Am J Clin Nutr: Eating skimmed milk does not reduce the risk of childhood obesity more than full-fat milk.

In North America, most children drink milk every day.
recommends that children over 2 years of age consume fat-reducing (0.1-2%) cow's milk to reduce the risk of obesity.
study was designed to assess the relationship between cow's milk fat intake and fat rates in children aged 1-18.
researchers retrieved articles from the Excerpta Medica Database, CINAHL (Cumulative Index to Nursing and Allied Health Literature), MEDLINE, Scopus, and Cochrane Library databases by August 2019.
included observational and interventional studies of healthy children aged 1-18 who described the relationship between cow's milk fat consumption and fat rates.
the two reviewers and used the Newcastle-Ottawa scale to assess the risk of bias.
use random effects for meta-analysis to assess the relationship between cow's milk fat and the risk of overweight or obesity.
use BMI z-score (zBMI) to assess obesity.
results, 28 of the 5,862 reports identified in the search met the inclusion criteria.
20 are cross-sectional studies and 8 are prospective cohort studies.
no clinical trials.
18 studies, higher cow's milk fat consumption was associated with lower child fat levels, and 10 studies found no correlation.
meta-analysis included 14 out of 28 studies (n s 20,897) that measured the proportion of children who consumed whole milk and skimmed milk and directly measured overweight or obesity.
children who consumed whole fat (3.25% fat) and skimmed (0.1-2%) milk had an OR value of 0.61 (95% CI: 0.52, 0.72; P.0001), but the heterogeneity between studies was high (I2 s 73.8%).
, the observational study showed that higher cow's milk fat intake was associated with lower child fat content.
guidelines recommending that children drink skimmed milk may not reduce the risk of childhood obesity.
randomised trials are needed to determine which cow's milk fat minimizes the risk of obesity.
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