Pam’s Commentary

February 15^th, 2006

www.pamkilleen.com

RE: Thinning the Milk Does Not Mean Thinning the Child (see story below my commentary)

 In yesterday’s commentary I spoke about the problems with the bottled water industry.

This story below is another example as to how badly we neglect our children. “This doctor says this”, “this study says that”….They’re all missing the point.

 This story is a huge distraction. The real story is about removing one lie (processed whole milk) and replacing it with another lie (processed skim milk). Replacing processed whole milk with processed skim milk would deprive children of essential nutrients (saturated fats are not the enemy, by the way). I just can’t imagine what they must do to skim milk to give it any taste or texture.

 Furthermore, it would be criminal if they were to replace processed whole milk or processed skim milk with soy milk. If this happens, we’re going to see our children get damaged even more. The corporations want to push soy milk in the schools because they make more money on soy than they would on milk. It’s a sick, twisted system. Parents are being lied to left, right and center. How difficult would it be to believe that whole raw milk from grassfed cows is the superior choice?

 Schools should be selling traditional whole drinks to our children. It will take a while to educate people about the benefits of whole, raw milk from grassfed cows, but it will happen. The lie has been going on for far too long. We have all been (and I mean this figuratively) decapitated. We’ve lost our common sense. The more man touches a food, the more “economy” is created. The more man touches a food, the worse it is for us. The corporations are above the law and don’t care about collateral damage.

 To learn more about raw milk and the dangers of soy, see my interview with Sally Fallon in the archives.

The Nation

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/12/weekinreview/12kolata.html

By GINA KOLATA

Published: February 12, 2006

FIRST, New York City schools replaced soft drinks with Snapple. Now they're banning whole milk. In 2000, Los Angeles also banished whole milk from its schools; some states are considering similar proposals. And across the country, there are anguished pleas for more nutrition education, more physical education, more anything to get children to eat less and exercise more.

Skip to next paragraph

William Gottlieb/Corbis

DRINK UP Today, many schools won't allow children to slurp whole milk for lunch. But skim milk may not make students thinner.

And why not? Children are fatter than ever. Rates of childhood obesity started rising in the 1980's, when adults' weights also began to soar. From 1976 to 1980, 5 percent of children were overweight, says Katherine Flegal, a statistician at the National Center for Health Statistics. Today, she says, 15.8 percent are overweight.

Just about everyone can list ways to fight childhood obesity: schools should alter lunch menus, teach nutrition and hold more physical education classes. At home, parents should be more diligent and the Xbox less available.

Here's the problem: as logical as these suggestions might sound, when many of them have been subjected to the cold light of rigorous scientific study, they have fallen short. If nothing else, when it comes to fighting obesity, science teaches humility.

A major study published last week, for example, gave some researchers pause. Nearly 49,000 women were randomly assigned to follow a low fat diet or their regular diet for eight years while researchers kept track of their rates of breast cancer, colon cancer and heart disease. Not only did the diets have no effect on these diseases, they also had no effect on the women's weights.

So, some ask, why expect that a small change, like replacing whole milk with skim, would affect children's weights?

"I don't want to say there is no such remedy that will ever work," said Dr. Jeffrey Friedman, an obesity researcher at Rockefeller University. "But the burden should be on those who want to impose them to show they work. To my knowledge, no one has ever done this."

It's not that no one has tried. In the 1990's, the National Institutes of Health sponsored two large, rigorous studies asking whether weight gain in children could be prevented by doing everything that obesity fighters say should be done in schools — greatly expand physical education, make cafeteria meals more nutritious and less fattening, teach students about proper nutrition and the need to exercise, and involve the parents. One study, an eight-year, $20 million project sponsored by the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute, followed 1,704 third graders in 41 elementary schools in the Southwest, where students were mostly Native Americans, a group that is at high risk for obesity. The schools were randomly divided into two groups, one subject to intensive intervention, the other left alone. Researchers determined, beginning at grade five, if the children in the intervention schools were thinner than those in the schools that served as a control group.

They were not. The students could, however, recite chapter and verse on the importance of activity and proper nutrition. They also ate less fat, going from 34 percent to 27 percent fat in their total diet. Alas, said the study's principal investigator, Benjamin Caballero, director of the Center for Human Nutrition at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, "it was not enough to change body weight."

The paper appeared in The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition in 2003 to no acclaim, Dr. Caballero said. No press release, no media coverage, no invitations to speak about the results at scientific meetings. On the journal's Web page, a search of articles that refer to the study comes up empty. It has not been cited anywhere.

The second study, of 5,106 children in 96 schools in California, Louisiana, Minnesota and Texas, had a similar design and the same results: all that help made no difference in the children's weights.

The principal investigators of both studies think they know the problem. In interviews, both Dr. Caballero and Philip R. Nader, who directed the study of 96 schools and is an emeritus research professor at the University of California at San Diego, came to the same conclusion: the intervention was not enough. It is necessary to change the children's total experience, not just what happens at school. "Not only the school, but the family, the community, the grocery store," Dr. Caballero said.

Others researchers are not so sure.

No one knows why children got fatter, says Dr. Rudolph Leibel, an obesity researcher at Columbia University. It is clear, of course, that they must be eating more or exercising less, but the difference may be tiny — a few dozen extra calories a day will, over the years, pile on pounds and a change like that is "unmeasurable," Dr. Leibel said. And no one has any good evidence that proposed solutions will make any difference.

He understands the concern. "There is a sense of fear and desperation and concern that spills over into calls for various interventions that look sensible but may not be," he said. And, he added, those interventions should not be imposed without first showing they have an effect.

Dr. Leibel and other skeptics say they are not surprised that, even with two studies showing the ineffectiveness of intervention in schools, communities continue to mandate those same changes. Scientists and the public, said David Freedman, a statistician at the University of California at Berkeley, "have this wonderful capacity for ignoring negative evidence."

Dr. Freedman, who has written books on the science and history of clinical trials, says he is reminded of a story about a pioneer in the medical application of statistics, Pierre-Charles-Alexandre Louis.

In the 1830's, Dr. Louis studied the effect of bloodletting, or bleeding — the standard treatment of the time — on pneumonia.

"The data showed that bleeding didn't work," Dr. Freedman said. But, he said, "Dr. Louis rejected this as terrifying and absurd."

So, he made a recommendation: bleed earlier and bleed harder.