Hello everybody I'm Monica Reinagle and you're listening to the nutrition divas quick and dirty tips for eating well and feeling fabulous.

Listener Joanne writes,

what's your take on the full fat paradox

that whole milk may help keep us lean?

Joanne is referring to a couple of new studies that made headlines recently

suggesting that people who eat more full-fat dairy products actually have a lower

risk of obesity and all the things that go obesity, such as increased risk of heart disease and diabetes.

This, of course, is completely contrary to the conventional wisdom.

So we'll take a closer look at that today.

For decades now, we've been advised to choose low-fat dairy products over full-fat for a couple of reasons.

First, low-fat dairy products are lower in calories and therefore

should help us avoid weight gain. And secondly, the fat in dairy products is largely saturated fat and limiting saturated fat is thought to reduce your risk of heart disease.

Now I've talked quite a bit in recent months about the increasingly questionable link between saturated fat intake and heart disease risk.

People who eat more saturated fat do not appear to have any higher risk of heart disease than those who avoid it.

And now there's this.

Eating full-fat dairy products

doesn't seem to pack on the pounds.

In fact, it seems to ward off excess weight gain over time. In one analysis of 1500 Scandinavian men who were

studied over the course of 12 years, those who ate only low-fat dairy products were twice as likely to become obese as those who reported

eating butter, cream, and full-fat milk on a daily or near-daily basis, even after they adjusted for other variables such as vegetable intake,

physical activity, alcohol consumption, and age. And just in case you're wondering,

this research was not funded by the dairy industry.

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