Let's Talk: Low-Fat Milk
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In the comments to the chocolate pudding post, Heather brought up a very interesting question about low-fat milk. (If you want to see the original comment, check it out at the end of the post here.) It was so well put (and so well timed) that I thought perhaps it deserved its own discussion.
To start us off, let me make this confession: I am no fat phobe.
As you may know from reading REAL FOOD HAS CURVES, the research is pretty solid: food has got to taste like something for it to register any satiety cues in the brain. You'll never see anyone canola-oiling their bread. Butter is just too darn tasty!
Furthermore, fats are necessary for life: for building neural structures, for aiding in proper digestion. You also can't absorb a host of vitamins (A and D, for example) without fat because the molecules themselves are fat soluble.
That all said, there's no doubt that we eat too many tasteless fats in the modern world. This is our story: something we need is then processed into copious supply, processed into oblivion, and then we eat more and more and more.
So our research-based equation--that fat = satiety--doesn't necessarily mean we should be downing a vat of walnut oil or duck fat. (Although. . . .) It means we shouldn't be afraid of tasty fats; they should form the basis of our food.
Still, Bruce and I have put low-fat milk solidly in the "real food" category in our book. Yes, some processing has been done to it. But hasn't it been done to almost all milk? I mean, of course, the pasteurizing that keeps us safe.
I'd love your take on it all. Is low-fat milk "real food"? If drunk on its own--or, say, poured on Bruce's granola which you can find here--whole milk is pretty darn fine. But if it's put in another dish--like that chocolate pudding--that already has lots of tasty fat (the cocoa butter in the chocolate, the four egg yolks), is not low-fat milk an acceptable way to find a balance between taste and calorie intake? Or should we go whole hog for the real thing, for whole milk at every turn?
