MORE MILK MEANS MORE WEIGHT GAIN

I really couldn't improve on this Washington Post headline for laying it out on the table. Milk has dramatically failed to live up to its purported powers as a weigt-loss tool, and has been proven more of a weight-gain tool.

"Children who drink more than three servings of milk each day are prone to becoming overweight, according to a large new study that undermines a heavily advertised dairy industry claim that milk helps people lose weight. The study of more than 12,000 children nationwide found that the more milk they drank, the more weight they gained: Those consuming more than three servings each day were about 35 percent more likely to become overweight than those who drank one or two."

"I went into this project expecting that drinking milk would have some weight benefit for children. So I was surprised when it turned out the way it did," said [Catherine S. Berkey of Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston], whose findings are being published in the June issue of the journal Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine.

A heavily advertised dairy industry claim, eh? Gee, isn't this pretty close to actionable? As in class? And speaking of which, as New Jersey bans sodas from its schools, it's worth noting that milk causes as much weight gain as sugar-sweetened sodas: "The researchers analyzed whether the children would have been better off if they replaced the soda they were drinking with milk but found no benefit. 'Our findings do not suggest that if children replace beverages sweetened with sugar with milk they would reduce their body weight,' Berkey said."

Well, sure, I mean, of course milk will make you fat if you don't drink low-fat milk, because... what's that? They were all drinking low-fat? Yep. "Those who drank more than three eight-ounce servings of milk a day gained the most weight, even after the researchers took into consideration factors such as physical activity, other dietary factors and growth. The association held, even though most of the children were drinking low-fat milk. 'That was surprising,' Berkey said. 'Apparently this applies to any kind of milk.'"

The dairy industry is already spinning this furiously, but this is a major, and well-deserved, blow to their credibility - as long as enough people hear about it.