No use crying over 2% milk

 

Last week, I had dinner with my friend Cesare, who is a medical researcher. That was the first time I heard of the marketing scam known as "2% milk" or "1% millk" or "'fat free' milk".

 

Sure, I know what 2% milk is. I've drunk some before. But I don't really know what 2% means. You see, I was comparing that to whole milk, thinking it contains like 50 times less fat. And that is wrong.

According to Google/USDA, whole milk has 3.25% fat, and so the 2% or 1% is not as big a difference as you might think.

The good doctor also advises that the 2% or 3.25% does not tell us how much fat we have ingested - it's just a proportion of some amount of milk, which contains other things besides fat. The proper measure is calories. How many calories do we consume when we drink one cup of milk?

According to Google/USDA, a cup of whole milk has 148 calories and a cup of 2%? 124 calories. So, the difference between whole and 2% is 24 calories. In other words, an accurate description of 2% milk is that it has 16% less calories than whole millk. (It doesn't matter that not all of the calories are from fat.)

Since 24 calories is a really small number, don't feel guilty about drinking that whole milk! Especially if, like me, you only use a little milk in your coffee.

(Warning: The FDA probably does not approve of this message.)

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Chapter 2 of Numbersense (link) digs into the "science" behind the obesity crisis. I look into the trendy assertion that obesity treatment is failing because we are not measuring obesity properly.