“Lifestyle choices” typically mean more exercise—along with less processed food and more fruits and vegetables in the diet—but no one in the mainstream is suggesting that the solution is to allow children to eat more natural saturated fat.
Years ago, my co-author and colleague Mary Enig, who held a doctorate in nutritional sciences, had an interesting conversation with an official at the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The agency had researched the best way to fatten pigs—research that was never published. When they fed pigs whole milk or coconut oil, the pigs stayed lean—they found that the best way to fatten pigs was to feed them skim milk.
The department’s dietary guidelines stipulate reduced fat milk for all Americans above the age of 2. Could this policy—initiated in the 1990s—explain the increase in obesity among American children? A couple of studies indicate that this could be the case.
Across all racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic status subgroups, those drinking 1 percent skim milk “had an increased adjusted odds of being overweight ... or obese ... In longitudinal analysis, children drinking 1 percent skim milk at both 2 and 4 years were more likely to become overweight/obese between these time points.” In other words, children on skim milk are more likely to become fat—just like pigs do!
Now let’s look at the kind of milk that children get in public schools. They’re offered 1 percent skim milk or chocolate milk—guess which one they prefer? The chocolate milk is set on their trays, which they can then consume or refuse—guess which behavior is likely to occur? Let’s look at the ingredients in the chocolate milk given to our children in the belief that this will keep them slim:
“Nonfat milk, sugar, contains less than 1 percent of: cocoa (processed with alkali), cornstarch, salt, carrageenan, natural and artificial flavor, vitamin A palmitate, vitamin D3.”
The food industry and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration insist that there is nothing wrong with MSG (monosodium glutamate), however, if you search “MSG-induced obesity” in PubMed, you will come up with almost 100 citations. It’s hard to get research animals to overeat and become obese—in order to study obesity—so scientists feed the rats, mice, and hamsters MSG to make them eat more and put on weight.
Most of the citations are animal studies, not human trials, and the food industry has argued that the amount of MSG given to the animals is way more, as a function of body weight, than humans would ever eat. Or, they say, the association between weight gain and MSG is really an association between weight gain and processed foods, since MSG is in almost all processed foods.
Most of the study subjects prepared their meals at home without commercially processed foods and about 82 percent used MSG. Those participants who used the highest amounts of MSG had nearly three times the incidence of being overweight as those who didn’t use MSG, even when physical activity and caloric intake were accounted for.
So, our school children get low-fat sugar bombs with a pinch of obesity-inducing MSG for lunch day after day. Is it any wonder that obesity is increasing? “Lifestyle” changes such as eating fruits and vegetables or getting more exercise are no match for this stealth health snatcher.