Jonathan Steedman (00:01.752)

Hey food groupies, welcome back to the Bite Me Nutrition podcast. We're gonna be talking about low fat versus full fat dairy today, because I get a ton of questions about this topic. And unfortunately, if you've listened to me ramble ever before, you'll probably be aware that I'm not gonna be able to give you a straightforward black and white answer, because that's not really how most of nutrition works. And unfortunately, it's exactly the same when it comes to this question. There's some important things for us to consider. There's some individual variants, all of that kind of stuff, but.

As always, the goal will be by the end of this episode, you know what is relevant to you. You can focus on what you need to focus on and make the decisions that work best for you. Cool. So there's kind of a few different things that we need to unpack. The first thing and the most important thing, and this is kind of anytime we talk about dairy and health, is that dairy is a big food group, right? There's lots of different types of dairy foods. So we can't really just put it all into one box and say dairy good, dairy bad, or...

always low fat dairy, always full fat dairy, right? Because you're comparing, you know, like Greek yogurt, which we know is linked with lots of positive health outcomes with like ice cream. Those are both technically dairy and hopefully you can appreciate quite different impacts on health, right? So we can kind of split dairy up into two camps. We can look at churned versus unchurned as a bit of a simple classification. Now, essentially that is just

talking about how it's made. And basically churned dairy is your butter, cream, ice cream, buttermilk and products that are built on cream, butter and ice cream. know, even you know, Chris and a croissant isn't dairy, but it's built on churned dairy. So you could kind of, I guess, extrapolate the health outcomes out from there. And then we have our unchurned dairy, which is basically milk, yogurt,

hard cheese, those sorts of things, right? Things that have not gone through that churning process. Now, the reason I'm using the word churn a lot, so often that it's now starting to sound wrong to me, so sorry if it's sounding wrong to you as well. That process has a pretty significant impact on dairy's or a big part of dairy's impact on your health, right? The reason being, it greatly impacts our, the way that we absorb and metabolize the saturated fat content in dairy. So if...

Jonathan Steedman (02:26.368)

Again, if you've listened to me for a little while, or hopefully you're listening to the right people on the internet, diets high in saturated fat are not a good idea, right? It's not saying you need to avoid saturated fat and get it to zero or anything like that. But as a rough guide, most people are going to benefit from keeping saturated fat underneath around 20 grams per day. Now it's a little bit murky when we come to dairy because churned dairy versus unchurned dairy, the saturated fat...

works a little bit differently. And that's due to something called the milk, milk fat globule membrane. Now, in dairy, unchurned dairy, saturated fat is encased in this membrane. So all of the saturated fat is inside this kind of bubble. And if that dairy hasn't been churned as part of the processing, that saturated fat pretty much remains in that bubble. We don't really absorb much of it, goes all the way through us. And so therefore, just because it's high in saturated fat doesn't mean we are getting much of that saturated fat.

And so that's a big reason why we need to distinguish between churned and unchurned because even though they might have on paper the same amount of saturated fat on the labels, the saturated fat in unchurned dairy appears to be far less impactful on negatively impacting our health than in churned dairy, say butter, cream, ice cream, those sorts of things, right? Because the churning process breaks apart that membrane and kind of allows the saturated fat droplets to be more accessible to us. And so when we digest and absorb that food,

we get more saturated fat out of it and we can see that down the line that can increase our risk of cardiovascular disease and things. Again, not to say ice cream is going to kill you, just to say overall saturated fat intake, we wanna keep that reasonably low. Cool, so that's the first thing when we're talking about low fat versus full fat dairy. You might have an argument for going for lower fat dairy in the churned varieties, lower fat cream, lower fat.

ice cream, low fat, I don't know if you can get low fat butter, but you in those options, you might say, particularly if you currently have heart disease or maybe a high risk category of heart disease, then low fat churned dairy options might be the better choice for you, right? There's also with the saturated fat, there's a conversation to be had around calcium, the higher calcium dairy appears to impact our ability to absorb the saturated fat as well in that it reduces it.

Jonathan Steedman (04:48.086)

So that's again why things like milk and yogurt, whilst still containing reasonable amounts of saturated fat, one, they haven't been churned, so they've still got that membrane. So the saturated fat is kind hard for us to get to. And two, they're higher calcium. That seems to lower our absorption of the saturated fat again. So all good things. And so that's why you may opt to go for full fat milk or full fat yogurt, for example, because we're pretty confident that the saturated fat in those foods is less

concerning less of a risk increasing thing. Risk increasing thing. I'm using all the big science words today, but hopefully that made sense. Unchurned full fat dairy is unlikely to increase your risk of heart disease. Full fat churned dairy can increase your saturated fat intake, which if that causes your whole diet to become high in saturated fat, then that is.

probably going to be increasing your risk of cardiovascular disease down the line. Now that's more of a health conversation. The next conversation is more around weight loss, fat loss. And that's, I feel like this is probably the main reason I get asked this question because you look and you see most low fat dairy options are lower in calories than their full fat counterparts, right? And so on the surface that

generally means that low fat dairy is a better option for fat loss, right? Because kind of most of the time with fat loss, not all the time, but most of the time, you know, if you can get a lower calorie version of the same thing, maybe that takes up the same amount of room on your plate is still not, you know, it's not completely sad when it comes to taste, still tastes good. Then the lower fat option is going to make sticking to a lower calorie intake a little bit easier.

So in the context of fat loss, you might be opting a little bit more for those low fat dairy options, even with your unchurned butter, know, unchurned unchurned dairy. might be looking for lower fat milk. You might be looking for lower fat yogurt, because even though the saturated fat content isn't a concern, that lower fat option is lower in calories as well. And so that might be a helpful choice for you. Now on the flip side, this is where we need to go into some personal experience and what you have.

Jonathan Steedman (07:09.688)

found works better for you. Some people find that the full fat dairy actually fills them up and makes them feel satisfied for longer. And so even though that full fat yogurt might be higher in fat and higher in calories in that moment, let's say that you have it for breakfast. And then because you've had full fat yogurt, hopefully with some, you know, other things, fruits and stuff to complete and balance that meal out. But you might find that if you have that full fat yogurt variety for breakfast,

you don't feel like a snack mid-morning. It keeps you full and satisfied through to lunch. Whereas if you have a low fat yogurt option, start getting snacky kind of mid-morning and end up snacking. And so what might happen is, an extra a hundred calories just for argument's sake spent on full fat yogurt might actually stop you from snacking on two, 300 calories mid-morning, which you can see is still a net benefit, right? We're still winning from the full fat yogurt. Now, again, that's very individual and you'll probably even find dairy to dairy.

bit different. So personally myself, I don't find full fat yogurt any more filling than low fat yogurt. So if I'm trying to lose some body fat, I'm going to go for the low fat yogurt. Just makes sense to me. But please, you'll know you better than I do. Of course. And play around with it and find which one is more satisfying and filling for you. Okay, that's so that's the nuanced, unfortunately, part of the fat loss discussion. It's not black and white depends on what is more satisfying and filling for you.

last thing, I keep seeing this. I don't know if the words rhetoric or narrative or, misinformation around, low fat dairy being full of chemicals, right? it's almost never no, no low fat products that I've seen on the market, in Australia, at least are higher in chemicals than their regular counterparts, right?

really most of the time low fat dairy has had the fat skimmed off. It's a mechanical process. They just take the fat off the top. And that is how it is lower fat, not because they add some kind of chemicals to it. Now, side note, hopefully anyone, if you're listening to someone who's talking about chemicals, that should be a huge red flag. They clearly don't know much about science just because the food has some chemicals in it. Reminder that actually everything is a chemical, but even if some food has an ingredient in it that looks scary in that you can't pronounce it.

Jonathan Steedman (09:34.476)

that might just be more of a reflection of your understanding of food science and less of a reflection on the health of that ingredient. But anyhow, yeah, most of the time low fat dairy is just lower in fat because it's been skimmed off, not because they've added a bunch of chemicals to it. And so per 100 grams, that product is gonna end up with more sugar in it. Not because they've added sugar, but because if you have hundred mils of milk and then you take 10 grams of fat out,

something has to fill that volume. So they get more protein, more sugar and more water that is left over to fill back up to 100 mils. So it's just more of a, I've never found a good way to explain this with words, I need to draw it. But essentially, low fat options are often slightly higher in sugar, but that is just a natural part of the process. It is not sugar that has been added. And outside of some very unique scenarios, we don't need to really stress too much about

sugar intake, particularly in that context, right? Sugar intake is part of natural dairy sugars, amongst lots of other things, is not something that I would be micromanaging or worrying about. So again, coming back to the fat loss discussion, if your goal is fat loss and you find that the lower fat dairy option is just as satisfying as the other, yes, it's slightly higher in sugar, but it's probably still lower in overall calories, which is still going to make it a better option for fat loss. Cool.

I did that with no notes. I'm sorry, I was probably a little bit rambly, but hopefully you've gotten the information you need to make your decision, right? And like I said at the top, it's not going to be a decision that you make of like, I only eat full fat dairy or I only eat low fat dairy. You might find that you have to make individual decisions about each thing. I.e. you might say, like I said before, I don't find low fat yogurt less filling than full fat yogurt. So I'm often opting for low fat yogurt.

There's an amazing low fat milk here by Mulaney Dairies. Again, I don't notice the taste difference, so I'd go for that. I'm not really gonna have light cheese though, because I just don't want to, because I don't like the taste. So I will make the trade off there. And light cream, for example.