Are you still eating low-fat or no-fat dairy products? If you are, you probably think you’re doing the right thing for your health. And if you check with virtually any public health agency, they’d wholeheartedly agree.

The American Heart Association, American Diabetes Association, and American Cancer Society, for instance, all recommend low-fat or no-fat dairy. The US Department of Agriculture, in their nutrition guidelines for Americans, also advises, “Dairy Group choices should be fat-free or low-fat.”¹

So what’s the problem? The advice to eat low-fat foods, including dairy, is antiquated, at least back to the 1970s, when low-fat diets were first recommended.

It’s also not scientifically supported, and if you’re choosing low-fat over full-fat, not only are you missing out on taste, flavor and satisfaction, but you’re missing out on valuable benefits to your health – benefits that come from eating full-fat foods.

Skim Milk Was Once Considered ‘Hog Slop’

While you’ve probably become accustomed to seeing skim milk, 1 percent, 2 percent, and whole when purchasing milk, keep in mind that it wasn’t always this way. Prior to World War II, skim milk was not sold in stores, but rather thrown away or used as feed for chickens, hogs and calves.

During World War II, dried milk powder became a preferred relief food, with the government asking U.S. dairies to produce 200 million pounds of dry skim milk powder for America’s allies.

When the war ended, however, a new marketing strategy was necessary. As written in the book “Pure and Modern Milk: An Environmental History Since 1900” by Kendra Smith-Howard:²

“The development of skim milk as an attractive product for sale only came about because dairy producers, emboldened by their success selling milk to Uncle Sam during World War II, seized on postwar marketing opportunities to sell what once had been hog slop to housewives and families.”

From Byproduct to Weight-Loss Sensation

While milk was once marketed as a wholesome food for children, the industry capitalized on growing weight-gain concerns among Americans, and began marketing it as a diet food. Smith-Howard writes:³

“As prices for whole milk increased in the late 1940s, milk dealers in the fluid milk market, as well as dried milk dealers, turned to skim milk as a promising product in its own right.

Though many consumers were skeptical about the value of skim milk, dairy companies enticed them with promises that drinking skim milk would help them lose weight.

Milk dealers secured the backing of physicians. As had been the case for certified and pasteurized milk in the Progressive Era, the recommendations of physicians gave skim milk newfound legitimacy.

Although physicians had long suggested nonfat milk to patients who had difficulty digesting fats or were elderly, weight-conscious consumers became the largest sector of the skim milk market in the 1950s.

Emphasizing skim milk’s role in promoting slenderness transformed skim milk’s reputation as a low-cost relief food to one that high-income dieters would embrace.”

Meanwhile, in 1953 University of Minnesota professor Ancel Keys published a flawed and cherry-picked paper that serves as the basis for nearly all of the initial scientific support for the Cholesterol Theory (the notion that eating saturated fat raises your cholesterol levels and leads to heart disease).

The nutrition community of that time completely accepted the hypothesis, and encouraged the public to cut out butter, red meat, animal fats, eggs, dairy and other “artery clogging” fats from their diets, a radical change at that time that is still very much in force today.

Accumulating research is showing, however, that this switch to low-fat has not only caused rates of chronic disease to skyrocket; it’s also been making people fat.