We Don’t Need The Latest Dairy Study to Bash Dairy

A research article entitled “Lactose Intolerance and Risk of Lung, Breast and Ovarian Cancers: Etiolgical Clues from a Population-based study in Sweden” was published in the British Journal of Cancer in October, 2014.

The study showed a decreased prevalence of lung, ovarian and breast cancers in lactose intolerant people as compared to siblings who were not lactose intolerant. The authors believe that the results suggest that the protective effects against the listed cancers may be related to a low dairy dietary pattern.

My Thoughts:

I understand why this study was conducted, but we must always remember the limitations of such reductionist studies.  They looked at an association between one condition (lactose intolerance) and three conditions (cancers) and assumed that people with lactose intolerance consume fewer dairy products.   That is a reasonable assumption, but certainly not demonstrable – even if surveys were used to assess dairy intake.

The pro dairy folks will rightly say that correlations-based studies do not prove direct causation.  No one disputes this.  However, I believe the reductionist question the study asks is more limiting than the study’s correlation-based design.

Reductionist nutrition studies, whether experimental or correlations-based, only become relevant if looked at in the proper context.  The results of such studies should inspire researchers to seek a wider context in an attempt to define consistent nutritional principles within this wider context.  Nutritional principles can only arise from a variety of studies involving multiple nutrients, multiple mechanisms, and multiple outcomes.   Studies like the China Project and many others have already established these principles. Therefore, I find this recent study not very helpful, even though its results put dairy in a poor light.  We don’t need studies like this to bash dairy.  There are already plenty of reasons to bash dairy!

If someone wanted to conduct a study comparing the prevalence of lung cancer between regular smokers and non-smokers, the study would probably not get funded. However, if it did get funded and the results showed a clear association between cigarette smoking and lung cancer risk, the study would probably not receive much media attention. The association between tobacco and various cancers has been clearly established.  This would be old news for most Americans.

The result of this recent dairy study is old news to anyone who has followed a WFPB diet for any significant amount of time. Many of us already know about the strong associations between dairy products and chronic diseases.

Unfortunately, this study surprises most Americans – even many dietitians who are under the misapprehension that dairy is healthy for human beings. This is a sad state of affairs.

Nutrition research provides more useful information when different dietary patterns and their associations with various diseases are compared.

Such research has provided large amounts of evidence that point to Whole Food Plant Based diets (WFPB) as likely to be the healthiest for human beings.  It would be great to see comparisons between a wide variety of WFPB diets.

Maybe the DASH diet could be compared to a traditional Chinese diet. Or maybe the Cretan Mediterranean Diet could go up against the Papua Highlanders Diet.  We are a long way from that!

Therefore, I now tell people to shrug off any nutrition research they hear in the mainstream media.  If they want to learn about nutrition, ask me.  If they think I’m too cocky, I refer them to the Resources page of this web site.

Prior to learning about the evidence supporting WFPB diets and to shedding my reductionist view of nutrition, I never really considered myself a nutrition expert.  I do now