Does Drinking Milk Affect Aging?

1 min

A professor at Brigham Young University looked into the effects of milk consumption on the aging of 5,834 U.S. adults. Exercise science professor Larry Tucker, Ph.D., reported differences in telomere length among adults who drink different types of milk. Telomeres are structures at the ends of chromosomes that shorten every time a cell replicates, so the older we get the shorter our telomeres become. The new study showed that the more high-fat milk people drink, the shorter their telomeres became. All told, this amounted to more than four years in biological aging for every 1% difference in milkfat e.g. drinking two percent vs. one percent milk. Nearly half of the study participants drank milk daily and another quarter consumed milk at least weekly. Just under a third of the adults reported drinking full-fat (whole) milk, another 30 percent reported drinking two percent milk, while 10 percent drank one percent milk and another 17 percent drank nonfat milk. And 13 percent of the participants reported they didn’t consume any cow’s milk, and Dr. Tucker reported that these individuals had shorter telomeres than those who drank low fat or non-fat milk.

Source:
Larry A. Tucker. “Milk Fat Intake and Telomere Length in U.S. Women and Men: The Role of the Milk Fat Fraction.” Oxidative Medicine and Cellular Longevity, October 28, 2019, DOI: 10.1155/2019/1574021

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