Skip to main page content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Dot gov

The .gov means it’s official.
Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

Https

The site is secure.
The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

Access keys NCBI Homepage MyNCBI Homepage Main Content Main Navigation
Review
. 2010 Oct;45(10):925-39.
doi: 10.1007/s11745-010-3412-5. Epub 2010 Apr 16.

The consumption of milk and dairy foods and the incidence of vascular disease and diabetes: an overview of the evidence

Peter C Elwood  1 , Janet E Pickering, D Ian Givens, John E Gallacher
Affiliations
Review

The consumption of milk and dairy foods and the incidence of vascular disease and diabetes: an overview of the evidence

Peter C Elwood et al. Lipids. 2010 Oct.

Abstract

The health effects of milk and dairy food consumption would best be determined in randomised controlled trials. No adequately powered trial has been reported and none is likely because of the numbers required. The best evidence comes, therefore, from prospective cohort studies with disease events and death as outcomes. Medline was searched for prospective studies of dairy food consumption and incident vascular disease and Type 2 diabetes, based on representative population samples. Reports in which evaluation was in incident disease or death were selected. Meta-analyses of the adjusted estimates of relative risk for disease outcomes in these reports were conducted. Relevant case-control retrospective studies were also identified and the results are summarised in this article. Meta-analyses suggest a reduction in risk in the subjects with the highest dairy consumption relative to those with the lowest intake: 0.87 (0.77, 0.98) for all-cause deaths, 0.92 (0.80, 0.99) for ischaemic heart disease, 0.79 (0.68, 0.91) for stroke and 0.85 (0.75, 0.96) for incident diabetes. The number of cohort studies which give evidence on individual dairy food items is very small, but, again, there is no convincing evidence of harm from consumption of the separate food items. In conclusion, there appears to be an enormous mis-match between the evidence from long-term prospective studies and perceptions of harm from the consumption of dairy food items.

PubMed Disclaimer

Figures

Fig. 1
Fig. 1
The numbers of deaths in England and Wales in 2008 from various causes, and the risks for these causes in the subjects with the highest milk/dairy consumption, relative to the risk in the subjects with the lowest milk/dairy consumption
See this image and copyright information in PMC

Similar articles

See all similar articles

Cited by

See all "Cited by" articles

References

    1. Elwood PC. Milk, coronary disease and mortality. J Epidemiol Community Health. 2001;55:375. doi: 10.1136/jech.55.6.375. - DOI - PMC - PubMed
    1. Cochrane AL. Effectiveness and efficiency. Random reflections on health services. London: Nuffield Provincial Hospitals Trust; 1972. - PubMed
    1. Alvarez-León E-E, Román-Viñas B, Serra-Majem LS. Dairy products and health: a review of the epidemiological evidence. Br J Nutr. 2006;96:S94–S99. - PubMed
    1. Egger M, Davey Smith G, Altman DG. Systematic reviews in health care: meta-analysis in context. London: BMJ Books; 2001. - PMC - PubMed
    1. Moher D, Liberati A, Tetzlaff J, Altman DG, PRISMA Group Preferred reporting items for systematic reviews and meta-analyses: the PRISMA statement. BMJ. 2009;339:b2535. doi: 10.1136/bmj.b2535. - DOI - PMC - PubMed
  NODES
Association 2
COMMUNITY 3
twitter 2