Food – When Less Is More (Waistline)

Or is it when more is less? A recent article at Details.com goes over how skim milk is actually worse than 2% or even whole milk. This reminds me of the paradox of diet soda.

When it comes to food, why do we keep trying to change the food instead of ourselves? It seems to be the new American way – something in our lives is wrong but instead of changing ourselves we try to change the situation. I am gaining weight –  food has calories which are the source of the weight – quick – change the food! Take stuff out of it! Change it’s chemistry!

Doesn’t it make sense? Take milk – it has fat in it, if you take the fat out won’t you lose fat yourself? Unfortunately it doesn’t work that way. Per the Details article –  In 2003, the Cochrane Collaboration, a respected source for unbiased reviews of research, compared low-fat diets with low-calorie diets and found that “fat-restricted diets are no better than calorie-restricted diets in achieving long-term weight loss. Furthermore fats, like fiber, actually curb your appetite, by making you feel full. So if you restrict fat you will just reach out for more of other foods. Also, when foods are modified for calories, some of the actual nutrition is often lost. Finally, when stuff is taken out of food they usually have to add stuff in to make it palatable – and that stuff usually is worse than what they took out. In the case of skim milk, they add powdered milk to give it back its milky color – and the process to create powdered milk makes it mutagenic, carcinogenic, and leads to heart disease. Yes that’s right they take milk out and put modified milk back in. Sounds good, huh?

Skim milk likely also follows the phenomenon of diet soda and other diet foods. Our brains say – hey you just saved calories on your drink – go ahead and have that dessert or snack, so you have a food that is worse than the non-diet drink was in the first place. In addition, the artificial sweeteners biologically can actually make you way more at your next meal due to insulin response and there are other health risks associated with them.

Here’s another quick personal note to the whole modified food concept – what else could these scientists be researching if they weren’t trying to find ways to make unnatural food?

Anyway, here’s the deal – there are really three ways to keep weight off: Eat Better, Eat Less, Exercise. Really number two isn’t even that important if you do one and three. But each of those are stories themselves, stay tuned…

In the meantime, skip the skim and get whole (milk and health).