Dairy and Diabetes: Junk Science

Filed in archive Research on June 30, 2006

Once something is virtually established as 'fact,' you can count on something else coming along to challenge it. It keeps life exciting.

Some people (and I'm inclined to agree) claim that the recent flurries of studies establishing a link between dairy consumption and lowered diabetes risk are nothing but "junk science."

No matter which side you're on,
this article is a good read, and reminds us to always question both sides of the issue, and never accept anything as fact--not even from our own doctors--without investigating it first.

Leave it to the dairy industry to come up with a whopper like this. They'd like you to believe milk will do anything -- it will increase your bone mass, make you lose weight and now it will prevent diabetes. But what's wrong with this study? It fails to mention that the results are simply based on replacing another, more harmful beverage with milk. Drinking milk is a replacement for drinking carbonated soft drinks -- those high-sugar beverages that cause diabetes. It's no surprise that people who stop drinking soda and start drinking milk are going to demonstrate a lower level of diabetes. You could get the same
reduced diabetes risk by replacing soft drinks with water. You could then say water prevents diabetes in the same way this study says milk prevents diabetes. In fact, any beverage that doesn't cause diabetes can be made to look like it "prevents" diabetes by comparing it to soft drinks.

I hate to be the one to have to point this out, but what happened to critical thinking skills in our society? Aren't scientists supposed to be scientific? Aren't journalists supposed to ask the basic fundamental questions about these stories before they report them as fact?

This just goes to demonstrate that scientific and medical reports that fill our mediascape are not based on scientific thought. People spin the studies and distort the models to help sell products. That is what passes as scientific thinking and medical science today.

(Picture Source: Wikipedia)