"How the Dairy Industry Designs Misleading Studies"
Observational studies like these, suggesting dairy might not be so bad,
can be confounded by extraneous factors, such as the fact that people
who eat more cheese tend to be of higher socioeconomic class.
Fine, but what about this interventional study?
A randomized, crossover trial which 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,
and people ended up with the same cholesterol levels.
Let's see how they did it.
Half the study was paid for in part by the dairy industry,
and the other half paid for by dairy, dairy, dairy, and dairy.
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?
Anyone remember this video?
It's one of my favorites.
The beef industry was in the same pickle as the cheese industry.
Beef has saturated fat, which raises cholesterol,
which raises the risk of dying from our #1 killer.
What's an industry to do?
So they designed a study where they added beef, and cholesterols went down.
How is that possible?
Here's the two diets.
They added beef and the cholesterols went down.
They did this by cutting out so much dairy, pork, poultry, 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.
Well, duh.
They could have swapped in Twinkies
and said snack cakes lower your cholesterol, or frosting or anything.
OK, so now that you know the trick,
let's go back to this study.
How are you going to get a high-fat cheese diet,
and a high-fat meat diet
to have anywhere near the same saturated fat level
as a diet with neither, unless...
Wait, don't tell me.
What, they added coconut oil or something to the other diet?
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.
That's now you can make sure a cheese or meat-rich diet
look like it doesn't raise cholesterol.
That reminds me of the desperation
evident in this study that compared the effects
of dairy cheddar cheese to a nondairy cheddar cheese called Daiya.
Milk consumption has plummeted in recent years
as people have discovered plant-based alternatives
like soymilk 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?
They got their work cut out for them.
Daiya is no health food by any stretch,
but definitely three times less saturated fat than cow cheese.
So, I give up.
How could you possibly show more inflammation from Daiya?
Well, there is one fat that may cause more inflammation that milk fat: palm oil.
In fact, it may raise cholesterol levels
as much as trans-fat laden partially hydrogenated oil.
Yeah, but what, are you telling me they like slipped the Daiya group
some extra palm oil on the side?
Yes, can you believe it?
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 by tofu in the habitual diet
would probably not usually be accompanied by the addition of lard.