Calcium, Fat, and Weight Loss – Resolving the Confusion
Monday, May 05, 2008
Byron Richards, CCN
A variety of reports in the past decade have indicated that calcium may be a helpful weight loss nutrient. This prompted the dairy industry to widely promote milk as a weight loss food. On May 5, 2008 a press release reports on an article that will soon appear in the Nutritional Reviews journal that states “neither dairy nor calcium intake promotes weight loss.” For consumers this simply becomes another “butter vs. margarine” or “are eggs good or bad” dilemma.
The new study is a review of 49 studies from 1966 to 2007. According to the authors 41 showed no effect, two showed weight gain, one a lower rate of weight gain, and five demonstrated weight loss. Averaging out all this data the authors concluded that “Our findings demonstrate that increasing dairy product intake does not consistently result in weight or fat loss and may actually have the opposite effect.”
This “study” is an effort to get the dairy industry to stop promoting milk for weight loss. Is the report really helpful? Many people are becoming aware of what the scientific community has been doing for decades – massaging data to make it look any way they want. Any skilled statistician can make the same data set have an opposite conclusion (the public has no clue). So who is paying the statistician? On top of that important science can be obscured by poorly controlled studies – giving us faulty conclusions like this one.
Drug companies routinely ghost write their own study results and then plug in data to match (and then deaths follow). Anti-vitamin studies are funded by Big Pharma allies and anti-vitamin Scandinavian governments and then spread as truth through our media. Much of what gets published is politics - not science, and depends on who is paying for it, what their affiliations are, what their agenda is, and their media connections. Such problems do not help consumers sort out their health or how to adjust their diets or vitamins in a useful way.
Milk is not for everyone and I personally don’t think skim milk or any no-fat dairy product is a food worth consuming. Our society is so confused on the subject of fat, let alone calcium, that it is hard to sort out these issues for people.
Dairy Fat and Saturated Fat
First of all, saturated fat, in and of itself, is not dangerous and is needed for your body to work properly. In fact, fat intake actually stimulates fat burning, as well as giving you a more sustained full feeling for a longer period of time (helping you to follow the Leptin Diet). Low fat diets eventually shut down fat metabolism and will either cause you to go into starvation mode (depressing thyroid/sex hormone function) or never be able to access your difficult to lose pounds. The saturated fat paranoia that pervades our culture is not based on a fundamental scientific truth. Diets too low in saturated fat are a common infertility problem in many young and thin women today, who simply do not have a high enough percentage of body fat to get pregnant.
On the other hand, too much fat is too much calories. Fat combined with excessive amounts of dietary refined sugar or carbohydrates causes calories to magically become fat and store as extra fat – a problem that is massively aggravated when you snack on anything between meals or eat after dinner at night. By having more fiber in your diet, fresh fruit, vegetables, and whole grains reduce this problem. The real Mediterranean diet that enables low rates of heart disease is not low in saturated fat – it is high in a wide variety of unprocessed fresh foods. Saturated fat is not the villain. It’s the company saturated fat keeps that is the problem.
In moderation, with other healthy food choices, fat-containing dairy products are excellent nutrition for many people. This is moderated by your genetic heritage and general digestive health. For example, a Scandinavian study showed that the amount of dairy fat in the diet was inversely proportional to the amount of cardiovascular disease and insulin resistance (the exact opposite conclusion the American Heart Association would like you to believe). Possibly this study only applies to Scandinavians and other cultures who have been consuming dairy for a long time. However, if a low saturated fat/low dairy diet were a fundamental scientific truth for heart disease prevention then this study could not possibly have shown this result.
The problem with no-fat dairy products is that the potential dairy allergens are now concentrated. Many individuals can tolerate 2% milk just fine, but react poorly to skim milk. Always buy organic milk, minimize your intake of any non-organic dairy products.
Many cheap cheeses are full of toxic trash, whereas many handcrafted American or European cheeses are very high quality (even though they don’t say organic – many are). Go to your farmer’s markets and talk to the farmers! Avoid all shredded cheese products with antibiotic-like preservatives (which is most of them – including packaged and ordered pizza). Shred your own cheese from something of quality. Make your own food with higher quality ingredients. It’s your health.
Understanding Calcium
There is absolutely no question that calcium can assist metabolize to run more efficiently in some people – not everyone. The key symptoms to understand relate to your appetite and your energy level – and if you have dairy products in your diet are these issues better? Or if you increase calcium dietary supplement intake are these issues better? Yes or no – it is rather clear cut and not hard for any one person to figure out.
If trying to eat more dairy raises your overall calorie intake too high, then it obviously won’t help you to lose weight. If you have a serving of dairy at every meal, along with other good food in an appropriate amount, you may find you have less cravings for food and less hunger between meals. This is a simple test to conduct. Does eating this way help you follow the five rules of the Leptin Diet? It either helps or it doesn’t. If it helps then you will most likely find this helpful to shed a few pounds or to maintain a good weight.
The science on why this works is very clear. You have a number of signals in your brain that make you want to eat food – one of the main ones is called neuropeptide Y (NPY). When you get in a funk with leptin then NPY levels go high, making you feel like you need to eat all the time or else you will have a heavy head or feel grumpy. A powerful gene signal in your brain, called Agouti, keeps NPY elevated and blocks healthy leptin function. This leaves you in a situation of eating more food than you should – often eating things you know you shouldn’t. These are powerful subconscious survival urges that are out of whack. You can tell you have a problem when your willpower is not adequate to stay on a healthy track of weight loss. Once again, you either do or don’t have these craving problems.
Calcium has been found to regulate the Agouti gene. If calcium is too low then the Agouti gene signal is too high, in turn ramping up NPY, and consequent food cravings (and consequent hot flashes in menopausal women). By increasing calcium intake the Agouti signal is turned down, NPY levels are lowered, and cravings go away – and your head wakes up!
Now it is possible for some people that just having a bit more calcium in their diet, as from dairy food, would be adequat to keep their cravings in check and their metabolism running better. That would be a simple solution. However, if people increase dairy calcium but keep snacking between meals or eating after dinner at night then the resulting leptin problems will overwhelm and potential calcium benefit – which is certainly why so many of the calcium studies showed little or no benefit. Calcium won’t force metabolism to work, it will only help if you give your metabolism a chance to work (which means following the Leptin Diet). This is also explained on page 128 of Mastering Leptin.
If you know all this and still can’t keep your cravings under control, you try to stay on the Leptin Diet but you just can’t do it, then maybe you will find that extra dietary supplement calcium can make a very large difference in how you feel. While any type of high quality calcium supplementation may help (ranging as a total intake from 2,000 – 4,000 mg a day), there is no question in my mind that Calcium AEP is the best product I know of that does the job quite well for this specific issue. You may need anywhere from 4 a day to 20 a day (there is 100 mg of calcium in each capsule). When you have enough your cravings go away and your head stays awake between meals. Once you tame your NPY for a few weeks or months and get on a good track, then you may not need as much calcium to maintain your newly discovered improved metabolism – especially as you approach or achieve your goal weight.
The recent discovery that that extra fat in your stomach actually produces NPY was astounding – and it means that your stomach fat directly affects your brain and cravings for food. Do you want your behavior being controlled by your belly?? It also explains why an expanding waistline can really lock you into a rut of perpetually eating too much food even though you know better.
Calcium is one tool that may help you break out of this rut. There are other reasons for food cravings, as I explained in my recent posting on Tips to Reduce Food Cravings. However, this calcium issue is more common than many people think and an article negating the value of calcium as a weight management tool is bad science.
