Dairy and cardiovascular health: Friend or foe?

Abstract

Cardiovascular disease (CVD) prevalence at a global level is predicted to increase substantially over the next decade due to the increasing ageing population and incidence of obesity. Hence, there is an urgent requirement to focus on modifiable contributors to CVD risk, including a high dietary intake of saturated fatty acids (SFA). As an important source of SFA in the UK diet, milk and dairy products are often targeted for SFA reduction. The current paper acknowledges that milk is a complex food and that simply focusing on the link between SFA and CVD risk overlooks the other beneficial nutrients of dairy foods. The body of existing prospective evidence exploring the impact of milk and dairy consumption on risk factors for CVD is reviewed. The current paper highlights that high milk consumption may be beneficial to cardiovascular health, while illustrating that the evidence is less clear for cheese and butter intake. The option of manipulating the fatty acid profile of ruminant milk is discussed as a potential dietary strategy for lowering SFA intake at a population level. The review highlights that there is a necessity to perform more well-controlled human intervention-based research that provides a more holistic evaluation of fat-reduced and fat-modified dairy consumption on CVD risk factors including vascular function, arterial stiffness, postprandial lipaemia and markers of inflammation. Additionally, further research is required to investigate the impact of different dairy products and the effect of the specific food matrix on CVD development.

Can milk proteins be a useful tool in the management of cardiometabolic health? An updated review of human intervention trials

“…Moreover, the inclusion of animal-derived products adds diversity to plant-based diets, providing an important source of many essential nutrients, the dietary requirements of which would be more difficult to meet by plant-based diets. However, the potential health impacts of animal-derived foods, and more specifically Proceedings of the Nutrition Society milk and dairy consumption, have been questioned owing to their high saturated fat content (for review, see (3) ). However, emerging epidemiological evidence supports the beneficial effects of milk and dairy consumption on health, particularly cardiometabolic health (4)(5)(6) .…”

Dairy food products: good or bad for cardiometabolic disease?

“…A new RCT (RESET; ClinicalTrials. gov NCT02089035) (88) is investigating this in depth and preliminary results from a recent meta-analysis of three prospective studies indicated that whilst dairy fat was not significantly associated with CVD, models which estimated the effect of replacing 5 % of energy from dairy fat with vegetable fat predicted a 10 % reduction in CVD risk (89) . The dairy foods that supplied the fat were not specified and data on this are needed to more fully understand this outcome.…”

Milk Consumption and Chronic Disease Risk – The Strategy or Challenge to Avoid and Eliminate “Unwanted” Compounds and Contaminants

“…For some of them, such as saturated lipids, lactose and some casein forms, the mechanisms of atherogenic effect were documented (Laugesen et al, 2003;Segall, 1994Segall, , 2002Warensjo et al, 2010;Markey et al, 2014). Other ingredients or products, like some enzymes, low-weight partially digested peptides and non-protein nitrogen compounds, are still in the serious observations, as it was published by Awasthi et al (2012), and .…”

“…That is why the dairy industry has in recent years worked intensively on manufacturing the low-fat, fat-modified or fat-free milk, what involved filtering out the fat from the milk or supplementation of polyunsaturated fatty acids (Markey et al, 2014;Ferreiro et al, 2015). Above mentioned articles may suggest that low-SFA or fat-modified milk should be preferred, regarding cardio-metabolic benefit, when compared to commercially available whole milk dairy products.…”