"skim milk" news and stories

Ever seen so-called "skim-plus," fat-free milk in the grocery aisle and wondered exactly what it was -- and what makes it different from its thinner sibling?

According to a Swedish study that was just published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, it may be better for you to drink whole milk and eat full-fat cheese than to avoid them if you want to avoid excess weight gain. It also found that there was no benefit, in terms of the size of the waistline, to drinking low fat milk instead. This appears to be especially true if you are a woman, because the study looked at the eating habits of over 19,000 middle-aged Swedish women over the course of 9 years.

The problems with the study, although it is certainly encouraging for those who don't like to get their lattes with skim milk, is that it doesn't seem to take everything into account. For example, the women in the study were of average weight (meaning that they were not overweight) when the study began, suggesting that they might already have some healthy-eating strategies in place to compensate for intake of milk.

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Farmers that were about to see their business go under have found a little salvation, thanks to organic milk.

Several farmers, like the ones profiled in this Boston Globe story about Vermont farmers, have switched to organic, and many are able to pay their bills or make a profit for the first time in decades. One man, Peter Decker, actually sold his auto body shop in Florida and, with half a mil, started his own organic dairy farm in Barton, Vermont.

I've never tried organic milk. I don't drink whole milk anymore, and any milk that I have is either 1% or skim. How does it taste?

In neighborhood bodegas throughout New York City, the shelves are stocked with cookies, chips and other snack food items. They carry staples, like bread and milk, but only one in three bodegas carries anything other than whole fat milk and fewer stock good quality fruits and vegetables, if they have any at all. Many of the city's residents - particularly those of lower incomes - do most of their shopping at these neighborhood convenience stores, rather than frequenting larger supermarkets. This means that these shoppers often have limited or less frequent access to healthier foods.

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