Australians are getting behind their farmers in buying branded milk over supermarket brands to help Australian dairy farmers keep from going out of business. The milk rush comes after The Project‘s co-host Waleed Aly this week begged Australians to eat more cheese and support local dairy farmers.
Pretty much all brands of milk will support farmers, as even if the company is foreign (Anchor and Mainland are NZ-owned, Great Ocean Road is Canadian and Pauls is Italian) as the milk is still being supplied by Aussie farmers. Scroll to the end of this post for a list of milk brands you can buy to help our farmers.
And there is good reason to drink more milk (full-fat preferably) if you aren't lactose intolerant. A new study finds the dairy fats found in milk, yogurt and cheese may help protect against Type 2 diabetes, reported NPR.
"People who had the most dairy fat in their diet had about a 50 percent lower risk of diabetes" compared with people who consumed the least dairy fat, says Dariush Mozaffarian, dean of the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy at Tufts University, who is also an author of the study.
The research, published in the journal Circulation, included 3,333 adults. Beginning in the late 1980s, researchers took blood samples from the participants and measured circulating levels of biomarkers of dairy fat in their blood for over the next two decades.
For a long time we've had this notion that saturated fat [the kind found in dairy products] is always bad for you," says Mark DeBoer, a pediatrician at the University of Virginia. But this assumption is being questioned.
DeBoer has studied the connection between dairy fat and children's body weight and found that children who have a higher intake of whole milk or 2 percent milk gain less weight over time, compared with kids who consume skim or nonfat dairy products.
And there's some evidence that dairy fat may help adults manage weight as well. Researchers in Sweden found that middle-aged men who consumed high-fat milk, butter and cream were significantly less likely to become obese over a period of 12 years compared with men who never or rarely ate high-fat dairy.It's possible that "the fat in dairy makes you less hungry to eat some other foods," says DeBoer.
And there's evidence that "when people consume more low-fat dairy, they eat more carbohydrates" as a way of compensating, says Mozaffarian. Many high-carb foods such as cereals, breads and snacks that contain highly refined grains are less satiating and can prompt people to eat more calories. Check out a previous blog post which supports this idea.
