Dairy Products and Zemel's Research=Controversy

Milk Controversy Grows
Is research being used, simply, to sell more of the product? We need to know the bias of the researchers and analyze the data for what it really presents in the way of useful information that is credible. People are consuming far less milk than they used to. Soft drinks are in vending machines in most schools, work places and every theater, and nutrition experts continually criticize the saturated fat in cheese.
Michael Zemel of the University of Tennessee, a nutrition researcher, presented a few small studies on people and that information is being used to sell dairy foods. Even he admits that this sounds, "pretty outrageous." Eating three servings of milk, cheese, or yogurt every day can help a dieter lose weight, according to this study.
The studies are small and no independent researcher has corroborated their findings. Producers have tons of milk and cheese to move and so the industry has launched a "full court press" of marketing activities to capitalize on the weight-loss claim before the authorities can scrutinize the results. They have hired the world’s largest promotions agency, and paid celebrities like Dr. Phil McGraw to say, in milk mustache ads, that "drinking milk can help you lose weight." They even gave away 24 convertibles in 24 days to convince you that 24 ounces (3 cups) of milk will melt away fat.
Only three small published studies have found greater weight loss in people who were told to cut calories and eat dairy foods, and all were done by one researcher with a patent on the claim. The government’s expert nutrition advisory panel has called the evidence on dairy weight loss "inconclusive." Two new studies have found that dairy foods don’t help people lose weight.
After two years and millions of dollars worth of advertising and giveaways, nearly half of American women say that they have heard that dairy foods help people lose weight. If only there were sufficient evidence to back up the claim.
All of this is based on the early 1990's study by Michael Zemel, a young nutritional scientist at Wayne State University School of Medicine in Detroit. He was testing what happens when men with high blood pressure increase the amount of calcium they get by eating more dairy foods. After eating two cups of yogurt a day (no mention of the ingredients) for a year, their blood pressures fell.
"But there was a result we didn’t expect," Zemel recalls. The men lost an average 11 pounds of body fat. "It made no sense to me whatsoever," he said. "They didn’t eat fewer calories and they didn’t exercise more." But Zemel had no control group — men who ate no yogurt or a yogurt-like food without calcium—so he couldn’t tell what was causing the weight loss.
Other researchers seemed to suggest that there was something to the calcium-fat link. Among participants in the third survey of Americans, for example, fatter people consumed less calcium than thinner people. Of course, it’s hard to know whether something else about people who consume less calcium (maybe they drink more soda pop) influenced their weight.
Jane Bowen and her colleagues at the University of Adelaide in Australia had put 50 overweight, middle-aged men and women on weight-loss diets. Half consumed three dairy foods a day and half got the same amount of protein from foods with little or no calcium. After 12 weeks, both groups lost the same amount of weight and fat. "An increased in dairy foods does not affect weight loss, " concludes Bowen.
Zemel explains that his studies were based on correcting sub-optimal intakes of calcium. Furthermore, says Zemel, calcium and dairy may have no impact on Bowen’s dieters because both the high-dairy and the control groups were eating a high-protein diet. Protein comprised roughly 30 percent of their calories.
The bottom line: the dairy industry’s multi-million-dollar ad campaign rests largely on how 46 people reacted to eating more dairy foods in three small studies by one researcher with ties to the dairy industry.
Only if you’re overweight, if you’ve been eating too little calcium, and if your weight-loss diet isn’t too high in protein or too low in calories, can you lose weight with dairy, says Michael Zemel, the author of the dairy-burns-fat studies. In 2002, the U.S. Patent Office issued Patent #6,384,087 to Michael Zemel, his wife, and another resercher, giving them excluive rights to the claim that calcium or dairy products can prevent or treat obesity. (The University of Tennessee owns the patent, but the dairy industry owns the exclusive rights to license the claim.) Two other studies found no impact with dairy on weight.

In 2004, Zemel published his book "The Calcium Key" ("the revolutionary diet discovery that will help you lose weight faster"). That's a lot of mileage to get out of a something that can be best described as preliminary research.
Corroboration of research, by independent studies, is the key to real and credible facts. I still maintain that a nutrition-based-regimen of healthy eating is the best route to a healthy weight. No single subsance can make claim to such a tremendous feat as causing "Healthy Weight Loss."