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The Japanese consume lots of milk, too. School lunches here come with a 200ml bottle of 3.5% fat milk. I survey the kids' breakfast habits, too* and usually about 1/4 of any class has milk with breakfast, too.

It's part of a whole program of getting more protein to the kids, AFAIK. The lunches are balanced that way....2-4 different things on your lunch tray, each one is a mix of protein, carbs (usually from rice and vegetables), and healthy fats. Almost no sugars, except in the milk or the very occasional traditional holiday snack (a couple times a year, and a very small portion). So even if you skip out on the soup or on the meat dish, you still got P/F/C in a good mix. But the basis of it is lots of milk, and they get a whole "drink milk and be tall" speech on a regular basis in Elementary School.

They don't eat as much cheese as Americans, though, that's for sure.

Peter

* "I have ____ for breakfast" is a good way to teach that "have" and "eat" are interchangeable in English.

When I was in the Netherlands, I noticed that they drink a lot of milk. It was also common in Estonia, although not as much.

According to this site (http://www.foodsci.uoguelph.ca/dairyedu/intro.html) there are several European countries consuming much more milk than the US.

/Sifaan

Very interesting read here (long article) on the benefits of saturated fats/cholesterol, and the dangers of trans-fats and polyunsaturated fats:
http://www.aspartame.ca/page_oho1.htm

Bring on the animal fat :D

/Sifaan

Umm, that article is garbage in my opinion. It is shown to be very healthy to have polyunsaturated fats or people (including me and everyone on this website) would not recommend fish oil to be a part of the diet. Trans fat thats obvious, after this pandemic of the fat 'killing people' everybody knows its unhealthy. I'm not gonna start chugging down saturated fat. Only one good kind of cholesterol High Density Liipoproteins (HDL). Saturated fats tend to raise low-density lipoproteins.(LDL or 'Bad Cholesterol'). You won't find a doctor/nuitritionist these day ever suggesting that people go on a high saturated fat diet.

That article was written in 2000 and looks very unprofessional and the source questionable in my POV based on the website name. "Aspartame".

I think the polyunsaturated thing is just because of the imbalance between omega 6 and 3. It is proven that fat intake accounts for 10% or less of your cholesterol. Lipids are just one source of cholesterol. People seem to be able to create it own their own. Insulin is the hormone responsible for cholesterol synthesis, so raising or lowering those levels will have a big impact on your cholesterol. Another angle to this is that having a very acidic diet can damage blood vessels and cause cholesterol to build up o them in an attempt to repair them. However I don't know if the acid theory is 100% proven yet.

But still, the article is from a questionable source. However I have seen similar articles from more credible sources that are better written.

This article was written by Sally Fallon. I'm certain that she has nothing to do with the web site that hosted that article. Sally is the president of the Weston A Price foundation, an organization that Dr. Mercola thinks very highly of. When you see something by Sally Fallon you should consider that. Dr. Mercola and Weston Price are controversial but appear to be right more than not but they certainly seem to have political objectives. Whether you buy into their doctrine or not is up to you. The website is anti-aspartame and seems to be focused at generating lawsuits against Monsanto.

Hi!

Sorry for not separating the article from the website that hosts it...

You can find the book on Amazon (and read reviews) here:
http://www.amazon.com/Nourishing-Tradit ... 0967089735

You can also find the article here:
http://www.truthaboutabs.com/truth-abou ... d-fat.html
(dunno how reliable this website is, but it doesn't appear to be as cranky as the previous ones)

No argument about needing the Omega-3 and -6 EFA's, but we only need them in relatively small quantities (i.e. we don't really expect to get much of our calories from those supplements). The focus of the article is about the large scale swing from saturated fats to polyunsaturated ones.

I don't know who is right or wrong in this debate, and possibly the dust will not settle on this for some years yet, but here's an analogy:

The health consequences of adding lead to gasoline were discovered many years before they actually were banned. In the meantime, the industry was suppressing research on health consequences on lead, lead levels in the atmosphere, etc
(My source for this information is "A Brief History of Nearly Everything" by Bill Bryson).

I think the tobacco companies did the same back in the 60's or so, in suppressing information on the consequences of smoking.

Which just goes to show that you can't necessarily count on the industry to act in the best interests of the consumers

/Sifaan

You have a point there. Plus conventional wisdom isn't usually very wise.

It wasn't until relatively recently that it was recognized that all polyunsaturated fats were not the same. An experiment in Greenland where eskimos lived of of seafood almost exclusively had no heart disease. This experiment was only done in 1970. It was several years later when it was recognized that the mechanism was Omega 3. It was already recognized that polyunsaturated fats were nessesary and that they were not produced in the body. It just wasn't recognized that there was a difference between Omega 6 and Omega 3. In fact, since Omega 3 caused things to go rancid and reduced shelf life, it has been selectively eliminated out of most food we eat. Today we get much more Omega 6 than needed and hardly any Omega 3. It's no wonder that Omega 3, and fish oil in particular has rapidly become the most popular supplement.

Changing conventional wisdom is like turning around the Titanic. As technology improves, much of what we take for granted will be proven incorrect or our understanding will be modified to some degree. Not all new information will be correct and some will have to be revised through the peer review process. Conventional wisdom is the mechanism for putting a damper on this new information until the peer review process has run its course. This avoids wild swings and overreactions. Of course as the pace of change increases conventional wisdom will continue to get further out of step with the best information available. That's why discussions like this are so important.

Stu