In a nutshell, no.
Why is it then that we constantly see ads of lean women eating yogurt? Muscular men drinking milk?
Well, advertisements are not educational material.
More importantly, though, we want the foods we like to be the foods that will make us healthy.
And people don’t simply like dairy, they love it.
Dairy, however, doesn’t love us back.
Dairy is hard to give up
When casein, the main protein in milk, is digested, it releases fragments called casomorphins. In laboratory and animal studies they attach to the same receptors as opioid drugs. Whether they do anything meaningful in adults has never been shown, and we would not build an argument on them.
The fat, the salt and the sheer calorie density of cheese explain its pull well enough.
Cow’s milk has roughly six times as much casein as mature human milk, and cheese concentrates it about nine times further.
Casein is super concentrated in cheese
When cheese is made, water, lactose and whey proteins are removed.
That means that we eat even more casein.
Dairy is engineered to induce growth
OK, so dairy is hard to give up, but does that mean that it is bad for our waistline?
Cow’s milk has one purpose.
It is built for an animal that grows fast. A Holstein heifer weighs around 370 pounds at six months and about 660 pounds by her first birthday.
When researchers pooled 29 controlled trials, adding dairy did not help people lose weight overall. It only helped in short trials where people were also cutting calories, and in the longer trials, where people ate freely, the effect went the other way. Cheese, as the most concentrated form of milk, is the easiest place for those extra calories to come from.
Since cheese is simply a form of concentrated milk, it has more growth-promoting protein and is super high in fat.
Most of it is saturated fat.
How does dairy make us fat, exactly?
First, dairy contains IGF-1 and makes your body produce more of it.
That is insulin-like growth factor 1, a growth signal. Drinking milk raises it: in controlled trials, by about 14 ng/mL. Higher IGF-1 has been linked to a higher risk of prostate cancer, which is a better reason to think twice about dairy than any effect on your waistline.
Second, dairy is high in fat.
And not just any kind of fat. It’s super high in the unhealthy saturated fat.
It raises LDL cholesterol, which is what builds up in artery walls. It makes cells less responsive to insulin. And extra fat is stored as body fat more efficiently than extra carbohydrate: when men were overfed for two weeks, they stored 90 to 95 percent of the extra fat calories, against 75 to 85 percent of the extra carbohydrate calories.
We humans are plant eaters. We know the age-old wisdom to eat our vegetables.
And vegetables are low in fat and high in fiber and nutrients.
Fat makes us fat.
Dairy is unnecessary
It is a long discussion about the nutritional qualities of dairy.
However, it’s the lactation secretion of another mammal. Another mammal that eats grass and grains.
A mammal that eats plants, and whose gut microbes make the vitamin B12 it needs. We get ours from a supplement, and everything else from the plants themselves.
We are not babies who cannot digest their food so that we need milk.
We are humans who get their nutrition from food.
The cow eats grass, we eat green vegetables, fruits, whole grains, legumes, nuts…
It’s simple.
Don’t get your nutrition second hand in the form of milk.
Get it fresh and unprocessed through the plants.
And plants, well, they will not make you fat!
Read next
- Why we crave cheese: casomorphins, answered properly.
- Calorie density: one number explains why dairy sits where it does.
- How to feel satiated with whole plant foods: what fills you up, measured rather than assumed.
