The Fat Diaries: Drawing the Line at 1% Milk

Summer is almost over and the weather has gone from molten to within mortal endurance. I’ve been going outside a little more, and began to examine my diet again to make sure I was on the right track. Sadly, my rock-hard zero tolerance for goodies has softened a little. I wondered if I could make up for it by cutting something else out, so I considered switching from 2% milk to 1% milk.

Having read countless articles about the recommended FDA diets, one detail stuck out: the new charts all included 1% milk. It seems that 2% milk is no longer the standard for health. Lord knows I was also guilted enough into switching milks by articles like this, declaring that if I had children over the age of 2 that were still drinking 2%, I was doing them a disservice.

I’ve been fighting the change since the concept of 1% was introduced. Most people my age remember when milk came in three varieties: whole, 2%, and skim. Whole milk was for cooking, or for your baby brother; 2% was for “normal people”; and skim milk was for Jane Fonda-exercising, sweatband-wearing, eye-of-the-tiger-ing fitness weirdos. It had been tried a few times in my household when Mom wanted to shake things up health-wise. It was unequivocally rejected by us kids. For one thing it was a pale translucent blue — like someone had poured water into a glass of “normal” milk. It certainly tasted like someone had poured water over our cheerios. Afterwards, one was left with a gross lactose-y aftertaste. “None of the flavor with all of the phlegm!” So naturally, I was skeptical of something that was only 1% away from being skim milk.

I’d talked to a few friends who had made the switch and they all assured me that there was no big difference between the two. None of them were avid milk drinkers like me, nor did they have kids, but they all agreed that one kind of milk pretty much tasted like another.

“And what’s better is that soon you’ll think 2% is really creamy and use it in your coffee!” said one friend.

I severely doubted that with my acid reflux I could drink coffee without half and half, but I was willing to give 1% a try, so I made the switch two weeks ago. After  my kids and my husband pointed out to me that I had gotten “the wrong kind of milk,” I patiently explained that we were trying something new. It went downhill from there. As the weeks went by, even I found myself less interested in drinking milk. My cereal wasn’t tasting as good, and neither were the cold glasses of straight milk that I drank with the kids at dinner. My kids started to request smaller glasses of milk and this week was the first that they asked for “just water please” in lieu of it. Breakfast was becoming lactose intolerant as the kids asked for less cereal and more bagels and oatmeal.

I grimly faced facts: the transition wasn’t working. I wasn’t making my family healthier by switching to milk with lower fat content. I was making them hate milk. And in the process, I was beginning to hate milk too. To me -- and my kids -- there was a marked difference in taste between the two varieties. By sacrificing calories, I was doing a bigger “disservice” to my kids by making their much-needed calcium unpalatable.

If we had kept this up we might adapt (eventually), but then I never adapted to skim either and it’s very possible that my kids would forgo milk altogether. Next shopping trip, we’re switching back to 2%.