Milk Fat Vs. Aging: The Tiny Weird Science Of A Hidden Health Risk

milk fat aging white ceiling grid skylight

Photo: mikhail marchenko

Milk Fat Levels Vs. Aging. Cellular Research Finds Stealth Threats:

Sometimes when researchers go hunting, they can approach things from increasingly-unexpected directions.

And even though SCIENCE would seem a pretty arithmetic endeavor,

It makes sense that they need to get increasingly-creative to find new solutions.

And so just the way we hear of more discoveries in the genetic-testing field from companies like 23 And Me,

One such scientist found a cellular-level health-risk in one of the most unexpected places of all…

Dangerous Assumptions:

So one of the things we all work off-of in life are assumptions.

They come from a base of knowledge compiled by past-generations, and are teachable and learnable,

This makes our lives easier, because we don’t have to go out & rediscover every single thing.

Some of these assumptions can be the type of thing our grandmothers taught us about nutrition.

And though we might think that food-staples and items familiar to prior-generations are okay, sometimes newer evidence suggests otherwise,

But The Short Answer for the current work is that the fat-content of milk you drink,

Especially if you drink it often, may have a profoundly-increased impact on how fast you age with time, even at the cellular-level.

Read on to find out more details…

The Things We Overlook Can Sometimes Hurt Us:

One of the assumptions we all make not just from parental teachings,

Is that if they sell it in a store and it’s familiar, then it’s safe.

But what if it isn’t?

A similar thing can happen when there’s a food-poisoning scare, like with romaine lettuce.

All of a sudden something that seemed innocuous is now harmful.

Or diesel-exhaust, that always seemed at-once iffy and easy to ignore,

But recent study then showed to be WAY worse than we ever thought.

The citizens of London in-particular are learning that one.

So the assumptions and short-hand we survive on can sometimes be wrong.

Dr. Neal Barnard Warned Us Of The Anti-Superfood:

Now previously, an instance of Novel Toxicity was brought up here in a post on Neal Barnard’s TED talk.

Where he discussed wasy to protect your brain with nutrition.

And one of the things he pointed-out was that although we knew saturated-fat was kinda-bad previously,

We never really knew until recently how bad it was for your Brain,

So much so, that when Dr. Neal got a small test-group down to 13g or less per day,

Their Mild Cognitive Impairment went away.

In a nutritional-sense, it’s almost like he did a video on an Anti-Superfood.

Milk Fat Vs. Cellular Aging, The Current Study:

Well, Dr. Larry Tucker of BYU just found another!

In a study of almost 6,000 subjects aged 20-85, across 3 years of data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey,

Different groups of people were surveyed on what type of Milk they drank on a regular basis.

And then he got creative.

Instead of looking at external behavior, body fat, lifestyle, exercise, etc.

He went the opposite direction and started looking in very small places; their cells.

And here’s where he found something odd.

Going To Small Places For Big Answers:

The part of a cell that’s most-concerned with aging is the part that lets your body sustain itself by copying those cells.

But, it can also wear-out.

Thankfully, nature has given us a break on this and put a protective cap on the area that can get hurt.

Unfortunately, it looks like the milk we all drink results in some kind of biochemicals that can get in there and damage those copy-machines anyway.

It might even be a similar type of damage that occurs when you eat sugar

The More Fat In The Milk, The Worse-Off You Are:

So to examine the effects, he looked at consumption data for the 4 main types of milk: Whole (8%), 2%, 1%, and Skim.

The physical impact on that copy-machine location in their cells showed that the higher the fat-content in the milk people drank,

The more-quickly their cells aged.

So much so, that people who drank 2% milk had cells that were More Than 4 Years Older than those who drank 1%.

-Even after controlling for 12 other lifestyle-factors!

This was shown in the tests with subjects having those copy-machine cell-structures (called Telomeres) ~70 units shorter; where longer ones would mean healthier and more-youthful.

Perhaps Elizabeth Bathory was wrong about blood and she should have been looking for low-fat Telomerase?

And for a more-extreme example, people who drank Whole Milk had cells that were more than 8 Years Older than those people who drank Skim milk.

What’s Scary Is That People Drink A Lot Of Milk:

Now what makes this striking is the frequency with which people consume milk.

In his study, Dr. Larry found that 50% of people drink milk daily, and another 25% drink it at-least weekly.

Also for the different fat-types:
1) About 1/3 drank Whole Milk
2) 30% drank 2% Milk
3) 10% drank 1% Milk
4) 17% drank Skim Milk
5) The remaining 13% of subjects didn’t drink cow’s milk at all

An interesting-footer to this is, there was no mention of people who had Half-And-Half or Heavy Cream in their diets at-all.

Think of how many people eat filled-pastries, or put thick creamers in their coffees, even if it’s just a little.

1) Half-And-Half has an average of 14% fat
2) Heavy Cream has an average of 36% fat

So their results could be even-worse than the whole-milk drinkers, even if the quantities are less.

So Why Does This Happen?:

The general theory is very similar to the one behind two of our old friends: Sugar & Ultra-Processed Foods.

Study after study in nutritional literature suggests that increased Saturated-Fat Intake does at-least 3 things:
1) Increases Inflammation
2) Changes Gut Microbes which may also increase Inflammation
3) Creates Oxidative-Stress like high-sugar-intake

These results have also been verified in other studies that just focused on different diets that got their fats from 2 sources.
1) Olive Oil
or
2) Butter

And as you can guess from reading posts on The Mediterranean Diet, the people with more Butter in their diet had more of those previous 3 problems,

And the people using Olive Oil for fats had much less.

Hiding In Plain Sight. Cultural Traditions Can Be A Silent Killer:

So sometimes traditions that come from the history of culture or climate, can seem innocuous because they’ve been around so long.

They’ve been accepted as a part of the landscape.

In sunnier climates, olives are all over the place.

In different parts of the world, Cows are all over the place.

And each in their own part fed us and allowed us to survive through the millennia.

By contrast, we just found out the ancient tradition of drinking Green Tea may be Even Better than anyone thought it was, instead of worse.

So as we’re now learning with Milk, just because something is sold in stores and there’s a ritual around its manufacture & consumption,

Does not mean it’s actually healthy for you.

And as the newer waves of increasingly-detailed SCIENCE! can get right down to places as small as your DNA to check,

We might find even more instances of Dietary Plutonium we might want to avoid!

End Of Article Bonus: Two SCIENCE Curve-Balls!:

Now we introduced this post as one about unexpected findings and consequences.

So there are two more that come out of left-field and seem to make no sense at-all but here they are:

1) For people who keep their Saturated-Fat intake extremely low, there might be a counterintuitive healthy-threshold. Because there was no relationship found between milk-type consumption and cellular-aging for that thin slice of the population.

But the opposite was also true. People whose diets were high in saturated-fats tended to be worse in other ways, too.

And then (brace yourself because) it gets weirder-still,

2) Dr. Larry also found that people who abstain from cow’s milk altogether have older cells than people who drink 1%.

Figure that one out.

That’s freaky-biochemistry for you! -Even the relationship between aging and milkfat-consumption is never completely-simple…