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"Will Dairy Foods Help Me Lose Weight?"

You’d sure think so given the recent plethora of ads with milk-mustached celebrities and headlines like “Drink Milk… Lose Weight?” Ads for Yoplait® brand yogurt claim: “A clinical study shows it helps you burn more fat and lose weight than just cutting calories alone.”



	Did You Know? The new South Beach Diet food products by Kraft fall far short of the USDA’s 2005 Dietary Guidelines, reveals a just-completed comprehensive analysis of the products by Pritikin Director of Nutrition Jeffrey Novick, MS, RD, LV/N. Here are highlights: South Beach Diet Sandwich Wraps average 1,385mg of sodium per serving. (The 2005 Dietary Guidelines recommend no more than 1,500mg of sodium for the entire day for middle-aged and older Americans.) South Beach Snacks average a whopping 40% calories from fat. (The 2005 Dietary Guidelines recommend 20 to 35% calories from fat.) South Beach Meal Replacement Bars get 11% of their calories from artery-clogging saturated fat. “In most cases,” sums up dietitian Jeff Novick, “The boxes containing these new South Beach Diet foods are healthier than the foods.” View Interactive Pritikin Pyramid

What the ads don’t say is that all the hoopla is based on one very small published study – just 21 people – and it was conducted by a researcher, Dr. Michel Zemel of the University of Tennessee, who has a patent on the claim that dairy foods promote weight loss. Moreover, the National Dairy Council funded the study.

In the study, 11 obese adults who included three servings a day of nonfat and low-fat dairy foods as part of their low-calorie diets lost, after six months, nine more pounds than 10 other obese adults who did not include diary foods.

But now a new, larger study, which was expected to confirm the earlier study’s findings, led the authors to assert a diet high in dairy foods was not more effective in shedding pounds than a low-dairy diet.

Study leader Dr. Jean Harvey-Berino, professor and chairwoman of the Department of Nutrition and Food Science at the University of Vermont, took 45 obese men and women and randomly assigned them to two different groups, both consuming 1,500-calorie diets. The first group ate four dairy servings daily while the second group consumed just one. After six months, the high-dairy group lost no more weight than the low-dairy group.

Dr. Harvey-Berino presented her data at the annual conference of the North American Association for the Study of Obesity in November in Las Vegas. “These findings,” she stated, “suggest that a high dairy diet does not substantially improve weight loss beyond what can be achieved in a high quality behavioral intervention.”

Bottom Line: “Whether diary foods can really enhance weight loss is unclear. Any claims to this effect are based on thin evidence,” says Dr. Jay Kenney, Nutrition Research Specialist at the Pritikin Longevity Center. ...

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Pritikin Perspective - Healthy Living Made Easier
Pritikin Perspective is a publication for Alumni of the Pritikin Longevity Center. It is dedicated to helping people make healthy changes in their lives. The articles in this publication should not be considered specific medical advice, as each individual circumstance is different. You are strongly encouraged to seek medical advice before beginning a program of diet and exercise.
Editor/Writer: Eugenia Killoran.

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