Full-Fat Dairy Might Just Be Good For Us, Study Finds

Growing up, I always heard the same dietary advice: go for brown rice where possible, and if you can, choose low-fat dairy.

However, speaking to HuffPost UK previously, Melissa Jaeger, a registered dietitian at MyFitnessPal, said: “The nutritional gap between [brown and white rice] isn’t that huge.”

And a new paper has suggested that full-fat options might not be as bad for us as I first thought, either.

Published in the Journal of Nutrition, the study authors found that eating full-fat options seemed to confer benefits without expected negative side effects, like increased “bad” cholesterol and weight gain.

In this study, researchers split 74 participants with overweight or obesity into three groups:

• low-dairy, calorie-restricted diet,
• energy-neutral diet with three daily servings of dairy,
• unrestricted diet with three daily servings of dairy.

They also followed Canada’s food guide. All dairy consumed was full-fat.

After 12 weeks of observation, the scientists didn’t see any difference in weight gain or “bad” cholesterol levels between the low-dairy group and the one that consumed three full-fat servings a day.

In fact, those in the three-serving group had better blood pressure and improved levels of vitamin D, calcium, and protein.

This, despite the fact that full-fat dairy contains saturated fats – lipids which have been linked to higher rates of heart disease.

Another older review published in the European Journal of Nutrition found that those who consume full-fat dairy are no more likely to develop heart disease and type 2 diabetes than those who stick to a low-fat or fat-free dairy diet.

Study author Professor Harvey Anderson said that one answer could lie in the dairy matrix hypothesis, which suggests that the physical structure of the fats in dairy products affects how they’re absorbed.

“With dairy products, it’s got two proteins – casein and whey – that are bound together with fat and with nutrients mixed in,” he said.

The professor added that this structure leads to a slow, steady release of nutrients and could potentially make its health benefits bigger than the sum of its parts.

The British Heart Foundation (BHF) said on its site that “the science around milk and dairy foods is more complex than once thought,” adding that the dairy matrix hypothesis seemed to hold in some research.

However, the BHF ended: “The evidence remains mixed, and choosing lower-fat milk can help if you’re cutting calories or trying to reduce saturated fat.”