Here is some information, followed by a simple question.
Full fat milk has 145 calories in a cup, and fat free milk has 85 calories per cup. The amount of sugar carbs they have are identical, at 12gm a cup.
What kind of milk should you choose, if you want to lose weight and be healthy?
The answer is that you should always choose whole fat milk!
If you are one of those people who drink only skimmed or fat free milk and believe that is healthier than whole milk, think again!
If you drink fat free milk, essentially you are drinking sugar water. Let me explain.
Logically, if your daily calorie ideal is say, 2000 calories, and you want to consume 100 calories of that from milk, then drinking 2/3rds of a cup of whole milk will give you those 100 calories, with only 8 gms of sugar.
But if you drink fat-free milk, you need to drink one and a quarter cups of milk, and you will end up consuming 15 gms of sugar, nearly twice as much sugar as whole fat milk!
You will be forgiven for scratching your head and saying, “Wait a minute! When I drink milk I don’t think in calorie terms, I think in terms of how many cups of milk am I drinking!”
My response to that is to ask you, “Why do you think of it that way in the first place?” Your body’s daily energy requirement is measured in calories, not in the quantity of what you eat.
There are three reasons why people drink low fat milk.
1. It is deeply ingrained in our minds that fat is bad for you. This is a completely false premise. Sugar is the culprit, not fat.
2. There is a perception that low-fat milk is cheaper. This is not really true.
3. Milk producers have encouraged you to drink low-fat milk. You will see the reason for this below in the bonus explainer!
“But what about the cholesterol?”, people ask me all the time when I ask them to switch to full-fat milk.
I challenge anyone to show me a single study that full-fat milk increases cholesterol. In fact, low-fat and non-fat milk are the real culprits in increasing cholesterol because they are essentially nothing but sugar water.
The irony is this. If you are truly a calorie counter, you should know that 200 calories of low-fat milk is far, far, more fattening than 200 calories of full-fat milk! 200 calories of non-fat milk will spike your insulin more because it is entirely sugar! For this same reason, it will increase your cholesterol much more than 200 calories of full-fat milk.
Low fat and non-fat milk are a total, complete scam!
Here is another reason why you should drink full-fat milk, if you consume milk at all. The fat in milk is actually good for you. Many studies show that the essential nutrients in milk are almost entirely fat-soluble nutrients. If you remove the fat, you also remove the nutrients. See this link.
Please, for the sake of our health, let us start a campaign to rename fat-free milk as sugar-loaded milk. We can also rename whole milk as low-sugar milk.
Of course it is true that a glass of full fat milk has more overall calories than a glass of no-fat milk. But who says what the size of the glass should be? Just get a smaller glass and drink the full-fat milk!
Bonus Explainer
Why did the milk companies want us to drink low-fat milk? The answer is simple. They love to remove the fat from milk, and sell it as expensive butter and cream! You can think of low-fat and non-fat milk as the useless bye-products of the butter industry. If consumers knew the truth about fat-free milk and stopped drinking it, the butter industry would have to throw away this stuff. Instead, they sell it to us as a healthy alternative to full-fat milk, when the opposite is true!
Bonus Bonus Explainer
If anyone has flown on United Airlines recently, you will see that even airlines are getting into a version of this scam. In the old days, the economy class cabin used to have the same legroom for each seat. The bean counters at United (and some other airlines) have now figured out that if you take the same number of seats, but you arrange them so that the back section has no leg room at all, and the front section has more legroom, then people will pay more money for the front section, even though both sections have the same crappy economy class seats, food, and service. This way, the airline makes more money from the same cabin and with the same number of seats! Do you see how this is a variation of the low-fat milk scam?
Having traveled recently in the newly cramped back section of the plane, I hope there is a special place in hell reserved for the bean counters who came up with this particular innovation.