Never Mind
Emily Litella needed a lab coat and stethoscope for this one – milk fat is good for you.
The CBC reports – Dairy fat may cut Type 2 diabetes risk: study
The researchers found people with higher levels of trans-palmitoleic acid also tended to show:
- Slightly less fat on their bodies.
- Higher “good” cholesterol levels and lower overall cholesterol levels.
- Lower levels of C-reactive protein, a marker of inflammation.
- Evidence of lower levels of insulin resistance.
Insulin resistance occurs when the body produces too little of the hormone insulin and fails to effectively regulate the metabolism of fats, proteins and sugars. The condition can lead to Type 2 diabetes.
The study was published in the December issue of the Annals of Internal Medicine.
“Who could have predicted” that, as mammals, human beings might actually derive some benefits from milk? Trans-palmitoleic acid is a component of milk fat that is not found in other transfats.
I note that this is from a long-term study and there isn’t so much as an ice cream shop among the sources of funding.
26 comments
I can’t quote sources off the top, but this has been known in the “foodie” community for a good while now. I switched from nonfat to 2 percent milk a few years ago, and I don’t begrudge myself an occasional quart of whole milk.
The big problem us older folks have is that we just can’t digest the stuff anymore :(. Milk is a good source of minerals, back in my younger more athletic days a favorite treat after training was a banana and a glass of milk, which did more to make me feel normal after sweating out all my electrolytes than all the syrupy “athletic drinks” on the planet.
I drink whole milk [half & half in coffee] and only use butter. I come from a line of dairy farmers that regularly lives to 100 on my Mother’s side so I assumed that was the way to go.
Older folks, Badtux. My Mother is approaching her 86th birthday, and she never drinks anything but whole milk, and you don’t want to know about the amount of cheese she consumes, and it is always real cheese, not “processed cheese food”.
I know what you mean though. Some people start to have major gas attacks from dairy products as they get older. I agree that if you dump a banana in a blender with cold milk, you are set for rebuilding.
Yeah, Steve, I don’t know anyone who is serious about food who doesn’t insist that natural products are better than the substitutes. One of my grandnephews was lactose intolerant for a while, and preparing meals for him was really a problem. Soy milk is just not the same. Fortunately he has overcome the problem and can now eat the same junk food as other kids, much to the dismay of his mother. She put herself through college as a baker, and generally loves to cook good food.
Well, Bryan, I did tell my doc that I did not want my right foot amputated because I am “lack-toes intolerant.” 🙂 As it turned out, there was a satisfactory remedy well short of amputation for the structural problem of my foot. I am, unfortunately, growing somewhat lactose intolerant as I age; if I drink much milk, I’d better stay near a bathroom.
Yes, I always keep unsalted butter on hand. Apart from the taste in daily use, many yeast breads can’t be baked without it.
Real butter, and cheese for me. I don’t drink much milk anymore, the digestive tract symptoms are as Steve implies, gas and runny… err… nevermind, I’m eatin’ breakfast :). I’m probably not going to live to the grand old age of 86 like your mom, Bryan, but that’s because of inhaling too much nasty stuff into my lungs when I was young, not because I put a pat of butter in my scrambled eggs. Ah yes, *eggs*, another of those things that the food nazis say we shouldn’t eat! My great-grandmother had two eggs and a big stout country biscuit for breakfast for 83 years straight, giving it up only when she had to enter a nursing home because my grandmother’s own medical problems made it impossible to care for her. My great-grandmother died at age 93, clearly she would have lasted until at least age 94 if she hadn’t eaten so many eggs in her life :twisted:.
– Badtux the Food Appreciatin’ Penguin
Yay!! /runs to the ice cream store…
So, if your gut doesn’t like dairy anymore, does that actually have anything to do with age, or is it that your population of intestinal symbiotes is in bad shape? Perhaps a course or two of antibiotics or too much Thai food has decimated your gut bugs? Just speculating, since I’m neither foodie, health-foodie, nor naturopath and use with abandon as much whole milk, butter and ice cream as I can afford.
On the other hand, somewhere in my thirties I did lose the ability to digest McDonald’s cuisine (Popeye had his spinach, Eructation-Man has the BigMac). Wendy’s burgers have the same effect on me but Burger King is fine — I’d like to know what the secret ingredient is. 😕
Thanks, PJ; I’d completely forgotten about how antibiotics wreak havoc with intestinal flora. My doc keeps me continuously on an antibiotic to prevent a recurrence of a diabetic foot wound and the infection that went with it. NOW I understand why my gut ain’t what it used to be!
It isn’t just the taste, Steve, it is also the time and temperature for cooking when you change the fat or oil involved. Cooking is chemistry, and chemical reactions are dependent on the substances involved. There is also the physics side of baking, as it it makes a difference if the cookie sheets are reflective or dark, which is why I spring for parchment paper.
My Mother takes antibiotics, especially Cipro with yogurt to cushion the effect on her digestive tract. More and more doctors are recommending doing this, but it has to be real yogurt, not plastic goop in a cup. You will see antibiotics with a diary warning specifically because they know that you will have digestive problems.
Badtux, you know what a farm breakfast looks like, and if the chores don’t kill you, the eggs sure won’t. The key is to be active. You can’t eat like a farmer and sit at a desk, you have to move. You don’t need a gym membership, you need to walk and stay active. Eggs aren’t a problem if you put in the effort. Everything is a problem if you don’t.
Just watch out for the HFCS, Ellroon. If it came from a lab rather than kitchen, the best you can hope for is that it does nothing.
You know, PJ, that sounds like the standard reaction to E. coli, and that is very possible with the mass produced products that fast food places use. The McDonalds and Wendys may use the same meat supplier, while BK uses someone else. I know from working in a canning factory that the same product can wear a lot of different labels, some store brands and others national brands.
I discovered many years ago, after a long course of different anti-biotic cocktails, that I’d become lactose and *almost everything else* intolerant. A friend put me onto a highly respected Naturopath (who was also a Pharmacist and a couple other things). He put me on a course of pro-biotics (the A, B, C) and a toxin cleansing regime. After about a month, I could drink whole milk and other things again. Ever since then, whenever I’ve had to have anti-biotics, or just start becoming intolerant to something, I do the whole cleansing/pro-biotic thing, and I’m OK again. 🙂 But I tend to stay away from fast *garbage that looks like food* as mush as possible. 😉
Everyone succumbs to “bar food” sooner or later, Kryten.
Actually, I have always been a big fan of street food around the world, but the fast food places are as close as you can get in the US. It may be more sanitary in the kitchen, but that is irrelevant if the food is being supplied by rip-off artists and factory farms.
Ahhh! Street food is a different thing (generally!) But in most countries, you should only ever eat street food when you are with a local that you trust implicitly! Many of the vendors are vary much aware of the general ignorance (and stupidity) of tourists, and act accordingly! (Even here, I’m ashamed to say). *shrug* Way of the World… The wealthy travel, and the poor will do anything they can to get some of that wealth! 😉
When I first went to Hong Kong, I was lucky enough to know some people who had spent a lot of time there. They whisked me away from all the typical main-street type tourist traps, through the torturous and dingy back streets, to some of the BEST food I’ve ever enjoyed anywhere! 😀 Same in many other places I visited (including the USA!) 😀 I really enjoyed the food in many places, like seafood in SF, spicy dishes in New Mexico (when my stomach was much younger and made of steel), the deli’s of NYC… And I was taken to a place in Tex that had what was probably the best beef burger I’ve ever had!
Traveling can either be a wonderful experience, or a lengthy & painful medical experience (and I have experienced both)! 😆
Lots of street food here, Bryan. The ubiquitous “roach coach” once seen only lurking outside of construction sites has gone upscale a bit and can now be found almost everywhere, serving everything from tacos to salads to lasagna. It’s rather hilarious to see one of these things pull into the parking lot of some yuppie bio-tech firm, fire off its “La Cucaracha” horn, and watch the lab-coat-clad scientists rush out to get their street food fix :). In the more densely packed neighborhoods the traditional street carts still abide. But you need density to make those work, and alas most of the area is too much contemporary suburbia for that. The little hole-in-the-wall taquerias and pho shops sort of make up for that though…
Regarding antibiotics, I haven’t had antibiotics for close to fifteen years. I had a cough that wouldn’t go away. They tried antibiotics. They tried steroids. Nothing work. I changed jobs to a less stressful job. The cough went away. Go figure. So much for modern medicine… “it’s stress, get a less stressful job” I guess just doesn’t fit into the world view of a modern physician.
However, thinking about it, I do recall when I became lactose intolerant. It was after an incident where my water filter failed in a remote area and I had to fall back to the old backup emergency water purification method, iodine. That really did a number on my gut flora, that’s for sure. That was over ten years ago, though, and my digestion seems otherwise quite normal today other than the continued lack of ability to digest lactose.
Finally, my great-grandmother was about as active as a mushroom for most of her life. In her opinion that was why she spent so much time having kids (she had eight altogether) — so that they could wait on her hand and foot for the rest of her life. For the last forty years of her life, after my grandmother (the oldest daughter) became old enough to cook and raise the rest of the kids (14 years old was apparently old enough for that on the farm), my great-grandmother did as little as possible while eating plenty of things like fatty pork sausage fried in bacon grease and eggs and butter and whole milk that are supposedly bad for you. She also loved sweets — peach preserves on top of biscuit pudding (like bread pudding, but made with leftover biscuits) was one of her her favorites, for example. But — it was all raised on the farm (other than the wheat for the biscuits, which was bought), and she was also eating plenty of fresh vegetables whenever they were in season and freshly canned ones when fresh was out of season. So apparently it all cancels out in the end.
BTW, just remembered one of my grandmother’s secret ingredients for yummy biscuits. It was bacon grease. She was 86 years old when she died of cancer that was utterly unrelated to anything she ever ate… she spent most of her life overweight, she ate horribly according to the pundits who would have had heart attacks at how much fat she ate as part of her daily diet and the utter lack of steamed fresh vegetables (they were always boiled until limp, which the pundits claim kills all the nutritional value, and *usually* cooked with a chunk of salt pork now that I think back), and according to all these pundits she should have died long before age 86 from all that. Instead, tobacco killed her, at an age long past where these pundits say she should have died of heart disease. Go figure.
I’ll have to deal with this tomorrow because I have a hungry cat in lap at the moment, and you have touched on my Great-grandmother Imh0f, Badtux, the one who had the 18 children with no twins.
There’s acidophilus milk. Commonly available in grocery stores, comes as regular or “sweet”, and sometimes isn’t labeled “Acidophilus” except in the fine print. I’ve never used it consistently, but have tried several brands in the past (none of them labeled “sweet”) and the taste ranged from slightly yoghurty to pretty much like ordinary milk. All of it that I’ve seen was 2% milkfat.
I know you can get acidophiles in tablet form at most decent drug stores, the key is getting active cultures to repopulate your gut, PJ. I haven’t seen the milk.
About my Great-grandmother Imhof –
She was from Switzerland and had 18 kids, no twins, by her 45th birthday. Like your great grandmother, Badtux, when the girls got old enough, they took over the actual work, so it wasn’t the total drudgery that people would imagine, including a few reporters who profiled the family.
They were well known in New York, and President William McKinley was the godfather of my Great Uncle Samuel. Another of the boys was named William McKinley Imhof [actually it was spelled Emhoff or Emhof depending on who was doing the reporting in the US].
Your description of the biscuit pudding with peach preserves reminded me of Chriesitotsch, Swiss cherry pudding, which is like cherry pie filling mixed with toast cubes soaked in milk. Of course it should have whipped cream on top. It was a regular desert in my family.
My Great-grandmother was more than slightly weird. when one of the boys married a Catholic, she claimed her new daughter-in-law had hexed her false teeth, so GGM refused to wear them for the last several decades of her life and lived primarily on bread soaked in milk. That restricted diet is probably the reason she only lived into her mid 90s instead of making it past 100, like her younger brother and many of her children.
Your great-grandmother knew that you need pork fat to bake a number of things. There is no point in even trying to make a pie crust without lard, which is pork fat. Bacon grease qualifies, but it tends to be salty, so you can’t use it for everything.
Yeah, the younger brother, my Great-great-uncle Chris died at 102 from cancer. As one of the aunts who did not approve of some of the things that he got up to noted: It was about time something killed him. He wasn’t much of a role model – drinking, smoking, and playing the accordion in a Swiss band at dances most weekends when the farm work allowed it. There was also his love of Studebakers and total lack of regard for traffic laws.
Well, Barber’s is a regional dairy out of Alabama that stocks a lot of stores around Panama City and I’ve seen their acidophilus milk in several. It is called either Plus ABC or Nutrish AB, so you wouldn’t know what it is without a close reading of the label. “Barbers Plus” is 2% with acidophilus, bifidum and calcium, “Barber’s Nutrish” is 1% with acidophilus and bifidum. Apparently there are also other dairies out there that use the “Nutrish” name for acidophilus milk.
Isn’t lard another of those things that are nowadays easier to find as ethnic groceries? I think it had been pretty much displaced by Crisco in your average U.S. supermarket even pre-1970’s.
Guess I’m catching up to your GGM, Bryan. I’ve recently re-acquired a childhood fondness for milk-toast as a comfort food (milk, butter & sugar heated with shredded toast).
I always get amused when the press etc talk about *the average life expectancy* being higher in western nations today. As with all statistics, the devil is in the detail! the X & Y gen’s are tending to die younger than the previous gen did, and this is mostly because they spend most of their lives stressed about one thing or another. My grandfather always told me not to worry about things, because the stress would eventually kill me. 🙂 With all the current bedwetting fear an hysteria over nothing being generated in the USA, I expect the avg life expectancy will decrease significantly, and not at all from *terrorists* (unless you count the likes of Kraft, Kellog, McD, BK, KFC, Monsanto, etc to be *terrorists* which, IMHO, they probably should be!) 😉 😀
The thing I found with probiotics is that: a) they are expensive, especially the *good* ones, and b) they are useless unless you need them, and may even make things worse in the long run. *shrug* I use (when I need to): Inner Health Plus
I was looking through Moore’s site (as I do occasionally), and came across this gem. 😉
¡Viva WikiLeaks! SiCKO Was Not Banned in Cuba
Yeah, really! 😛 😀
PJ: They carry Barber’s here, it would just be a matter of figuring out who, if anyone, carries that particular product.
You might add a dash of cinnamon or use brown sugar for a change. I remember eating buttered bread with sugar sprinkled on it as a child, and if you added cinnamon and toasted it in the oven it was really good.
Kryten: Life expectancy in the US has gone down recently, which is consistent with what happened during the Depression. The birthrate should also decline, as people put off having children because of the unsettled conditions. This is all known and should be expected, but it will probably become another crisis. Logically when health care is dependent on employment, as it is in the US, when there is high unemployment, there are fewer people able to seek health care. Lacking health care cause the number of preventable deaths increases. This isn’t magic, any more than it was magic when the Boomers hit 45 in the early 90s and the crime rate started to decline. Crimes are committed generally by males between 15 and 45, so when that group gets smaller so does the the number of crimes. The politicians built a lot of prisons just in time for them to be extraneous.
There are so many cons and frauds with “dietary supplements” that you should only get them from someone you trust, and only use them when you need them.
I mentioned before that I assumed that many of the classified documents in the dump were probably lies designed to misinform. That was certainly true of Panama, and might be true in Cuba, but the Cuban interest section has long been a captive of the Calle Ocho crowd of Cuban exile whackoes, that there is no way of knowing.
Ohhh yes! There are a heck of a lot of *snake oil* sales going on in the *alternative* health (as there is in the supposedly *legitimate* pharma-drug killer companies! 😈
I’ve used the Inner Health products for many years now. they are the only ones I tried that actually wok (for me anyway). 🙂
Errmmm… Erratum: “Moore’s sight” –> “Moore’s site” , of course! I’ve actually NOT had a good day. I found out from my Doc this morning that I will probably be on Insulin in the new year (the diabetes med’s Diaformin & Diamicron are not working any more. My hba1c & glucose levels are slowly going up.) Then, the $300+ titanium frames on my $700 eye-glasses broke, and I don’t have the money to get them replaces (the arm actually snapped off), and something else went wrong (that I won’t bother mentioning. You get the idea.) So, expect more typo’s etc., sorry about that! 😉 And it *proves* that trouble really does come in threes! Been saying that for decades (thanks to my Grandfather explaining that to me! I think I’d be better off If I’d never heard of that.) *SIGH*
And a Merry Christmas to all! Bah humbug! 😛 😉 😆
Ehhhh… It’s OK everybody! 😉 Just being annoyed. 😆 Have a great Christmas (whether you celebrate it or not)! Peace to all. 🙂
Not sure which was the worst thing about your Uncle Chris, Bryan — the smoking, the drinking, or the accordian playing. Oh well, at least it wasn’t bagpipes :lol:.
The bacon grease was used for flavoring and salt in things like biscuits. Salt pork especially hog jowls and other such “everything but the grunt” fare was regularly added to vegetable dishes in order to add taste. None of this was light or “healthy” fare. My grandmother’s biscuits were *stout*. Not quite dwarvish battle bread, but definitely nothing light or fluffy about them, one of those biscuits with some gravy over it was pretty much a meal :). But oh-so-good… and didn’t seem to do my grandmother or great-grandmother any harm, just as the whole milk or real butter or real cheese didn’t, they both died of cancer at an advanced age, not of anything to do with their diet.
Kryten, I’ve had to change jobs twice and move once because of stress-related illnesses taking their toll on my health. Thus why I am in a rather sedate backwater of the computer business today, though somehow I’ve ended up back doing something peripherally related to security (next time you transit through DFW wave to me , or at least to the cameras attached to one of my camera farm clusters 🙂 ). I think people underestimate just how much harm stress does to your health, my blood pressure goes through wild fluctuations when I’m stressed out (either my ears are pounding or I’m passing out), there’s that cough, there’s the wild weight fluctuations… not surprising that, as Bryan points out, average life expectancy is going down in the U.S. today. Especially given the collapsing state of the U.S. health care system, which hasn’t been #1 in the world for over 20 years, indeed, on most measures of quality ranks somewhere around the typical Eastern Europe nation…
I don’t think I want to know how you managed to snap titanium frames, as it was probably embarrassing, but this time of year was always a heavy workload for emergency services as people get stressed out and snap, so titanium is probably catching some of that. The week between Christmas and New Year is always a bad news time of year as people who have been holding together for the holiday just lose it.
It’s always safer to go with what you know if you are swallowing it.
I hope things start to come together for you, Kryten. They usually do, and there is a lot of promising work taking place on type-2 diabetes, especially in the Commonwealth.
Oh, yeah, Badtux, a biscuit and gravy breakfast will easily hold you until lunch. Sounds like those biscuits will stick to your ribs, if they don’t break them. 😉
Ah, Badtux, based on the doctors in the local hospital emergency room, the for-profit hospital corporations have imported their staff from third world countries. I’m guessing that more than a few of them would be happy to accept chickens in payment, a goat would get you super-service.
Ehhhh… Amazing what one can do when sufficiently annoyed (or motivated). I was cleaning my glasses when my housemate announced that her daughter and son-in-law (the one who assaulted her and has caused he so much pain) have decided to grace us with their presence for Dinner Christmas Day. I’d been thinking that it will be nice to have a nice quiet day for a change, and I guess my hand just involuntarily convulsed, and I snapped the arm off the glasses. *shrug* I’m still pretty strong, though not as fit as I was in the 80’s. 😉 It’s why I don’t allow myself to get angry or loose it (and also why I understand completely about the necessity for anger management). People underestimate me, always have, even when I *did* look dangerous! 😆 😉 The lack of self-preservation in stupid people always amazes me. *shrug*Anyway… so much for my Christmas day. Thankfully, they can’t stay long apparently. So I’ll just busy myself elswhere for awhile. I’m sure he’d say or do something stupid, and since I have zero respect and he holds zero value as a human for me… *shrug*
The Doc showed me this new insulin system. Only needs 2 injections a day now. The unit comes in a box with 7 packs of 2 (a weeks supply) and are fully self contained and disposable. The needle is tiny and I would hardly feel it (which isn’t a problem anyway.) 🙂
I’ve always believed that stress is the biggest killer. I try not to get stressed as much as possible. Which curiously, tends to get other people annoyed because they think I don’t care or don’t take them seriously (which, I do have to admit happens occasionally when people stress over something really trivial) if I just stay calm etc when they tell me something they consider tragic etc. Hey, I survived a year in Cambodia, and other deadly places. Almost everything else *IS* trivial to me. 😉 *shrug* I’m not gonna get an ulcer because someone else needs to get stressed over something! Life is too short as it is. 😉
That would explain it, Kryten.
We could never go to city bars with the country guys on our shift when I was in law enforcement – they had absolutely no sense of who was a threat, and assumed that everyone walked away, if a little battered, from a bar fight. Many of the “quiet” bars that those of us who lived in the city liked, were constantly removing chalk outlines from the floor when stupid people would annoy some of the regulars. No one wanted trouble, but they definitely had no intention of backing down. Threat assessment was a totally alien concept to them.
If you want trivial, teach at college-level. Students freak out at just about everything except what is really important for their future. The brain is definitely not fully formed until after the college years. If you’ve covered oxygen, water, food, and shelter, everything else is just annoying, not life threatening.