Bizarre Portlandia sketch aside, we Americans really do love our watery, tasteless skim milk. Well, maybe we don’t love it — but we drink it, because the government says we should. Back in 1985, the USDA made its first official recommendation in support of skim milk as a means of managing saturated fat intake and ultimately reducing heart disease.
Except, now they might be changing their minds.
Evidence for full-fat dairy goodness has been mounting in recent years, aided in part by a couple of huge studies published in 2012 and 2013 (and, notably, funded by government and academic institutions, not the dairy industry). The gist of the research: the more milk consumed, the lower the incidence of heart disease. Consumers have taken these studies to heart [zing!] and have slowly started to shift their purchasing habits: the first half of this year alone saw an 11 percent increase in whole milk sales and a 14 percent decrease in skim.
So why is this news now? This year, the “Dietary Guidelines for Americans” is set to undergo one of its routine updates. Which means that the bureaucrats in charge of the whole thing will have to come to terms with the new research and decide whether or not to modify the skim milk recommendation accordingly. Kind of a big deal, given the fact that heart disease is still the leading cause of death in the U.S., and we’ve been pointing our fingers at saturated fat as the culprit since the 1950s. If not milk, cheese, butter, and eggs, then what is there to blame?
That question, of course, leads to the bigger, scarier question of whether or not the government has any right to make recommendations based on incomplete (or constantly evolving) scientific evidence.
All we know is that it’s time to crack open a pint of full-fat ice cream in celebration of this news. Because it’s basically been proven to be healthy for us, right?
