How do the meat and dairy industries design studies that show their products have neutral or even beneficial effects on cholesterol and inflammation?

Observational studies like “Milk and Dairy Consumption and Risk of Cardiovascular Diseases and All-Cause Mortality: Dose-Response Meta-Analysis of Prospective Cohort Studies,” which suggests that dairy might not be so bad, can be confounded by extraneous factors, such as the fact that people who eat more cheese tend to be of “a higher socioeconomic status.” In that case, what about an interventional study? Researchers designed a randomized, crossover trial that compared a high-fat cheese diet to a high-fat meat diet to a “nondairy, low-fat, high-carbohydrate” control diet. Both the high-cheese and high-meat diets were loaded with saturated fat, but all of the study participants, including those on the low-fat diet, ended up with the same cholesterol levels. And, it should be noted that the study was overwhelmingly paid for by the dairy industry.

So, how did they do it? If you’re in the dairy industry and trying to design a study to show that a high-cheese diet does not raise cholesterol, how would you go about doing that? This is the topic of my video Friday Favorites: How the Dairy Industry Designs Misleading Studies.

Anyone remember my video BOLD Indeed: Beef Lowers Cholesterol? It’s one of my favorites. The beef industry was in the same pickle as the cheese industry: Beef has saturated fat, which raises cholesterol, which raises the risk of dying from our number one killer. What’s an industry to do? Well, as you can see at 1:20 in my video, it designed a study in which beef was added and cholesterol went down. How is that possible? It was achieved by cutting out so much dairy, poultry, pork, fish, and eggs that their overall saturated fat intake was cut in half. Indeed, saturated fat levels were cut in half, and cholesterol levels went down. Well, of course that happened. They could have swapped in Twinkies and claimed that snack cakes lower your cholesterol…or frosting…or anything.

So, now you know the trick. The way to get the same cholesterol levels is to make sure all three diets have the same amount of saturated fat. How are you going to get a high-fat cheese diet and a high-fat meat diet to have the same saturated fat level as a diet that has neither cheese nor meat? The researchers added so much coconut oil and cookies to the so-called low-fat diet that all three diets had the same amount of saturated fat and…voila! That’s how you can make it appear that a cheese- or meat-rich diet doesn’t raise cholesterol.

This reminds me of the desperation evident in a study that compared the effects of dairy cheddar cheese to a nondairy cheddar cheese called Daiya. Milk consumption has plummeted in recent years as people have increasingly discovered plant-based alternatives, like soymilk and almond milk, and now there are plant-based cheese alternatives. What’s the National Dairy Council to do? How are you going to design a study that shows it’s healthier to eat dairy cheese? Well, you design a study where dairy cheese causes less inflammation than the vegan alternative. They had their work cut out for them. Daiya is no health food by any stretch, but it definitely has three times less saturated fat than cow’s milk cheese. So, how did they show the study participants got more inflammation from Daiya?

There is one fat that may cause more inflammation than milk fat: palm oil. In fact, palm oil may raise cholesterol levels as much as trans-fat-laden partially hydrogenated oil. And, you’ve probably guessed it: They slipped the Daiya group some extra palm oil on the side. Can you believe it? They compared cow’s milk cheese to Daiya nondairy cheese plus palm oil. In fact, they was so much extra palm oil that the vegan meal ended up having the same amount of saturated fat as the cheese meal. That’s like proving tofu is worse than beef by doing a study where they compared a beef patty to a tofu patty stuffed with lard. Oh, wait. The meat industry already did that! But, at least they had the decency to concede that “replacement of meat with tofu in the habitual diet would not usually be accompanied by the addition of butter and lard.”

from NutritionFacts.org https://ift.tt/2xRm3SI
via IFTTT

Dairy is compared to other foods for cardiovascular (heart attack and stroke) risk.

When studies funded by industries suggest their products have neutral health effects or are even beneficial, one question you always have to ask is, “Compared to what?” Is cheese healthy? Compared to what? If you’re sitting down to make a sandwich, cheese is probably healthy—if you compare it to bologna, but what if you compare it to peanut butter? No way. That’s the point made by Walter Willet, former Chair of Nutrition at Harvard, as I discuss in my video Friday Favorites: Is Cheese Harmful or Healthy? Compared to What?

 “To conclude that dairy foods are ‘neutral’…could be misleading, as many would interpret this to mean that increasing consumption of dairy foods would have no effects on cardiovascular disease or mortality. Lost is that the health effects of increasing or decreasing consumption of dairy foods could depend importantly on the specific foods that are substituted for dairy foods.”

Think about what you’d put on your salad. Cheese would be healthy compared to bacon, but not compared to nuts. “For example, consumption of nuts or plant protein has been inversely associated”—that is, protectively associated—“with risks of coronary heart disease and type 2 diabetes; in contrast, intake of red meat has been positively associated with these outcomes. Thus, it is reasonable to assume that the lack of association with dairy foods…puts these foods somewhere in the middle of a spectrum of healthfulness, but not an optimal source of energy or protein…More broadly, the available evidence supports policies that limit dairy production and encourages production of healthier sources of protein and fats.”

Willet wasn’t just speculating. His statements were based on three famous Harvard studies involving hundreds of thousands of men and women exceeding five million person-years of follow-up.

What was learned in the first large-scale prospective study to examine dairy fat intake compared to other types of fat in relation to heart attack and stroke risk? Replacing about 100 calories worth of fat from cheese with 100 calories worth of fat from peanut butter on a daily basis might reduce risk up to 24 percent, whereas substitution with other animal fats might make things worse. You can see a graph showing how it breaks down for heart disease at 2:07 in my video. Swapping dairy fat for vegetable oil would be associated with a decrease in disease risk, whereas swapping dairy for meat increases risk. Calories form dairy fat may be as bad as, or even worse than, straight sugar. The lowest risk would entail replacing dairy fat with a whole plant food, like whole grains.

Yes, “dairy products are also a major contributor to the saturated fat in the diet and have thus been targeted as one of the main dietary causes of cardiovascular disease (CVD),” the number one killer of men and women, but the dairy industry likes to argue that there are other components of dairy products, like fermentation by-products in cheese, that could counteract the effects of their saturated fat. This is all part of an explicit campaign by the dairy industry to “neutralize the negative image of milk fat among regulators and health professionals as related to heart disease.” If the Global Dairy Platform looks familiar to you, you may recall that it was one of the funders of the milk-and-dairy-is-neutral study, trotting out their dairy-fat-is-counteracted notion, to which the American Heart Association responded that “no information from controlled studies supports the hypothesis that fermentation adds beneficial nutrients to cheese that counteract the harmful effects of its saturated fat.”

We need to cut down on dairy, meat, coconut oil, and the like, no matter what their respective industries say. In fact, that’s the reason the American Heart Association felt it needed to release a special Presidential Advisory in 2017. It wanted to “set the record straight on why well-conducted scientific research overwhelmingly supports limiting saturated fat in the diet.”

Everything we eat has an opportunity cost. Every time we put something in our mouth, it’s a lost opportunity to eat something even healthier.

from NutritionFacts.org https://ift.tt/gWIOjfb
via IFTTT

What is the real story behind the recent studies that show cheese has neutral or positive health effects?

In my series of videos on saturated fat, I talked about a major campaign launched by the global dairy industry to “neutralize the negative image of milk-fat among regulators and health professionals as related to heart disease.” As you can see in my video Is Cheese Really Bad for You?, that campaign continues to this day with the publication of a meta-analysis demonstrating “neutral [non-harmful] associations between dairy products and cardiovascular and all-cause mortality,” that is, death.

How do we know the dairy industry had anything to do with this study? Well, it was published in a journal that requires authors to disclose financial conflicts of interest. So, what ties were divulged? As you can see at 0:47 in my video: Dairy, dairy, dairy, dairy, dairy, dairy, the fourth largest dairy company in the world, dairy, dairy, milk, beer, soda, McDonald’s, dairy, dairy, dairy, dairy, and more dairy. Oh, and the study itself was “partly funded by…the Global Dairy Platform, Dairy Research Institute and Dairy Australia.” So, there we have it.

The other big new study suggested that a little bit of cheese every day isn’t just neutral but actually good for you. And, researchers in that study make it clear that they have “no conflict of interest” despite some of the authors being employees of the Yili Innovation Center and the Yili R&D Center, with Yili being “China’s largest dairy producer,” which makes it one of the world’s largest dairy companies.

How can cheese consumption be associated with better health outcomes? Most of these studies were from Europe, where a “higher socioeconomic status was associated with a greater consumption of cheese.” In Europe, they aren’t eating Cheez Whiz and Velveeta. There, cheese is “generally an expensive product,” so who eats it? As you can see at 1:45 in my video, cheese consumers are those with higher paying jobs, those in a higher socioeconomic strata, and those with higher education levels, all of which are associated with better health outcomes, which may have nothing at all to do with their cheese consumption. Higher socioeconomic groups also consume more fruits and vegetables…and more candies. So, I bet you could do a population study and show that candy consumption is associated with better health. (Shh! Don’t tell the National Confectioner’s Association.) Too late! Did you know that candy consumers have lower levels of inflammation and a 14 percent decreased risk of elevated blood pressure? This information is brought to you by the candy industry and the U.S. Department of Agriculture from our very own government, which props up the sugar industry to the tune of a billion dollars a year.

It’s like when the government uses our tax dollars to buy up surplus cheese. Paul Shapiro, CEO of The Better Meat Co., wrote a great editorial on this: “Imagine the following CNN headline: ‘Government Buys $20 Million in Surplus Pepsi as Demand Plummets.’ The fictional article informs readers that our tax dollars will soon be buying up millions of unwanted cola cans, all as a favor to the flailing soda industry, which just kept producing drinks no one wanted. “As outrageous as such a government handout to the soda industry would be, that’s exactly what the U.S. Department of Agriculture is doing for the industrial dairy industry.”

Michele Simon, JD, MPH, produced a great report on how our government colludes with the industry to promote dairy junk foods. “The federal government mandates the collection of industry fees for ‘checkoff programs’ to promote milk and dairy.” In fact, “McDonald’s has six dedicated dairy checkoff program employees at its corporate headquarters” to try to squeeze in more cheese. That’s how we got double steak quesadillas from Taco Bell and 3-Cheese Stuffed Crust Pizza and the “Summer of Cheese” ad campaign from Pizza Hut. “These funds are used to promote junk foods, which contribute to the very diseases our federal government is allegedly trying to prevent. Does it make sense to tell Americans to avoid foods high in salt, sugar, and saturated fat, while engaging in the promotion of those same foods?” Look, “the meat and dairy industries can do what they like with their own money. The public power of taxation should be used for the public good,” though, not to support the dairy and candy industries.

from NutritionFacts.org https://ift.tt/dCyOKGE
via IFTTT