“Dietary guidelines around the world recommend the consumption of low-fat and fat-free dairy foods to obtain overall healthy dietary patterns that help meet nutrient recommendations while keeping within recommended calorie and saturated fat limitations” (Torres-Gonzalez 2023). This concern about saturated fat in the diet originated in the 1950s and by now is pretty much dogma. Is this still good advice?
Kernel of truth
Diets high in saturated fats, such as the “Western Diet,” have been linked to cardiovascular disease, diabetes, inflammatory bowel diseases, and possibly even mood disorders. There are so many papers published supporting this that I couldn’t pick one to cite.
Distortion beyond the evidence
One problem in reviewing the literature regarding fats in dairy is that until recently, most studies assumed that low fat was better, and there was no comparison between full and low fat dairy foods (Sochul 2019).
Another problem involves generalizing from studies showing that high saturated fat diets are associated with disease burden to diets with any (low or medium) amounts of saturated fat. Basically, the results were interpreted as “saturated fat = bad.” But we now know, as discussed earlier, that fats are not the same, as there are several different kinds of saturated fats and they do different things in the body.
So, in the last few years researchers have looked carefully at the effects of full fat vs. reduced fat dairy and their possible effects on incidence or courses of diseases such as cardiometabolic disease and colorectal cancer. Meta-analyses, which pool and analyze findings from many studies, now show that dairy fats have either neutral or beneficial effects on cardiovascular risks, insulin resistance, and colorectal cancer risk (Barrubes 2020, Torres-Gonzalez 2023). So the assumption that low or no fat dairy is better is not backed by science.
The evidence was never that strong to begin with. There was an over-reliance on animal models which need to be validated very carefully, and many of these kinds of studies have problems with “ecological relevance”—meaning the studies don’t really model what happens in the real world. For instance, studies that feed animals pure saturated fats don’t illuminate much about how specific fats interact with other components of a whole food such as cheese, milk, or yogurt (the “food matrix”) (Weaver 2021). More recent research has considered the different kinds of fats examined more carefully and what differences there may be (Karura 2023). The findings have shown, as discussed above, that the source of saturated fat (e.g., plant vs. animal; dairy vs. meat) makes a difference in what it does in the body.
So, if you like your full fat dairy, there is no reason to avoid it (La Marche 2025).