Get Thin with Milk!
And it isn't just another fad

By LISA DAVIS

You may have heard of the cabbage-soup regimen. Fads like that weren't mere diets; they were magic. They offered negative calories: The more you eat, the more you lose. They don't, of course, work as hyped. Cabbage doesn't really burn up stored calories. But milk will.

This isn't a new food fad; this is science. Just ask Michael Zemel, chairman of the nutrition department at the University of Tennessee, USA. He's found that milk turns down the tendency of your fat cells to store the day's calories, and increases the amount frittered away as heat. A hard cheese like cheddar will do the same thing, as will yogurt, even the full-fat variety. Contrary to dieter's dogma, dairy products can supercharge almost any diet.

You scoff? If the milk diet isn't a food fad, you may be thinking, then surely it's something those who market dairy products dreamed up. In fact Zemel has spent more than a decade rigorously investigating the possibility that dairy products might tune up the metabolism, and he's published his results in august and arcane scientific journals. His studies have prompted other researchers to go back to their data. Had their subjects lost weight without the docs even nothing? Time and again, the answer was yes.

Zemel first began to wonder about a connection between dairy foods and weight loss in 1988 when, pursuing the possibility that a calcium-enriched diet might bring down blood pressure, he added two cups of curd to the daily menu for obese men with hypertension. After a year, the men's blood-pressure readings were down. So was their body fat, Zemel noticed, by five kilos, on average.

Another early clue came from Purdue University, USA, in the mid-1990s, where for two years, Connie Weaver and Dorothy Teegarden tracked women between the ages of 18 and 31. That study had been designed to look at the effect of exercise on bone health, but another connection also became evident: Women who ate a diet rich in milk, cheese or yogurt lost weight or stayed stable while others shunning dairy products put on kilos.

"We had a hard time believing it," Weaver says, "so we kept scrutinizing the relationship statistically. And it wouldn't go away. Then we thought, okay, we're going to present it at a conference, but nobody's going to believe it. Well, at the same symposium, Mike Zemel was presenting his first work on the relationship. It was a great comfort to both our groups that we weren't out there all by ourselves."

Furter reassurance soon came from other studies. Robert P. Heaney, a renowned osteoporosis researcher, heard Zemel talk at a scientific meeting and, he says, "I had a light bulb go on over my head." Heaney had been keeping a record of women's calcium intake for years in bone studies, and he weighed his volunteers at each visit. "I realized all the information was in the chart; I just never looked at the relationship." When he did, Heaney found that a higher calcium intake went along with a lower weight, on average, whether a woman was fresh out of her teens, in the midst of menopause, or elderly.

Then the connection showed up in young kids. Dietitians at the University of Tennessee followed a group of children from infancy for years, collecting information on diet, weight and body fat, among other things. They found that the more calcium rich foods the children ate, the less body fat they were carrying around by the time they reached school age.

Finally, Zemel noted signs that dairy products were universal pudge-fighters. Every few years, US government scientists query a representative sample of people on a wide range of health topics. Zemel analyzed the ;most recent data and found that participants with a diet high in dairy products were only one-sixth as likely to be obese as those whose diet provided little.

The circumstantial evidence was piling up. Still, none of these studies proved that dairy products or calcium were responsible for svelter profiles. People who eat a lot of calcium-rich foods tend to have a healthy diet in general; calcium's absence often signals a poor, high-calorie diet likely to boost weight. That's why Zemel's new study is so important.

For the first time in clinical research, Zemel arranged for some volunteers to get plenty of dairy foods and others to avoid the stuff for the sole purpose of monitoring their weight loss. He put 32 people, each with lots of weight to lose, on a diet. Nutritionists helped them cut about 500 calories from their daily meals. Some were also asked to eat three to four servings of dairy foods daily.

Dieters who got dairy products lost 70% more weight than those who avoided it

After six months, all the dieters had lost weight. But those who added dairy foods lost more weight than the others - 70 percent more. They shed an average of 8.6 kilos, compared with 5 kilos in the control group. What's more, the high-dairy group lost 64 percent more body fat than the ;other group did, trading flab for lean body mass. And the fat they shed came primarily from around their middle, the kind that's most dangerous to the heart.

"It's wonderful," Zemel says. "I can't say I was surprised. We had done the theoretical work, we had done the cell work and the mouse work, and we thought we knew what was going on. But I was delighted - absolutely delighted."

How could a few servings of milk or cheese be such a weighty matter? Calcium likely plays a key role. Look at what the mineral does in the body - not just in the bones, but in ;blood vessels, where it guides constriction and dilation, and in nerves, where it helps regulate the flow of messages. Calcium is a critical signaling agent, Zemel says, helping all sorts of cells figure out what they need to do.

Apparently, one type of cell that listens when calcium talks is the fat cell. In studies done in lab dishes, Zemel found that when there's plenty of calcium in the blood, fat cells get the message to quit storing fat and start burning it. When calcium levels are low, the cells hoard fat. "Bottom line, it causes more fat to be made," Zemel says. "You get a bigger, fatter fat cell. And lots of bigger, fatter fat cells makes for bigger, fatter people."

Unfortunately for the well-fed, our diet sends the wrong message to our cells. The average 50-year-old woman gets much less than the recommended amount of calcium daily. Men get more, but still nowhere near what experts would call enough.Calcium pills can help make up the shortfall, but when it comes to weight, Zemel's research suggests tat pills aren't a perfect substitute for the complex package of nutrients found in milk. In the recent study, he had a group of dieters take calcium supplements, along with participants who added dairy products and those who only cut calories. At study's end, the pill-poppers lost more than did those who relied on diet along-but a good deal less than the dairy group. "We have to think of dairy products as more than just a calcium-delivery vehicles," says Zemel.

It takes a fair amount of dairy foods to do the job. In Zemel's studies, the waistline-whittling effect seems to top out with four servings a day of milk, yoghurt or cheese. For people who think of themselves as lactose-intolerant (lactose is a sugar found in milk), the notion of downing so m;ch may be enough to make them feel bloated and gassy.

It's true that some adults produce relatively little lacase, the enzyme needed to breakdown lactose. But before you go on a high dairy diet, one more caveat is in order. Milk isn't magic, any more than buckets and buckets of cabbage soup were.

"let's be real," Zemel says. "This doesn't mean that people can eat all they want and exercise as little as they want and think nothing will happen because they're having a couple of glasses of milk. But if people are cutting calories and they're not including dairy products in their diet, I think they're making a mistake".