Is dairy good or bad for you? | Tim Spector & Sarah Berry

one of the biggest food myths is that Dairy is always unhealthy for you because of the fats we've become obsessed with cutting out certain foods from our diet and dairy's top of that list but there's no evidence at all that's going to make you healthier welcome to Zoe science and nutrition we're World leading scientists explain how their research can improve your health Sarah and Tim thank you for joining me today pleasure great to be here why don't we start as always with a quick fire round of questions and you know the rules a yes a no or a short one sentence answer if necessary Sarah starting with you lots of people say that Dairy causes inflammation in the body for most people is this true no all right people paying attention already Tim should people drink milk during menopause to protect their bones probably not very interesting we'll definitely come back to that Sarah if I have high cholesterol should I give up Dairy no Tim the current U.S government advice on milk is to switch to low fat or fat free milk is this good advice no rubbish amazing so that's I think really surprising we're going to come back and talk about it in uh in lots of detail but actually maybe if each of you can answer one final question um what's the biggest myth or misconception about dairy foods that you often hear um I think they are high in fat therefore they're bad for you and therefore and they also are linked to many allergies this isn't true I think the fat side of it is not true and the allergy thing is over exaggerated and Sarah what about you I would say there's loads of myths the probably biggest myth that frustrates me is that Dairy is high in saturated fat and therefore increases your risk of heart disease and it doesn't well listen and find out amazing all right I'm not telling you the answer now that's that's brilliant so uh the listeners are gonna have to stick with us uh now some of you may know that Dairy is actually a topic that's very personal to me uh this came up on one of our previous podcasts so I gave up Dairy completely for about 20 years uh having me thought I was lactose intolerant and it was really only through Zoe from having lots of these brilliant conversations with both of you and with a lot of other scientists that I basically have radically changed my view about Dairy um and of course more broadly what I eat so I think all the listeners are in for a treat and I think this is going to be a condensed version of sort of what I've learned over the last few years so are we ready to go well I didn't know that you'd given up Dairy learn something new every podcast I uh I'm glad that I keep entertaining you Sarah I gave it up for about 10 years did you yeah why because my acupuncturist or my mother's acupuncturist said it was causing me allergies and sinusitis and actually it's a brilliant introduction because the most common question we had from the Zoe community on social media asking um questions for this podcast was about Dairy and whether it causes inflammation and it sounds a little bit like your Monk's acupuncturist so what is the answer well there's no evidence that overall Dairy is related to inflammation I think a lot of these studies came from allergies to some of the proteins in milk that can occur at different stages of life and also the general lactose intolerance that most of the world's population have after the age of three so we sort of know that milk is generally quite hard to digest as as after the age of three when we don't have those enzymes anymore helping us and so we evolved these enzymes these lactase enzymes in evolution certain groups that's the northern Europeans a group in the Middle East and some East Africans all individually so that we could harness cattle and that helped our survival so in a way we've known it is difficult it needs a bit of a shift in our genes to be able to do that and I think that's given milk it's it's particularly milk it's bad reputation and it does mean that large portion of uh the world can't digest can't drink a pint of milk without feeling sick or nauseous because uh there's just they can't break down those proteins and they can't digest it properly so we've got that as the base and is that the same as inflammation which is what I think a lot of people are sort of putting these two together well if you can't break it down it will stress the body and cause some inflammation you'll feel sick but in general that you're not going to have that long term and so I think there's no evidence though that if you can support drinking something like milk regularly it has any effect on inflammation because of a a small number of people that do have dairy allergies or dairy problems with over generalized it in my opinion yeah I'd agree I think it's one of the big myths that's out there about Dairy because a very small proportion of people do have a true allergy to Dairy but actually it's tiny like timster said in in adulthood and if you actually look at the evidence we know when you look at population studies that people that have a higher amount of dairy whether it be low fat or full fat Dairy actually have lower circulating inflammatory measures so is that right so you're saying that actually when you look at it on like large numbers of people and you look at who has Dairy they actually have you can measure it in their Bloods and they have less inflammation yeah and what's great about Dairy is there's a particular type of fat in it that's very unique to Dairy and we can measure this in people's blood cells so we can use it as a a marker to say whether they truly do have more dairy or they don't so rather than just relying on food frequency questionnaires or people saying yeah I eat a lot we can actually objectively measure it and you see that people have a higher circulating measure of this marker so we know that they have more Dairy they have lower blood levels of a lot of inflammatory measures and actually where it gets really interesting is there's actually quite a lot of randomized control trials that have also looked at people that are randomly allocated to have a high dairy diet or a diet high in other foods and when people are allocated to have a high dairy diet generally they actually reduce the levels of inflammation in their blood that's amazing so this part which is I think a really common view like is wildly out of line with the latest science the the thing to caution this with is that Dairy acid food is really complex and so many studies look at Darius and oval group but Dairy differs according to whether it's fermented or non-fermented whether it's hard or liquid I.E milk or cheese whether it's high fat or low fat and even within those categories so let's say cheese for example mostly it's fermented it mostly it tends to be hard and mostly it's high fat even within that category there's thousands of different cheeses so it is quite difficult sometimes drawing really broad conclusions but overall there's been more than 50 randomized control trials looking at the effect of dairy on inflammation and the sum of the evidence not in all of them but in the majority of them will show that Dairy actually has an anti-inflammatory effect rather than pro-inflammatory and even that that even surprises me based on some of the fatty acids and stuff that are in Dairy that's amazing well I think we are going to try and work through a bit of that complexity because that's part of being my own Journey with both of you just before we do that so I think that it's not just you know me going to like these fancy coffee shops and seeing milk usage um decline I think Sarah there's been sort of a broader shift in terms of um Dairy over the last few decades is that right so we've seen huge change in the types of dairy that people are eating so we've seen a massive reduction in full fat milk consumption a massive increase in skimmed or semi-skimmed um uh which are basically low fat milk that people use different terminology we've seen a huge increase in yogurt the 1970s is when the milk was at its peak and it's it's been dropping since then in virtually every country in the west but actually increasing in Asian countries so it's increasing in China interesting so we're seeing these differential effects across the world but in general less milk is being drunk in in the U.S and and UK and Europe than uh much less than in past decades and that's for a number of reasons breakfast cereal consumptions decreased a lot as well since 70s 80s but also with the growing awareness of saturated fat being linked to heart disease and and dairy being high in saturated fat therefore then people have been thinking oh well I need to go to the low-fat variety or I need to cut Dairy down yeah there was definitely no full fat milk you know in my house growing up with my my mother worrying about my father's high cholesterol that was definitely one of the things and I know she was like I hate I don't really like this skim stuff but that's what we should be drinking in order to um uh keep him alive right so it's a pretty big deal I I think that's a it's a brilliant transition to him to maybe talk about what the evidence is about Dairy being either good for our health or or bad for our health you know today in 2023. what we've heard that milk is not at is not pro-inflammatory and it may be anti-inflammatory but the latest research shows that milk doesn't actually protect you against osteoporotic fractures which was tick fractures other than hard to say that the bone fragility fractures or uh having a hit you know hip fracture wrist fracture so things that tend to become more common as you get brittle Boulder I think about that little bone disease is what's commonly known as and it's something that affects about one in three women so it's incredibly common yes so you start with a wrist fracture in your 60s then you might get a loss of height due to Vertical fracture then in your 80s a lot of you know highly susceptible to hip fractures which can really end up changing your life so really important big epidemic of this we were telling everyone 10 years ago to drink more milk particularly around the menopause this would protect you which is what I thought you were supposed to do yes well that was up to very recently the latest advice but all the actual evidence now suggests that milk drinkers have no uh protection against hip fracture compared to non-milk Drinkers and it sort of makes sense because the biggest milk drinkers in the world are the Dutch and the Scandinavians and they have the highest fracture rates in the world so all of that calcium is in your milk and it's going to protect you this is it's all turns out to be nonsense yes that's that's what the science is now telling us and you know there's many other sources of calcium we always think of milk as the only source of calcium but actually there's so much in green leafy vegetables in in kale in broccoli in nuts in almonds uh all kinds of different areas we can get my much more easy access to to this calcium and so I don't think we should be really pushing milk as much as we we have been and is that true for old dairy so we're talking about milk I think Jonathan it's important to pick up on the um osteoporosis question here regarding milk that whether all Dairy should be classified as not being helpful in that situation so there's studies that have taken place in care homes for example where they will take you know number of different Care Homes and some Care Homes were have fortified the diet or so I added to the diet Dairy now this isn't just milk though this is like adding yogurt cheese and other Dairy and then other care homes that haven't so it's part of a clinical trial the care homes that add Dairy to the diets of the people that are living there they do have a reduction in lots of different unfavorable Health outcomes including fractures overall what we know from population studies is people that consume more Dairy have lower rates of type 2 diabetes that's really consistent the evidence for that we also know populations that have higher intakes of dairy have lower rates of cardiovascular disease it's less consistent but the majority if the data would support that and we're starting to understand mechanistically why that is we also know that people that have higher intakes of dairy tend to have better weight overall and we also know that Dairy it's may be protective against some cancers so there's really consistent evidence that people have higher intakes of dairy have lower risk of colon cancer for example but then we need to look at the different types of dairy to see um you know which types are more protective than other types and I think the best way we as a nutritionists would separate them out is typically the fermented and non-fermented and then once we look at the fermented then we'd separate them out according to whether they're like liquid or hard so when we talk about fermented we mean cheese we mean yogurt when we're talking about the non-fermented we mean milk and women butter so to make sure I've got that you're saying like overall actually when you look back at people living their entire lives and what they ate then actually the people are eating dairy have tended to look healthier but within that it's like there's this mix of different things and so some of those Dairy might be really quite good for you some of those Dairy might not be very good for you and you mix it all together and on average that might be better than someone who's not eating dairy and I guess the risk always is you know are they drinking Coca-Cola as an alternative you know what what are the the alternative choices you know as as you've explained to me many times is that the picture so it's quite complex compared to many of these things where maybe it's just sort of clear that if you eat you know a whole grain it's better than a highly refined grain yeah so dairies a huge food group and so whilst we can say broadly speaking if you consume more Dairy you tend to be healthier we need to look at all of the different components of the food groups as well there's also quite a lot of clinical trial data that we can draw on as well to look at whether Dairy itself is what's improving health or whether it's all the other factors that normally complicate how we understand a food impacts our health so is it that people that have you know higher oval diet quality tend to consume more dairy or is it the dairy itself and what's the answer so my interpretation of the evidence is that for cheese and for yogurt it's the dairy itself that's conferring a favorable impact and we're starting to understand why this is as well the data as as Sarah is saying on cheeses and yogurts is actually stronger than for milk and I don't think there's comprehensive data about it being fracture protective but it's certainly uh it's suggested that way certainly and I I think all the fermented dairies have all these extra advantage of the probiotic microbes in there because we're talking about fermented dairies these contain probiotic microorganisms that we know now from clinical trials are good for the immune system they have an effect within a few weeks they do hang around in our in our gut to energize the other microbes there have lots of effects we still don't understand in our body and I think we should still be pushing those and all the evidence about yogurt and cheese is much more positive than for milk alone that's amazing before we dig into the individual things that the number two question that we had from literally like about a thousand people was about full fat versus lower fat Dairy and I guess this can apply right across whether it's milk or if it's cheese and lots and lots of people saying um well the government advice makes really clear that I am supposed to swap my full fat milk for low-fat milk or my full fat cheese for low fat cheese and we did our research in both the UK government and the US government are currently saying that um I know that you don't always agree with whatever the existing advice which we know goes through a process that means sometimes is a bit out of date what's your personal views on this well I think there's no evidence at all that full fat milk is more harmful compared to um skimmed or semi-skim milk and there's no evidence for any advantage of low-fat milks and lots of theoretical reasons why there might be more uh less good for you by skimming off the fat because you're losing a lot of the nutrients okay so the reason that the government have put out these low-fat guidance it's not just in the UK and the US it's actually if you look at nearly all guidelines across many different countries they recommend uh you to have the low-fat versions of dairy one is because in most instances all of the healthy nutrients are maintained so if you have skim milk versus full fat milk you still retain the calcium the iodine the potassium and many of the other really healthy nutrients but what you also do is by going to low-fat milk as you reduce your saturated fat content and we've always believed and the evidence would support the increasing saturated fat intake increases your cholesterol increases your risk of cardiovascular disease and this is why the government have recommended us to have low fat to cut down the saturated fat intake and what do you believe but what I believe is that whilst it's very clear clear that low-fat Dairy has a favorable impact on health it's also cleared that full fat Dairy has some favorable impact on health but just not quite as favorable as low-fat Dairy my big problem with this is that this was a theoretical argument and you made the good theoretical case for it but there's been no all the clinical trials have failed to show any real difference between these two arms and by saying you have to take out the fat by spinning it basically in a centrifuge to get the fat globules off you take out lots of stuff you may not know about because the milk is incredibly complex there's all kinds of other proteins and things in there we don't totally understand the differences just to keep it really simple you know my dad's listening to this right now and he'd like you know he would be drinking full fat milk but um the um medical advice he's been given is he should swap out the full fat milk for skimmed milk because he's got high cholesterol like how important is that advice for him to follow do you think Sarah so I think based on evidence from observational studies we know that it's very clear that people that consume more full or low fat Dairy have reduced risk of cardiovascular disease and typically lower cholesterol and there's also randomized control trials have looked at this so there's one quite well-known randomized control trial where people were allocated to either follow no dairy diet or for 12 weeks follow a low-fat dairy diet and for 12 weeks follow a high fat dairy diet and what they did is they particularly focused on cholesterol and the different types of cholesterol and what they found interestingly is those following either the no Dairy the low Dairy low-fat area or the full fat area had absolutely no difference in blood cholesterol levels and this is not what you'd expect based on the really high saturated fat content of dairy which is why Dairy is so special because we know that there's something more interesting and complicated going on with the food Matrix so I would say to someone if your doctor says no you have to go to low fat or you have to avoid Dairy I would say that it's perfectly healthy and actually beneficial potentially to include cheese and to include yogurt I wouldn't consume butter and we can come on to that and I think that I don't see the harm in having low uh skimmed milk or semi-skin milk versus whole milk I'd love to talk about a few of the fermented dairy because I think that lots of people will believe that these are foods they shouldn't eat this is where they're coming from and I'd like to share what the latest data shows so could we start with you know yogurt um how healthy is this should we be eating it so I think yogurt and cheese are a fantastic part of our diet they're packed full of great nutrients um including calcium iodine potassium um fantastic types of protein so it's a complete protein so it provides all of the proteins that our body can't make and I think that I'm fortunate and actually a fortunate part of as well is cheese and yogurt is there seems to be something really special about the Matrix so the food structure that means that despite having a high saturated fat content they actually don't increase our cholesterol so that sounds a bit magic because we're just we're talking about milk and sort of saying on balance like it's not terrible for you but it's not a health food either so how comes I've taken the milk I basically left it sitting out there for a long time um and now magically you're telling me it's better for me so I think Tim can talk about lots of the attributes but I think what's quite interesting is if we do studies where we compare butter versus cheese despite having the same amount of saturated fat cheese does not raise our cholesterol if anything cheese certainly in comparison to butter it lowers our cholesterol it lowers our bad cholesterol despite having the same fats and what this highlights is that we have to really be careful when we're looking at either backer pack labeling of taking that really reductionist view of thinking just of the nutrients we have to think of the food and dairy is an example that we as nutritional scientists always use as a great example of the complexity of food and how looking at just a simple list of five or six nutrients tells you really very little about the health effects so what's happened how has the military been not very good for you or the butter again you're saying not very good for you to something well it's been transformed by microbes and this is the whole idea of fermentation which really means the transformation of food into something that is tastes different has a different texture and is also has a different effect on your body and so you're getting uh in yogurt classically three or four different species of microbe that when you're eating yogurt go into our into our guts and they as they're passing through some of them get killed off in the stomach but most of them they're wrapped in the fats so the protective shell of the yogurt and or the cheese they get to our lower colon and they will then stimulate our microbes there to produce healthy other metabolites and chemicals and I think this is probably where we're getting this other bonus from this health bonus is from these live microbes and that's why processed cheeses Kraft slices that are just dead or fake frozen pizza mozzarella don't have those same benefits so I think we are still ingesting a lot of microbes when we have reasonable cheeses and yogurts that you find on the market because they go moldy and if they go moldy you know that they've changed it's the ones that don't never go moldy you worry about and it so that we we don't totally know whether it's the transformation of the food by the microbes that's switched it so that the fats seem to have a beneficial effect or uh it's the microbes themselves having other effects on our resonant microbes to produce other chemicals in response I think we're still trying to understand exactly what's going on there hasn't been nearly enough research on fermented foods up to this moment you know we didn't even used to record uh how much fermented foods people ate in the past just like we didn't record how much the food was Ultra processed or not so this is very new we're gonna have to go back to a lot of these surveys to really work it out what's quite interesting is the studies that have looked at inflammation see that there's a more potent anti-inflammatory effective Dairy if it's fermented dairy versus if it's unfermented so whilst the totality of the evidence will show all Dairy seems to be either neutral or anti-inflammatory the fermented dairy which is the cheese and the yogurt yes one of the key takeaways I guess for me is that cheese is still saturated fat right that yogurt is still saturated fat and I've definitely been brought up to believe saturated fat is the worst thing that you can have right it's like go straight to hospital and have a heart attack don't stop right that's sort of how we've all been been taught over the last um 50 years and I I think what you're saying is it's not that simple I know that you're not very keen on the saturated fats in Meats for example but that um when it goes through this magic process of fermentation somehow this yogurt and this cheese is still saturated fat but actually on balance it's even healthy for you um is that right yeah I think the simplest thing to the way to summarize this is try and stop looking at nutrients trying to stop being over focused on nutrients and think about the food and dairy is a great example despite what you would read on the back of Peck labeling if you were to look just at the nutrients you'd think oh my gosh it's full of saturated fat you know I can't possibly eat this actually no when you eat it as a food the way it behaves in your body is very differently and the way it impacts your health is very different than what would be predicted based on the nutrients so we often talk about food as being more than the sum of its nutrients because of the structure because of this Matrix and dairy is a fantastic example could we have some actionable advice let's say you're going to the um to the grocery store to the supermarket you're trying to decide what to eat can you share some tips small portions little and often is what you you want with fermented dairy and uh when we discussed it but um there's something called kefir which is fermented milk which has about seven to ten times the amount of microbes that yogurt does have and it's like a super yogurt it's thinner and if you after something for its health benefits then switching from yogurt to Kefir is really good and you can make it yourself very cheaply small portions small shots just having them you know handy we've noticed you have to have them at least every every day or two you can't just have a giant Dairy binge once a week because it won't have that effect on the gut it won't be present all the time to have those benefits quite regularly so small amounts regularly is what we're after and again uh you know try and move to kafir as well as these cheeses pick if you can artisanal cheeses avoid highly processed cheeses which are dead as you you said most the cheese a third of the cheese in uh pizza for example is fake analog cheese it's made in factories it's not very little to do with dairy and so the poor quality stuff really is probably very bad for you so you need to realize you want to pay a bit more for something that's good and eat less of it I think that's the that's the key if you can get raw milk cheeses and increasingly um certainly in the UK and some areas some states in the US like California you can get raw milk cheeses um go for them because they do have a greater variety of microbes particularly on on the rinds Etc and go and enjoy it but pick the stuff that you enjoy and try and get diversity of your cheers because the more diverse your cheeses the more diverse the microbes you're going to be ingesting and Tim what about for people that are on a budget that enjoy cheese that I know you've said you know perhaps pick the higher quality and have less of it but they don't necessarily want to reduce the volume what cheeses are there in common supermarkets retailers that are affordable that will still be beneficial well what about Santa cheddar for example a supermarket cheddar will still have uh at least three or four microbes in it and because it's it's dry it will last a long time before it goes moldy they're perfectly fine you don't have to be spending huge amounts of money on exotic chicken and there's a soft cheese any better than a hard cheese whether it's like a a Brie or a buffalo mozzarella or whatever or does it not not really no that's not the distinction you get just as many microbes on a dry cheese a dry acidic cheese you do on on some of these Wet Ones um we even tested um Philadelphia oh my kids love Philadelphia yeah which looks out to process but uh when we tested it genetically we still found that it had at least three microbes we could detect on it so as long as something goes moldy [Music] there are some fake cheeses that never go moldy and you need to avoid that what about mozzarella like again standard Supermarket mozzarella I haven't tested mozzarella to know exactly uh what's inside it but that will have uh microbes on it and uh is is perfectly healthy feta cheese is perfectly healthy has microbes in it um but ricotta for example doesn't and most Cottage cheeses don't either and um that they've been killed off pasteurized the the not part of the process so there is subtle differences between some of these cheeses but vast majority of of decent cheese is fine to have and in terms of yogurts you know as we've discussed before I mean it's going for the um full fat unadulterated so you know it's not processed if it's full fat then that's the other really important reason why I really say to people go for full fat you know it hasn't been tampered with and uh you go for ones without vanilla you go ones without additives it's got no fruit and you can add stuff yourself so you know what's in it that's the basic rule all those full fat yogurts will be fine make sure there's no artificial sweeteners and they haven't done anything anything to it on the on the back of the pack and you'll be fine brilliant there were so many things we didn't get on to so I think we're definitely going to have to come back so butter for example we miss completely which is a whole podcast on its own let me do a quick summary and uh I think the key Point here is that all of this Dairy is full of saturated fats were sort of brought up to believe this was terrible for you but actually this really isn't what the science says anymore that we really need to distinguish the type of dairy we're talking about but interestingly even milk isn't bad for you and this idea that it creates all this inflammation isn't true once you get to sort of cheese and yogurt it's actually I think Sarah and Tim you're both saying look this all the evidence is this is actually healthy for us seems like this magic of fermentation these bacteria is really involved in this and part of it may be that there's live bacteria still in there part of it listening to this area is probably how it's changed the structure what you always like to call the Matrix of this this food and then lastly we had this discussion about full fat versus low-fat versions I think that there's two parts of this first I think there's this very strong agreement that most of the foods that you actually see as low fat tend to be worse for you because they've had to sort of mess with them in order to make them still taste good so that's always something to be nervous of but interestingly even if you just look at sort of full fat milk versus low fat milk or full fat cheese versus low-fat cheese there isn't this evidence that suggests that by switching to low fat that's suddenly much healthier for you and you're going to live longer and you're going to like lose lots of lots of weight actually interesting it seems like it's sort of very um balanced and I think that speaks as all ways to sort of the complexity of what's going on here I agree with you on all of that great synopsis Jonathan good job in a difficult area amazing thank you very much both of you and I look forward to the follow-up on butter so do I butter or margarine that's the big question next all right thank you everybody thank you Sarah and Tim for joining me on Zoe's science and nutrition today if you want to understand how to support your body with the best foods for you including the healthiest Dairy options for your body then you may want to try Zoe's personalized nutrition program to improve your health you can get 10 off by going to join zoe.com podcast as always I'm your host Jonathan wolf Zoe's science and nutrition is produced by yellow hewings Martin Richard Willen and Alex Jones here at Zuri see you next time [Music] foreign

Channel: ZOE

Views: 229,532

Keywords: zoe, gut health, ultra processed foods, tim spector, jessie inchauspe, gut health diet, ultra processed foods documentary, ultra processed food, medicine, lifestyle, doctor, health, animal-based, is dairy good or bad for you, gut health supplements, is milk bad for your bones, healthy snacks, is dairy bad, sarah berry, dr sarah berry

Id: uCS4p715gvU

Length: 35min 19sec (2119 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 06 2023