Week 13 - Milkfat

This past week went by pretty quickly and quietly. The weekend is freshest on my mind so I'll recap it first. We got the leaves cleaned up and that sucked up nearly all of Saturday and Sunday. Using a larger mower, my wife got the leaves "raked" into rows and then we raked the leaves onto a tarp and dragged it out into the pasture. The leaves piled up to five feet tall and could have easily filled our living room. We also made it to a wedding about 90 minutes late on Saturday night (somehow memorized the wrong time...) but luckily we knew some people at the reception who let us crash their table. The Buckeyes won in OT and carried on to 11-0 on a meaningless season.

I also went mountain biking with an OSU faculty member on Sunday. It might not seem like a lot, but it is so exciting when I get to interact with my co-workers outside of the office. In this case, he was a well-respected, well-published statistician, but out there on the trail he was just another guy new to mountain-biking who wanted to experience the challenge and rush of some trail obstacles. Definitely one of the highlights of my week.

On Thursday, we also had a seminar on the effects of consuming milk by a visiting faculty member from my alma mater. It's worth mentioning that I really enjoyed his dry humor to make an old topic more interesting. He did a great job with questions and really interacted with us students. Within the dairy industry, milkfat is really what farmers get paid on. The research proposal that I spent all week writing to specifically oriented towards better prediction of how methane can be related to milk production and milk fat depression (MFD). The biggest problem with MFD is that when you sink a cow into lower fat components, she has a lot of trouble coming back out of this. That is why it's really important to understand the energy needs and nutrient balance of the cow and rumen, to maintain healthy and high-volumned milk production through her lactation.

It's funny, but when I searched for the cartoon clip that was put up at the end of our guest seminar, a lot of the first things that came back in results were very negative towards dairy farmers, milk and milk products. There were horrible claims about poison, fat, cholesterol and death by vegans with less education about nutrition or agriculture than a 2nd grader's afternoon at their grandparents' farm. For a long time milk has been linked to saturated fat and increased chance of heart disease, leading to death, but as it turns out, a lot of this data was pseudo-fabricated in a similar manner to the tobacco ads and endorsements of the same era. As it turns out, the foundational paper which correlated to saturated fat to death utilized less than 1/3 of available data which led to the desired results.

Yes, it is true that milk has saturated fat, but saturated fat is not bad for you. In fact, milk fat when provided on an equal basis has been shown to have similar or improved health effects in human patients. More importantly, fat intake is not related to heart disease so much as cholesterol. Well, it could be said that milk increases cholesterol, but it increases HDL cholesterol. So the ratio of HDL:total cholesterol actually improves, which has been shown to decrease risk of heart disease. And if all that isn't convincing to you that the milk fat argument isn't all the horror people play it to be, remember your chance of death is 100%, so do you really want to live life without milk?

Which one would you rather?

Milk does great things, such as strengthen your bones with increased calcium availability. It also provides a great source of healthy calories that are balanced in fat and protein. These are great for growing kids, and good in moderate doses in your adulthood, too. Now, people say that "full fat" milk is bad for you, but what you really don't realize is that even whole milk is only 4% total milk. Comparing this to 0.5% fat in skim milk, the difference is very small. And what are you replacing it with? Water. Why pay for more water when you could save money by consuming less pop and increase your healthy consumption of dairy calories instead with whole milk instead of skim?

If you don't want to drink milk, that's up to you - it leaves more for me. I also know that not everyone can drink milk due to allergies or enzyme inactivity. But don't go spreading lies about milk quality, milk safety or  the health aspects of milk fat consumption. I can tell you that I am at a healthy weight, a healthy fitness (mountain-biked 11 miles of advanced course in one sitting without training this weekend) and a healthy intellect. I drink milk and eat cheese and feel great. Have you got milk?

The heroes of the dairy industry: hard-working cows who love to get outside on their time off. Credit