This item by Nicholas Bakalar in the New York Times suggests that yet another truth published in the sacred “literature” and publicized by the medical establishment is not true after all:

Low-fat milk may not be the best option for kids, though many experts recommend it to fight obesity for children over two.

Canadian researchers collected height and weight data on 2,745 healthy children ages 1 to 6 years. They took blood samples, and their parents reported how much skim, 1 percent, 2 percent and whole milk the children drank.

After controlling for age, sex, outdoor play and other factors that affect both vitamin D levels and weight, they found that children who drank one cup of whole milk per day had a vitamin D level comparable to that of children who drank 2.9 cups of 1 percent milk, but their body mass index was lower by 0.79 points. The higher the fat content of the milk they drank, the lower the children’s B.M.I. and the higher their vitamin D levels. The study is in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition.

Why this happens is unknown, but the senior author, Dr. Jonathon L. Maguire, an associate professor of pediatrics at the University of Toronto, suggested that vitamin D is better absorbed with fat, and drinking low-fat milk may leave a child hungrier for more calorie-dense food.

Vitamin D, like the cannabinoids, is lipophilic —it wants to bond with a little glob of fat, not water. I once heard skepticism expressed at a conference about a Dutch survey showing that the delivery method favored by a small percentage of cannabis users  —7% I think— was boiling leaves and flowers  in water to make a tea. The skeptics were reminded that people put milk in their tea.

In a related vein, the Times Sunday Book Review ran the following by Gareth Cook:

RETHINK
The Surprising History of New Ideas
By Steven Poole
342 pp. Scribner. $26.

Around 1900, a century before Tesla’s Model S, there were more than 30,000 electric cars registered in the United States. In London, passengers were being ferried around by a small fleet of electric taxis, nicknamed Hummingbirds for the distinctive whir of their engines. So begins “Rethink: The Surprising History of New Ideas,” the British journalist Steven Poole’s attack on what he calls a “Silicon Valley ideology”: the notion that every great innovation of today is a “flash of inspiration,” an invention of “something from nothing.” In an anecdote-rich tour through the centuries, Poole traces “new” ideas in mental health back to the Stoics; dates the invention of the e-cigarette to 1965; and tells us that the leech is now an F.D.A.-approved “medical device,” used for, among other things, preventing blood from pooling after reconstructive plastic surgery. We live in “an age of rediscovery,” Poole writes. “Old is the new new.”

Or, as Tod Mikuriya used to say with regard to Cannabis, “Back to the future!”