https://nutritionfacts.org/video/friday-favorites-how-the-dairy-industry-designs-misleading-studies/
The meat and dairy industries design interventional studies showing their products have neutral or even beneficial effects on cholesterol and inflammation.
A randomized, crossover trial, compared a high-fat cheese diet, to a high-fat meat diet, to a low-fat diet.
A high-cheese diet: CHEESE, which is loaded with saturated fat; A high meat diet: MEAT, which is loaded with saturated fat; VERSUS CARB, a low-fat diet.
Results: People ended up with the same cholesterol levels.
The entire study was paid for by the dairy industry
If you’re the dairy industry, and you’re trying to design a study to show that a high-cheese diet doesn’t raise cholesterol, how would you go about doing that?
There was a Beef industry study (paid for by the Beef industry) that showed when beef, (which has saturated fat and raises cholesterol, and therefore raises the risk of dying from our #1 killer, heart disease) was added to diets, cholesterol went down (!)
How is that possible? Here’s the two diets:
They added beef, and the cholesterol went down. They did this by cutting out so much dairy, poultry, pork, fish, and eggs that their overall saturated fat intake was cut in half. They cut saturated fat levels in half, and the cholesterol levels went down. Dr. Greger says that they could have swapped in Twinkies and said snack cakes lower your cholesterol.
For the Dairy Industry study, they added coconut oil. They added so much coconut oil and cookies to the so-called low fat diet that they were able to sufficiently raise the level of saturated fat to cause a similar rise in cholesterol.
The National Dairy Council designed a study comparing dairy cheese to non-dairy cheese (Daiya).
Milk consumption has plummeted in recent years as people have discovered plant-based alternatives like soy milk and almond milk.
And now there’s plant-based cheese alternatives? What’s the National Dairy Council to do? How are you going to design a study that shows it’s healthier to eat cheese; design a study where cheese causes less inflammation than the vegan alternative.
Daiya is not a very healthy “cheese” but it has three times less saturated fat than cow cheese. How could you possibly show more inflammation from Daiya?
They gave the Daiya group some extra palm oil on the side. They compared cheese to Daiya “plus palm oil”—so much extra palm oil that the vegan alternative meal ended up having the same amount of saturated fat as the cheese meal. That’s like proving tofu is worse than beef by doing a study where they compared a beef burger to a tofu patty...stuffed with lard. Oh, wait, the meat industry already did that, but at least they had the decency to concede that “Replacement of meat with tofu in the habitual diet would not usually be accompanied by the addition of butter and lard.”
Sources:
Guo J, Astrup A, Lovegrove JA, Gijsbers L, Givens DI, Soedamah-muthu SS. Milk and dairy consumption and risk of cardiovascular diseases and all-cause mortality: dose-response meta-analysis of prospective cohort studies. Eur J Epidemiol. 2017;32(4):269-287.
Sanchez-villegas A, Martínez JA, Prättälä R, et al. A systematic review of socioeconomic differences in food habits in Europe: consumption of cheese and milk. Eur J Clin Nutr. 2003;57(8):917-29.
Thorning TK, Raziani F, Bendsen NT, Astrup A, Tholstrup T, Raben A. Diets with high-fat cheese, high-fat meat, or carbohydrate on cardiovascular risk markers in overweight postmenopausal women: a randomized crossover trial. Am J Clin Nutr. 2015;102(3):573-81.
Demmer E, Van loan MD, Rivera N, et al. Consumption of a high-fat meal containing cheese compared with a vegan alternative lowers postprandial C-reactive protein in overweight and obese individuals with metabolic abnormalities: a randomised controlled cross-over study. J Nutr Sci. 2016;5:e9.
Vega-lópez S, Ausman LM, Jalbert SM, Erkkilä AT, Lichtenstein AH. Palm and partially hydrogenated soybean oils adversely alter lipoprotein profiles compared with soybean and canola oils in moderately hyperlipidemic subjects. Am J Clin Nutr. 2006;84(1):54-62.