High fat anything really. Fat has a very high satiety/calorie ratio vs sugars, and metabolizes more slowly, keeping you full longer. This is just shaking off the last vestiges of the 80s anti dietary-fat craze.

It's not that simple. Yes, dairy fats lend themselves to satiety but that doesn't mean all fats do. There's lots of unhealthy fats and even some healthy ones that don't lend themselves to higher satiety: take a look at the Holtz Satiety studies: http://www.mendosa.com/satiety.htm

They clearly show Croissants, cakes, Doughnuts and even Peanuts have very low satiety. Sure, eggs, cheese and beef do okay, but they're still beaten by apples, oranges, oatmeal and potatoes.

And, let's not loose sight of the fact that health is important too, and there's lots of fats out there that don't do your health good.

I mean high fat vs. the reduced fat foods craze that swept the developed world starting a few decades ago. Really, just a return to previous, moderate and balanced healthy fat consumption.

> Croissants, cakes, Doughnuts

Those things are also loaded with sugar.

There are croissant-based-pastries that are high in sugar, but a standard canonical croissant is savory not sweat. It’s basically just butter, flour, water, and yeast.

Aren't fruits/veggies good because of fiber? It's usually pretty hard to find fiber with fats, but those tend to be the best bang/calorie in terms of satiety, at just from reports I've read.

I always buy full fat everything when available (yogurt, milk, cheese, etc), rarely cut out fat from meats, and use plenty of healthy fats in cooking (olive oil, avocado), and bring overweight isn't something I worry about for myself or my kids.

In general though, if you need to choose between more fat it more carbs, you're usually better off with fat, unless those carbs are high in fiber.

One of the lede's that was buried slightly is that "whole milk" is only 3.25% milkfat. So, going from 2% to whole milk is a miniscule increase in the total amount of milkfat consumed.

This surprised many of my relatives when I brought it up with them, who thought it was an increase to over 25% milkfat.

Want to add a few things.

>"whole milk" is only 3.25% milkfat

It is only in Canada and US whole milk is 3.25%. In UK, and I believe EU as well it is 3.5%.

>whole milk is a miniscule increase in the total amount of milkfat consumed.

This causes my brain to explode for a bit. A 2% to 3.25% is 62.5% increase in total amount of milk fat. Which is not really minuscule increase. At the same time I totally understand what you meant.

It’s an increase of 1.25% of milkfat across the entire product. It’s one half a teaspoon more milkfat in an 8 oz glass of milk.

As a point of comparison with another milky product - the flavored latte - flavor shots are 1/2 an oz (2.5 tsp) each, and two are added to an 8oz latte.

Where are they getting 25%+ milk fat? Do people really not understand how milk is produced? Half and half is ~12%, light cream is ~20%, and whipping cream is only ~35% fat, and each of those products has reduced fat milk as a byproduct (they need to get that extra fat from somewhere). The highest fat milk I've had was raw milk, which was between 4-5% milk fat.

My aunt and I had a running joke growing up about this. Basically, she would call my whole milk "meal in a cup", so I would call her skim milk "meal in a gallon". However, the actual calorie difference is fairly modest with whole milk being less than double skim milk in calories (but IMO at least twice as satiating).

I'm really frustrated by how information about fat in general and milk specifically has been presented. I'm tired of explaining how whole milk isn't all that different from lower fat dairy milk, but it tastes way better (personal opinion). Same goes for other dairy products, like cheese and yogurt. It seems people usually overload on carbohydrates, so increasing fat consumption should help to offset that, so I think whole milk products are generally a better choice for most people. I think most people would be better off drinking ~60% less milk and going with whole milk instead of skim milk.

I wish food had some kind of satiety/calorie index or something so people can make better decisions about which products to choose.

Not only that - compare the sugar profiles of whole, 2% and skim - you may be a bit surprised (roughly equal if not the same). Also if your kids are drinking those single serve boxes... I’ve seen the sugar on those as high as 18-20g. Way higher than milk out of the carton... approaching “juice” levels. Which reminds me, those relatives with skim in their fridge? They didn’t also happen to also fall for the “heart healthy” fresh-squeezed OJ? Mine did.

Very helpful—it is bizarre that people have no idea what whole fat milk is, and that it’s less than double 2% milk.

I wonder if the milk industry prefers people to gravitate towards reduced-fat milk because it leads to more milk consumption/revenue. If we all drank full-fat milk, we’d get full faster and therefore buy less.

Well in Japan and Korea, ( Possibly in Taiwan and China as well ) there is a trend to use and consume higher fat content milk as it is marketed as higher quality and more expensive. With Milk from 3.6% going up to 3.9%.

> to gravitate towards reduced-fat milk because it leads to more milk consumption/revenue.

I dont believe that is the case in consumption volume increase, but the Fat they reduced could be used in other products which increase their revenue.

It's good to avoid anything that sells itself as "low-fat" unless it comes that way naturally.

Often you'll find that "low-fat" means high sugar.

This could be due to the vitamin additives required for reduced fat milk but not for whole milk in the US. Particularly Vitamin A palmitate, which is a controversial substance due to some cancer correlations in mice.

I keep trying to get my in-laws to drink whole milk but they've had it beat into their head for decades that dietary fat = bad so they continue to drink gallons of skim milk. May as well drink water!

Water would likely be considerably healthier.

If they drink gallons of whole milk they will gain weight.

What is the issue with skim milk? It tastes like milk but has less calories.

Personal opinion: Skim milk tastes like a distant relative to whole milk. That 3.25% milkfat makes a major change in the taste of the product. It's like adding butter to a recipe - it's the fat that really adds to the taste.

Taste varies from one individual to the next. I try to avoid skim milk because whole milk simply tastes much better.

Skim milk tastes like whole milk that's been watered down. Simply unpleasant.

So should we keep our kids on whole fat milk, or is 2% good enough? That is, what does the correlation/curve look like? Is the takeaway just that we should avoid fat free milk?

You can almost think of fat free milk as juice with protein. both lactose and fructose require the liver to metabolize to glucose. The fat free milk, has some protein to help slow down the absorbtion of the lactose, so it’ll be a slower carb than pure juice. The fat slows down the carb even more since the glycemic index of a food tends to be anti correlated with the proportion of carbs to other things (including non soluble fiber). More fat slower carb. Generally the slower the carb the slower the insulin response as well. And it’s insulin that triggers cells to ingest glucose. Which means the faster the carb the faster the blood glucose rollercoaster. And the more frequent the urge to eat, potentially leading to obesity (and increasing issues with insulin resistance).

Now having said all that I personally suspect whole milk is the way to go, but I don’t know the actual proportion. I’d expect whole milk to be correct for calfs, and if you really wanted to be correct for children, you’d look at the fat content of breast milk.

My kid's pediatrician always recommended whole milk. Personally I liked the whole milk w/o additives but would compromise on Vitamin D.

These headlines need help. A laymen's term for "adiposity" could save me a google and it wouldn't hurt my nerd feelings.

Changing headlines is discouraged in https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html ("Otherwise please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize.")

This is a link to a scientific journal, so the context is experts in the field that are familiar with the jargon. If you look at https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3063466/ it's a fairly technical term that roughly means "obesity".

The title on HN right now is not the title of the article (“ Whole milk compared with reduced-fat milk and childhood overweight: a systematic review and meta-analysis”).

You are completely right, looks like they took the first line of the conclusion instead. Thank you!

Is it really such an uncommon term? I've once seen a comedian get quite a laugh with that word. Although to be fair my parents both work in the health field, so I can't claim to have an unbiased experience in this case.

I would expect that for the Washington Post, but this is the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition; it’s target audience are not laymen.

Agreed. How about this tldr:

low fat milk makes you fat

You can have an updoot for that.

This makes sense to me. My understanding is that consuming sugar has a much higher impact on obesity then consuming fat, and that low-fat milk usually has added sugar to make up for the flavour-loss from removing the fat. I am not exactly well studied in this area though.

Low fat milk definitely does not have added sugar. If you have to consume a fixed number of calories, though, and you consume reduced fat milk to get to that number of calories, your ratio of calories from fat, protein, and carbohydrates will skew more to protein and carbohydrates.

I don't think that's the case in the UK at least.

However the sugar level is higher per fixed volume because the removal of the fat increases the concentration of what remains.

Perhaps that’s what they were saying. My memory of this idea is not great, but it’s the same here in Canada as the UK.