RED DEER – More people are straying from healthy food such as milk because they think it contains harmful fat.
They are wrong, say two American dairy scientists.
“We should be enjoying the greatest health in the history of humans,” Bruce German of University of California, Davis said at the recent western dairy seminar in Red Deer.
“Humans are now suffering from an epidemic of diabetes. As we gain too much weight, we gain metabolic diseases like diabetes and it is devastating.”
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He said diseases caused by unbalanced diets are epidemic in the developed world: obesity, diabetes, hypertension, osteoporosis and allergies.
In the future, people may require more personalized diets and a greater understanding of nutrition to fend off disease.
Recent scientific research has analyzed milk at the cellular level and found a number of benefits, including breast-fed infants.
Human milk gives babies a healthy start by encouraging the development of beneficial gut bacteria that builds a healthy immune system passed on from the mother.
“We have this notion now of the mother, the infant and the microbes as being a tripartite relationship. It turns out the gut is much more important than we thought,” German said.
Analysis of gut bacteria in obese and unhealthy people is different than those in normal condition.
The dairy industry needs to get on board with this information and promote the benefits of milk.
He called it a functional food that provides calcium, phosphorus, omega 3 fatty acids, sugars, probiotics and vitamins A, D and K.
However, milk also contains three to five percent fat and public health policy tends to promote avoiding dairy fat, said Adam Lock of the University of Michigan.
“Milk fat is perceived by many human nutritionists as unhealthy, and public health policy continues to recommend a reduction in milk consumption,” he said.
Milk fat is highly saturated because of the nature of the cow’s rumen. Unsaturated fatty acids are toxic to the rumen microbes.
“When you look at these saturated fats in their totality, they are actually neutral, ” said Lock.
A study released last year found no significant evidence of a link between heart disease and dietary saturated fat in dairy products.
“This is one of the most challenging barriers to break in the dairy industry in terms of public perception,” he said.
