Milk: Does It Really Do a Body Good?

The claim that drinking three glasses of milk per day confers cardiovascular benefits has been withdrawn from a year-old press release issued by a Dutch research institute.

Written byBob Grant

| 2 min read

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In 2010, a press release from Wageningen University and Research Centre (WUR) in The Netherlands trumpeted a claim by one of its faculty members that people who drank 3 glasses of milk per day reduced their risk of cardiovascular disease by 18 percent. The trouble was, the study that the press release was announcing didn't exactly find that to be true. And now one of the US scientists who coauthored the study, a Dutch Dairy Association-funded meta-analysis of 17 previously-published papers, has called the release misleading and distorted, prompting WUR to withdraw the claim and issue a clarification.

The meta-analysis was published in the January 2011 issue of The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition and makes much more tempered statements about the relationship between milk ...

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Meet the Author

Bob Grant
From 2017 to 2022, Bob Grant was Editor in Chief of The Scientist, where he started in 2007 as a Staff Writer. Before joining the team, he worked as a reporter at Audubon and earned a master’s degree in science journalism from New York University. In his previous life, he pursued a career in science, getting a bachelor’s degree in wildlife biology from Montana State University and a master’s degree in marine biology from the College of Charleston in South Carolina. Bob edited Reading Frames and other sections of the magazine.
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