The Non-Fat Obsession (edited with more information!)

People, seriously... What is up with the obsession for fat free products?  I honestly don't get it.


My take on food is that you should eat whole foods.  That means: take some whole foods, the way they are produced in nature, put them in your kitchen, and cook/prepare them.  Keep out the middle, scary, processing man as much as possible because he's only going to hurt you.


This morning, I made some coffee, and then realized I didn't have any cream.  I went to the fridge, and saw that my roommate had some half and half, which I proceeded to use a bit of (sorry, Lay).  I poured some in my coffee, put the container back in the fridge, and then did a double take.  Here's what I saw:

Excuse me?!  This is half and half.  ...Half cream, half milk.  CREAM IS FAT.  I would curse on this blog, but I'm not going to go there.

But fret not, there's more.

Let's take a minute to gawk at those ingredients...


That's actually disgusting.  The people who make this stuff realize that a non-fat version of half and half would be disgusting.  So, what do they do?  They add loads of other crap to make it taste like real half and half.  And then, somehow people think that this is healthier than just drinking what nature intended.  What is the point?  Drink real cream!  This stuff CANNOT be healthier for you!


Tuscan Dairy Farms, I am ashamed of you.  Duping innocent shoppers into thinking this is better for them...  Shame, shame.


Here's the thing with dairy and fat and all that goodness (and remember this is just my opinion, but hey, I do study nutrition after all).  My take on it is that you should just drink it the way it comes from nature.  Yes, that means no fat free, low fat anything.  Whole milk, cream, all that deliciousness.  Eat it.  Yeah, I'm aware that skim milk is supposed to be great for you and keep you from dying of heart disease.  But do you realize what they put in skim milk to give it a creamier texture?  Powdered milk, which has oxidized cholesterol in it (read Sally Fallon's book: Nourishing Traditions for more information--I'll probably write more about this later, as well).  Oxidized cholesterol (or oxysterols) are free radicals and have been known to cause atherosclerotic plaques (yeah, those plaque things in your arteries that cause cardiovascular disease.  ...wait! I thought skim milk was supposed to be super healthy for me!)  Fresh whole milk contains trace amount of oxysterols (oh, and powdered eggs? Those contain even more oxysterols).  


The other thing about skim milk is that obviously there is no fat (well, there is a little, but not a lot).  Now, let's think about what vitamins are in milk: there are some water-soluble vitamins and fat-soluble vitamins.  All those B vitamins in milk are water-soluble, so no problem there.  But the fat-soluble vitamins--A, D, E, and K (E and K are found in much smaller amounts and vitamin A is added to reduced fat milks to be made equivalent to whole milk)--how do we absorb these important vitamins if there is no fat?  Obviously, we need fat to absorb these vitamins.  


So now we know to stick to whole milk.  When possible, get it from grassfed cows.  Nowadays, cows are fed corn, and, if you remember from elementary school...COWS EAT GRASS.  They are not built to digest corn, and it just makes them fat (which is why farmers feed them corn now... everyone likes a fatty, marbled steak these days. That and it's 100x cheaper, which I'm sure is the main reason they do it).  Ever wonder why Americans are getting so fat?  I'm sure it has nothing to do with the exponential increase in the consumption of corn syrup...


When a cow eats grass, it is healthy.  When a cow eats corn, it is sick.  That's why farmers have to pump their cows full of antibiotics.  Let's think about how human breast milk works--the nutrients a mother eats are passed through her milk to the baby.  Hmmm...  Would you pump yourself full of antibiotics constantly while breastfeeding your child?  I don't think so.


Grassfed cow meat and milk is much higher in omega-3 fatty acids, something we could definitely use more of as a nation.  I will go more in depth on these fatty acids in another post, but the main point is that they are very important, nutritionally speaking.  They have been shown to lower triglyceride levels, blood pressure, aid in a better cholesterol profile, lead to better brain health, and have fantastic anti-inflammatory properties.  These cows are generally just much healthier, and eating healthy meat and milk can never be a bad thing.


Here's another thing to notice on the front of that carton:  Ultra-Pasteurized.  Let's think about that.  Now, Pasteur had a point.  Yes, heating milk kills bad bacteria, and it saved a lot of lives when that was a problem.  But, it also kills the good bacteria.  I haven't made up my mind yet on raw milk because I definitely would not drink raw milk from a cow in a feedlot a million miles away.  I would literally have to go see how the cow is treated, see it being milked, etc before I would drink it raw.  But I have no problem with people drinking raw milk as long as they know the farmer practices safe farming and milking.  Raw milk is a whole other topic for me to talk about, so I'll save it for another post.


But, my point about ultra-pasteurization and pasteurization in general is that it kills just about everything--the good and the bad.  Living in NYC, I don't have many farms around to visit, so I choose to buy my milk from the farmer's market from a farm that uses low-temperature pasteurization.  I really don't know if this actually makes a difference (when compared to regular pasteurization), but the milk is grassfed and it definitely has a different quality than pasteurized milk from the grocery store.  When this milk goes bad, it doesn't smell putrid--it smells like yogurt.  Now, I haven't tried eating it yet because that's a little scary for me, but if offered the choice to eat curdled regular milk and this milk, I would choose my milk one hundred times over.


So, next time you're at the grocery store, think about this.  Don't go for the fat free products, and if you can, get to a farm or a farmer's market for your meat, cheese, and milk and make sure the cows are grassfed.  It's all over the news that saturated fat (the kind found in meat, cheese, and milk) causes heart disease among other problems.  I simply just don't believe this.  I believe that the saturated fats found in industrially produced meat, cheese, and milk may cause this, but I honestly don't think that grassfed products have this same effect because communities have lived off these foods for centuries in good health.  Whenever you can, go for whole foods, not some "healthy", processed food.  My general rule is that if they advertise how "healthy" it is on the package, it's probably not healthy.  Read labels.  Check ingredients.  If you can't pronounce half the words, don't buy it!


I must buy some cream today....


Happy Eating,


KS