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Time to Question Everything You Know About Milk
We reviewed over 100 studies and conclude that milk recommendations for Americans are not based in evidence
It’s perhaps the most widely advocated nutrition recommendation of the last half-century: For strong bones and overall health, consume three servings of reduced-fat milk a day.
The USDA’s “ChooseMyPlate” dedicates a corner of their icon for milk and equivalent dairy products (Figure 1).
Schools must offer fat-free or 1% low-fat milk at lunch and other meals. To get kids to drink it, the government allows chocolate and other sugary varieties — but not plain whole milk!
And celebrities from Jennifer Aniston to Taylor Swift have donned the milk mustache, assuring us that milk does a body good.
To comply with this recommendation, Americans would need to double their intake (now averaging one and a half glasses a day), which would amount to billions of extra gallons a year. However, my colleague Walter Willet at Harvard and I examined over 100 studies and we conclude, in a new article in New England Journal of Medicine…
