Milking the Data
There are all sorts of reasons to classify milk as healthy or unhealthy.
Recently I stumbled across a new one that makes me wonder why any of the official recommendations and guidelines have anything positive to say about milk at all.
It comes down to the way the (German) dietary guidelines come about: via the “National Consumption Study II”.
What Is Milk?
The question seems rhetorical, but in this context it isn’t. In fact it is the central question when looking at milk:
In Results Report Part 2 (2008)(1) of the National Consumption Study II, Chapter 4 (“Food Consumption”) contains the main group “Milk, milk products and cheese”. And it is right there, on the first sub-level, that the category “Milk and milk-mixed drinks” is formed.
Everything gets funnelled into this one category: perfectly ordinary whole milk right alongside heavily sweetened chocolate cocoa, strawberry milk or vanilla milk off the supermarket shelf.
In the statistical analysis this means that liquid sugar bombs get booked as “dutifully consumed dairy products”.
The Consequence
A quick internet search turns up “drinking milk with cocoa” as well as “milk-mixed products, full fat, with cocoa” and “milk-mixed products, low fat, with cocoa” - all at 21 g of carbohydrate per 100 g. For comparison: I find cola at 11 g of carbohydrate per 100 g.
Now if epidemiology correlates a high consumption of milk-mixed drinks with health problems, that gets pinned wholesale on “milk” - even though it cannot be ruled out that the problems are down to the excessive added sugar instead.
The same goes, incidentally, for fruit yoghurt:
- Yoghurt, full fat, with fruit preparation: 14 g/100 g
- Yoghurt with fruit: 14 g/100 g
- Strawberry yoghurt (catering preparation): 15 g/100 g
- even Yoghurt with vanilla and nut: 18 g/100 g
Somewhat better than the cocoa drink, but still more sugar than in cola.
A Brief Detour
In another chapter of the National Consumption Study II we come across a piece of information we have already dealt with elsewhere:
Chapter 4.1.9 contains this revealing wording(2):
Behind the food group meat you will find both white meat such as poultry and red meat such as beef and pork, but also game and offal (Appendix Tab. A. 2). Dishes based on meat are understood to mean essentially sausage salads, meat-containing fast food such as hamburgers, or meat with sauce.
Old thoughts come bubbling back up…
The composition of the so-called meat dish
Hamburger: Hypervegetarian?
Is one of the most iconic meat dishes actually a meat dish? An amusing little realization
Read more →The Bottom Line
Anyone who uses these aggregations to statistically determine that “milk drinkers” have certain health problems may have said more about refined industrial sugar than about milk itself.
Anyone who finds that meat correlates with entirely obvious health problems may have massaged the data beforehand: a “meat dish” that contains a mere 10% meat would, in other contexts, have the consumer watchdog knocking at the door.
And “too much milk is unhealthy” simply makes a punchier headline than “sweetened milk-mixed drinks contain a lot of sugar”.
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