Advertising my post “Exorcising the Devil in the Milk,” I received a challenge and a question on Twitter from @kitchenslut.

The Challenge:

Look. I don't disagree but find there is a trend that among academically minded professionals economists are more likely to be converted to diet evangelism.

My view here is that it is a bad idea to trust any single academic discipline with any important scientific question. Every important scientific question should have at least two different academic disciplines thinking about it. For issues of diet and health, I hope that economics can be an additional discipline providing a cross-check on the science of diet and health. The training of economists makes them able to understand and think through the evidence in this area. Carola Binder discusses the role of economists in this area in her guest post “The Obesity Code and Economists as General Practitioners.”

My Rejoinder:

The orthodoxy is based on relatively slim evidence, and other hypotheses are worth testing. Diet evangelism doesn't have to be any more than "THIS IS A HYPOTHESIS WORTH TESTING!!!" And I'm going to live that way in the meantime.

The Question:

How would you rate the importance of the A1 milk protein on a relative scale of public health issues?

My Answer (with correction of a typo and some clarifications added in brackets):

• Huge. Look at the cross-country graph of heart disease vs. A1 milk consumption [in “Exorcising the Devil in the Milk.”] Other issues are huge, too. But this one is easy to solve. At modest cost, all dairy herds could be converted to safe A2 cows in about ten years. The attempt at coverup is worth righteous indignation. [Read the book to see otherwise ordinary people participating in a routine coverup.]

• To be clear, the big effects are on people who have leaky guts. So not everyone will have a big bad effect. But a lot of people have leaky guts.

• And many people have leaky guts before they realize they have leaky guts. Plus infants are likely to have leaky guts.

• Note that judgment of size is different from judgment of the amount of evidence for causality. The high correlations and large magnitudes across countries says there is a parameter that we really, really need to know the value of.

• Although there is reason to think the mean is positive, the large variance of the parameter [due to our ignorance and possible large size], combined with the low cost (relatively to the income of most of us highly educated folks) of drinking A2 milk instead of A1 milk, makes precautionary individual action an easy choice.

• Interestingly, this particular public health issue has very little to do with the rise in obesity. It is a separate issue.

Don’t miss my other posts on diet and health:

I. The Basics

• Stop Counting Calories; It's the Clock that Counts

• 4 Propositions on Weight Loss

• Forget Calorie Counting; It's the Insulin Index, Stupid

• Obesity Is Always and Everywhere an Insulin Phenomenon

• Why a Low-Insulin-Index Diet Isn't Exactly a 'Lowcarb' Diet

• What Steven Gundry's Book 'The Plant Paradox' Adds to the Principles of a Low-Insulin-Index Diet

• The Problem with Processed Food

II. Sugar as a Slow Poison

• Yes, Sugar is Really Bad for You

• Best Health Guide: 10 Surprising Changes When You Quit Sugar

• Letting Go of Sugar

• Heidi Turner, Michael Schwartz and Kristen Domonell on How Bad Sugar Is

• Which Is Worse for You: Sugar or Fat?

• Does Sugar Make Dietary Fat Less OK?

• Sugar as a Slow Poison

• How Sugar Makes People Hangry

• Michael Lowe and Heidi Mitchell: Is Getting ‘Hangry’ Actually a Thing?

• Katherine Ellen Foley—Candy Bar Lows: Scientists Just Found Another Worrying Link Between Sugar and Depression

• Ken Rogoff Against Sugar and Processed Food

III. Anti-Cancer Eating

• How Fasting Can Starve Cancer Cells, While Leaving Normal Cells Unharmed

• Why You Should Worry about Cancer Promotion by Diet as Much as You Worry about Cancer Initiation by Carcinogens

• Good News! Cancer Cells are Metabolically Handicapped

• How Sugar, Too Much Protein, Inflammation and Injury Could Drive Epigenetic Cellular Evolution Toward Cancer

• Meat Is Amazingly Nutritious—But Is It Amazingly Nutritious for Cancer Cells, Too?

• My Annual Anti-Cancer Fast

IV. Eating Tips

• Our Delusions about 'Healthy' Snacks—Nuts to That!

• My Giant Salad

• Using the Glycemic Index as a Supplement to the Insulin Index

• The Keto Food Pyramid

• Hints for Healthy Eating from the Nurse's Health Study

• Carola Binder—Why You Should Get More Vitamin D: The Recommended Daily Allowance for Vitamin D Was Underestimated Due to Statistical Illiteracy

• Eating on the Road

• Intense Dark Chocolate: A Review

• In Praise of Avocados

• Putting the Perspective from Jason Fung's "The Obesity Code" into Practice

• Which Nonsugar Sweeteners are OK? An Insulin-Index Perspective

V. Calories In/Calories Out

• Nina Teicholz on the Bankruptcy of Counting Calories

• Mass In/Mass Out: A Satire of Calories In/Calories Out

• How the Calories In/Calories Out Theory Obscures the Endogeneity of Calories In and Out to Subjective Hunger and Energy

• The Trouble with Most Psychological Approaches to Weight Loss: They Assume the Biology is Obvious, When It Isn't

VI. Wonkish

• Anthony Komaroff: The Microbiome and Risk for Obesity and Diabetes

• Prevention is Much Easier Than Cure of Obesity

• A Conversation with David Brazel on Obesity Research

• Magic Bullets vs. Multifaceted Interventions for Economic Stimulus, Economic Development and Weight Loss

• Carola Binder: The Obesity Code and Economists as General Practitioners

• The Heavy Non-Health Consequences of Heaviness

• Analogies Between Economic Models and the Biology of Obesity

VIII. Debates about Particular Foods and about Exercise

• Exorcising the Devil in the Milk

• Is Milk OK?

• Whole Milk Is Healthy; Skim Milk Less So

• Jason Fung: Dietary Fat is Innocent of the Charges Leveled Against It

• Faye Flam: The Taboo on Dietary Fat is Grounded More in Puritanism than Science

• Salt Is Not the Nutritional Evil It Is Made Out to Be

• Confirmation Bias in the Interpretation of New Evidence on Salt

• Julia Belluz and Javier Zarracina: Why You'll Be Disappointed If You Are Exercising to Lose Weight, Explained with 60+ Studies (my retitling of the article this links to)

IX. Gary Taubes

• Vindicating Gary Taubes: A Smackdown of Seth Yoder

• The Case Against Sugar: Stephan Guyenet vs. Gary Taubes

• The Case Against the Case Against Sugar: Seth Yoder vs. Gary Taubes

• Diseases of Civilization

• Gary Taubes Makes His Case to Nick Gillespie: How Big Sugar and a Misguided Government Wrecked the American Diet

• Against Sugar: The Messenger and the Message

• Kearns, Schmidt and Glantz—Sugar Industry and Coronary Heart Disease Research: A Historical Analysis of Internal Industry Documents

X. Twitter Discussions

• Putting the Perspective from Jason Fung's "The Obesity Code" into Practice

• 'Forget Calorie Counting. It's the Insulin Index, Stupid' in a Few Tweets

• On Fighting Obesity

• Debating 'Forget Calorie Counting; It's the Insulin Index, Stupid'

• Analogies Between Economic Models and the Biology of Obesity

• How the Calories In/Calories Out Theory Obscures the Endogeneity of Calories In and Out to Subjective Hunger and Energy

XI. On My Interest in Diet and Health

See the last section of "Five Books That Have Changed My Life" and the podcast "Miles Kimball Explains to Tracy Alloway and Joe Weisenthal Why Losing Weight Is Like Defeating Inflation." If you want to know how I got interested in diet and health and fighting obesity and a little more about my own experience with weight gain and weight loss, see “Diana Kimball: Listening Creates Possibilities” and my post "A Barycentric Autobiography.