dairy & weight loss page

[fiercehunter]

Sometime in the mid 2000s I heard about studies that connects intake of calcium rich foods ie dairy with weight loss. I continued to eat a mostly dairy free diet though because I believed that dairy causes weight gain; this is a common belief on boards like this and paleo people don't eat any dairy at all etc.

Do we need dairy foods for their calcium content or not? Can you really be healthy, lose weight etc without dairy or is it actually a problem?

[Ayreos]

I haven't even looked in any research specific to calcium, but i'll give it a shot: Grok got his extra calcium from gnawing on animal bones. In fact, i recall sardines and salmon eaten with bones are a relatively good calcium source. Plus, it's all about the marrow!

[primalrob]

you can get tons of calcium from non-dairy foods, particularly leafy greens. plus, as ayreos mentioned, bones are packed with the stuff.
i've done dairy free months a few times, and never noticeable weight differences (don't weigh myself, but belt and mirror tests didn't show much). if i seemed to lose a small bit of body fat, it was more likely because i was eating so strict for the whole month (whole30-ish) that i tightened up a tiny bit. going back on dairy didn't do anything to me, so now i eat it because it tastes awesome.

[js290]

Sometime in the mid 2000s I heard about studies that connects intake of calcium rich foods ie dairy with weight loss. I continued to eat a mostly dairy free diet though because I believed that dairy causes weight gain; this is a common belief on boards like this and paleo people don't eat any dairy at all etc.

Do we need dairy foods for their calcium content or not? Can you really be healthy, lose weight etc without dairy or is it actually a problem?

Loren Cordain on dairy, FWIW.

Ron Rosedale – Healthy Bones | Me and My Diabetes

[Lewis]

Sometime in the mid 2000s I heard about studies that connects intake of calcium rich foods ie dairy with weight loss. I continued to eat a mostly dairy free diet though because I believed that dairy causes weight gain; this is a common belief on boards like this and paleo people don't eat any dairy at all etc.

Yeah, although with the Paleo Diet it seems more a matter of concern that dairy products can be connected with autoimmune issues than that they might cause weight-gain. Admittedly, Prof. Cordain has a section headed "Milk Insulin resistance, and the Metabolic Syndrome" in his latest book, but it seems to be a lesser concern.

One wonders sometimes just what some people are sensitive to in milk. The common assumption seems to be that it is lactose, but perhaps it's really more often casein, or even certain types of casein. Keith Woodford says people often tell him they're "lactose intolerant", to which he responds, "Can you drink goat's milk?" often getting the answer, "Yes". Well, goat's milk contains lactose ...

Woodford has some interesting things to say about A1 casein and BCM-7 in this podcast. None of it may be conclusive, but Woodford says there are some smoking guns around, and there do indeed seem to be:

Devil in the Milk with Keith Woodford 11/17 by Underground Wellness | Blog Talk Radio



I think Cordain gives some pretty good arguments for giving dairy products a miss in that latest book ... although whether everyone will find those conclusive is another matter.

It's interesting me that Cordain invokes the pre-contact Inuit/Eskimo diet in connection with acne, pointing out that they used never to have acne and didn't (among other things) drink milk. And yet he often doesn't refer to these people, perhaps because he doesn't in general like the all-meat diet they used to consume. So why invoke them just on this one issue? I would be very interested to know, for example, whether or not African herders, who consume (or at any rate in the past consumed) very large quantities of dairy products generally had acne.

Do we need dairy foods for their calcium content or not? Can you really be healthy, lose weight etc without dairy or is it actually a problem?

There are others sources of calcium. There are few that contain so much calcium (and besides it may not be so bio-available in some other foods). But actually that's one of the reasons Cordain is suspicious of milk, suggesting it delivers too much calcium. That could be a problem, specially if your magnesium levels are low:

Finland, which, from 1973 to 1999 had the highest recorded incidence of heart attack in middle-aged men in the world, also has a high calcium-to-magnesium ratio in the diet at 4 parts calcium to 1 part magnesium.

The Miracle of Magnesium 8/7/04


How much should you get is another very interesting issue. Just what should the figure be? Is the DRI (RDA) set too high currently? What's the effect of soil depletion on this (as on other minerals) been?

Weston Price says he found high levels of calcium in "the diets of the primitive groups" -- i.e., of the people he visited in the 1930s.

In other words the foods of the native Eskimos contained 5.4 times as much calcium as the displacing foods of the white man, five times as much phosphorus, 1.5 times as much iron, 7.9 times as much magnesium, 1.8 times as much copper, 49.0 times as much iodine, and at least ten times that number of fat-soluble vitamins. For the Indians of the far North of Canada, the native foods provided 5.8 times as much calcium, 5.8 times as much phosphorus, 2.7 times as much iron, 4.3 times as much magnesium, 1.5 times as much copper, 8.8 times as much iodine, and at least a ten fold increase in fat-soluble activators. ...

Nutrition and Physical Degeneration: Chapter 15

I dunno. Are Price's figures to be relied on? There's unfortunately no way to check them now. It's interesting that he says he found over five times as much calcium in native Eskimo food (presumably from seafood) as in the commercial foods that replaced them. One doesn't often think of Eskimos getting much calcium in the diet. In fact, shortage of calcium in the diet was cited as one reason why Stefansson would supposedly have been endangered by the Bellvue Hospital experiment -- which in fact did him no harm.

[fiercehunter]

Yes am familiar with Cordain's stance and Keith Woodford DITM etc, just don't believe I was better off the 20 years I didn't drink milk. Drinking milk again has actually been a major turning point for me; I haven't drank it since I was 19- over 20 years. During those years I was not any healthier, happier or thinner, and now think it was all a big mistake.

[Lewis]

Yes am familiar with Cordain's stance and Keith Woodford DITM etc, just don't believe I was better off the 20 years I didn't drink milk.

As Mark says, it's "a gray area". Maybe it's only the people who are casein-sensitive that have to avoid it.

OTOH, I'm not sure why one would particularly want dairy products. That's cultural/taste reasons aside -- obviously, a piece of Gruyere or some cream on strawberries can be nice to have.

I guess Sally Fallon has got something of an argument here, but I really don't know how persuasive it is.

Perhaps I'm misremembering but I understood her to say, on being asked why the WAPF recommends raw milk so strongly, that while other foods would be just as good (as she believed Price had shown) in the U.S. milk was an easily available source of raw protein, raw fat, and other factors, such as beneficial bacteria. (She's evidently referring to the fact that all traditional cultures seem to have some raw animal foods in their diet.) So, IIRC, she said if you could get your child to eat raw liver, or raw fermented fish, that would be just as good, but you were less likely to be able to pull that off, the surrounding culture being as it is.

Drinking milk again has actually been a major turning point for me ...

Why is that, then? What have you noticed?

And which milk? Is it raw? from cows or goats?

[magnolia1973]

I think people struggle with weight loss while eating dairy (and a lot of other foods that are otherwise good- nuts, fruit etc.) because it is easy to overeat dairy. If you used to drink milk with every meal and eliminate it - there is X calories eliminated and the likely cause of weightloss unless you have issue with dairy.

I just don't believe it is "bad" for you.

[Diana Renata]

It seems to be a very personal thing. It works for some but not for others.

I seem to be ok with certain dairy. I'm kind of a snob about it and have been making/drinking loads of raw goat milk kefir. No adverse affects on my weight for that.

I agree with magnolia that it can be really easy to overeat. I've found that making it the focus, rather than an addition really helps with that. Instead of putting a sprinkle of cheese on a dish, I'll make the dairy the meal itself. That's just works for me.

[sakura_girl]

I get a stuffy nose whenever I eat cheese (I only eat Swiss A2 cow's milk cheese, sheep milk cheese, and goat cheese). I'm not a huge fan of milk and have never tried drinking it, so I don't know if the stuffy nose is because of allergies to casein, reaction to mycotoxins, or both. Not sure if it impedes my weight loss directly because it's dairy, but it impedes me in the sense that I can overeat it easily.

I'm the opposite of Diana. If I make it my meal, I can easily eat a pound of it and still crave other food and be hungry. If I supplement a meal with it, I won't have as many issues.