A bunch of people have already asked me about this study I have Some Thoughts Many of them are that this is totally ridiculous, drink whatever milk you want ughpic.twitter.com/YuCR9s5NlV
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The study used telomere shortening as a proxy for biological age Basically, shorter telomeres means 'older', because shorter telomeres are associated with aging
(Telomeres are part of our DNA that stop it from breaking when it replicates. You have less of them as you grow older, which some people think is part of the reason that we get less healthy as we age)pic.twitter.com/6iLjGFhzIh
FIRST PROBLEM: telomeres are NOT age. They are ASSOCIATED with age In other words, you can't predict much from shorter telomeres. It might just be that they get shorter as we age naturally, rather than causing our aging processes per sepic.twitter.com/9gn5y4Zy1e
So making any claims about adding years to your life from this research is baldly wrong. The study made some weird extrapolations from shortened telomeres to 4.5 years of aging, but that's not very realistic
SECOND PROBLEM: The analysis was cross-sectional Basically, the researcher (yes just one) took a sample of people at one point in time and looked at whether full-fat milk was associated with telomere issues
This is a problem, because we haven't measured people over time All we can say is that, in the NHANES sample from 1999-2002, people with shorter telomeres drank more full fat milkpic.twitter.com/p5ZowpcOoI
Which brings us to the THIRD PROBLEM: this study was observational in nature All the analysis did was look at the association between full/low fat milks and telomere length
The study didn't even control for many covariates. It's not hard to see how your telomere length (a complex measure of DNA) could be influenced by things that this study failed to control for
For example, it might be that people with sick parents are more likely to drink full fat milk. Having sick parents is associated with telomere issues, so instead of the milk it's the sick parents' fault
Also, the main analysis treated fat % in milk as a linear variable? That's just total nonsense, you can't buy milk (in most places) that has 2.35% fat
For this study to be correct, people would have to be homogenizing their own milk which is...unlikely
Anyway, there are more problems but I think that's enough for now You can't really take much away from this study except that adults in 2000 who drank full fat milk might've had slightly shorter telomerespic.twitter.com/LSREjADsty
TL:DR - drinking skimmed milk can't "add 4.5 years to your life" - the study had nothing to do with age - probably not causal - DRINK WHATEVER MILK YOU WANT
Oh, forgot to mention that if this regression was accurate you'd expect that people who eat cheese, which has a very high percentage of milk fat, would have basically no telomereshttps://twitter.com/GidMK/status/1217927165884321792?s=20 …
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