 When industry-funded studies suggest their products have neutral health effects or even beneficial, one question you always have to ask is, compared to what? Is cheese healthy? Compared to what? And if you're sitting down to make a sandwich, cheese is probably healthy compared to bologna, but compared to peanut butter? No way. That's the point. Well, will it made a former chair of nutrition at Harvard To conclude that dairy foods are neutral, it could be misleading as it could be misinterpreted to mean that increasing consumption of dairy foods would have no effects on cardiovascular disease or mortality. Lost is that the health effects of increasing or decreasing consumption of dairy foods would depend, importantly, on the specific foods that are substituted for dairy foods. Like what are you going to put on your salad? Cheese would be healthy compared to bacon, but not compared to nuts. See, consumption of nuts or plant protein has been found to be protectively associated with the risk of coronary heart disease and type 2 diabetes in contrast and take up red meat, for example, has been associated with increased risk. Thus, it's reasonable to assume that the lack of association with dairy foods could put them somewhere in the middle of a spectrum of healthfulness, but certainly not an optimal source of energy or protein. More broadly, the available evidence supports policies that limit dairy production and encourages production of healthier sources of proteins and fats. He wasn't just speculating. This was based on three famous Harvard studies involving hundreds of thousands of men and women exceeding 5 million person years of follow-up. This was really the first large-scale prospective study to examine dairy fat intake compared to other types of fat in relation to heart attack and stroke risk. So replacing like 100 calories of fat worth of cheese with 100 calories of fat worth of peanut butter on a daily basis might reduce risk up to 24%, whereas substitution with other animal fats might make things worse. Here's how it breaks down for heart disease. Swapping dairy fat for like vegetable oil would be associated with a decrease in disease risk, where swapping dairy for meat increases risk. Dairy fat calories may be as bad or worse as straight sugar. The lowest risk would entail swapping to a whole plant food like whole grains. Yeah, dairy products are a major contributor to the saturated fat in the diet and have thus been targeted as one of the main dietary causes of, you know, the number one killer of men and women. But the dairy industry likes to argue there are other things in dairy products like fermentation byproducts and cheese that could counteract these saturated fat effects. All part of an explicit campaign by the dairy industry to neutralize the negative image of milk fat among regulators and health professionals. If global dairy platform looks familiar, they were one of the funders of the milk and dairy's neutral study, trotting out their dairy fat is counteracted notion, to which the American Heart Association responds that no information from controlled studies supports the assertion that fermentation has beneficial nutrients to cheese that somehow counteract the harmful effects of the saturated fat. We need to cut down on dairy, meat, coconut oil, no matter what their respective industries say. In fact, that's the reason the American Heart Association felt they needed to release this special presidential advisory in 2017. They wanted to set the record straight on why well-conducted scientific research overwhelmingly supports limiting saturated fat in the diet.