higher in fat or calories. However, according to the authors of this new research, this assumption is actually flawed for a number of very important reasons, and drinking skimmed milk is actually likely to be worse for your wellbeing.
But how can this be so? Well, it seems that drinking a low calorie option such as skimmed milk doesn’t actually lead to a reduction in calorie intake. The authors of the study believe that this is because people who use low calorie options such as skimmed milk are more likely to drink far more of it, and actually take on more calories than they would have done otherwise. Previous studies have actually found strong evidence that shows that children who drink low-calorie options such as skimmed milk are more likely to be heavier than their peers later on in life.
“Our original hypothesis was that children who drank high-fat milk, either whole milk or two per cent, would be heavier because they were consuming more saturated fat calories,” said Dr Mark Daniel DeBoer, who is the author of the study and an associate professor of paediatric endocrinology at the University of Virginia School of Medicine. “We were really surprised when we looked at the data and it was very clear that within every ethnicity and every socio-economic stratum, that it was actually the opposite, that children who drank skim milk and one-percent were heavier than those who drank two per cent and whole”.
There is clearly the problem that people overeat when they think that what they are eating is a healthy option. And it is worth pointing out that even whole milk only has a fairly low level of fat and calories and using skimmed milk doesn’t really lower it very much. The problem is that people then drink far more of the skimmed milk and end up drinking more calories than they would if they were drinking whole milk. Clearly there needs to be some education of the public on this issue to help people fully understand.