Milk; It Does a Body Good, but Not That Good

Interesting post in the Weighty Matters blog post about the milk industry's claims regarding milk and the ability for it to help you lose weight.

I've heard the claims about milk helping you to lose weight. It was another one of those "read it a few times and filed it away" things I do.

The thing is that milk, like any other large industry (oil, restaurants, tobacco, corn,...anyone with a lobbying group wooing your congressional representatives) has their own media spinners working hard to get you, Joe Sixpack, to know just enough to associate their lobby interest with rainbows and gummi bears when you hear about their interest. They spend a lot of money on public relations companies. to get their message out there to influence you.

And it works. After all, I just said that I had heard about milk=weight loss. I don't know the mechanics, but I've heard it. They took some one-off research and turned it into a sound bite for public consumption.

The thing is that I've been stuck in the weight-loss treadmill long enough that when I look at this I see the whole thing for what it is. A sound bite for advertising their product.

As I've said before there is no magic bullet for weight loss. If drinking vitamin Yellow 13 made weight melt off or swallowing tapeworms would allow us to eat whole pizzas and maintain a perfect figure we wouldn't have an American continent that is slowly sinking into the ocean under the weight of its inhabitants. Okay, it's not really doing that. But you get the point.

Weight loss is simple in idea. Calories in greater than calories out, you store them as fat. Calories in less than calories out, you lose weight. Day to day weight varies with water retention, salt intake, biomatter in your digestive tract, etc. but averages out to your rough body weight. Weight loss "systems", if analyzed, are really just screwing with your short term caloric intake (for the most part) or giving you some "tool" for cutting down your caloric intake without thinking of those dirty words "caloric intake".

Summary: you eat too much.

Milk has fat and calories in addition to good minerals. It's not a "bad" food. The fat in it probably screws with your satiety level so you might feel fuller than you normally do, then you don't necessarily eat as much for the meal...that's possible. Fat does that. Real fat makes you feel more full so if you happen to be one of the tiny percentage of people that pay attention to how the stomach feels instead of how full the plate is then you shave 20 calories off the meal.

Is that a dramatic enough difference to justify saying it's a diet miracle food? I don't think so. I've heard similar claims about vegetables, soups, and spicy food. It still doesn't negate the fact that these things have calories and people are mostly fat out of habits, not "good food vs. bad food." These claims have a teeny tiny kernel of truth that makes the claims just good enough that you can't sue their cheerleaders paying the PR firms to tell you about them.

I'll start believing these claims when I can eat their wonderfood and then a whole pizza for a week straight and not gain any weight. Otherwise it's just another miracle cure magic bullet packaged for public consumption.