Got Milk?

BRIAN: Welcome to the show. I’m Brian Balogh and I’m here with Ed Ayers.

ED: Hi, Brian.

BRIAN: And Peter Onuf.

PETER: Hey there, Brian.

BRIAN: And today we’re here to commiserate with all of you, who sometimes yearn for, well, a simpler time.

MALE SPEAKER: It seems to me we have confronted every day with new knowledge that robs us of a lifelong assumption that there are some simple truths that could be taken for granted.

BRIAN: This is BBC commentator Alistair Cooke, filing one of his weekly “Letters From America” in the summer of 1957.

ALISTAIR COOKE: Take milk for example. Until very lately, no nation on earth had drunk so much milk as the Americans had done in the past 44 years.

BRIAN: Alistair Cooke was talking about milk because milk was at yet another turning point. Its first turning point had come, as he said, 44 years earlier. That’s when the federal government embarked on a campaign to rid the nation’s milk of tuberculosis bacteria. By 1920, milk, which had only two decades earlier been notorious for spreading tuberculosis and typhoid, was now being widely referred to as, “nature’s perfect food. ” And now in 1957, all that was being turned on its head.

ALISTAIR COOKE: The milk fad is waning so fast in the United States, that the great dairy states feel as unsympathetic to doctors as the tobacco industry. Some busy body has discovered that what seems to clog the human arteries and cause clots and heart attacks, is it chemical snag known as cholesterol. And milk, is mother’s milk to cholesterol.

BRIAN: Sure enough, per capita milk consumption, which had peaked after World War II, fell steadily in the decades that followed. At last count, it was a little more than half of what it had been in the 1950s.

ALISTAIR COOKE: If the cholesterol crusade catches on, it’s going to be a dim future for Wisconsin and Minnesota and many of the regions of the cow country. And I should guess that by about 1984, Miss America will be a midget walking around on stumps, but of course, she will be sound in heart and limb.

BRIAN: Alastair Cooke may have been wrong about that stumps thing. Miss America 1984 was a very average in height Vanessa Williams. But as for the bigger picture, Cooke was more right than he could have imagined because, once again, we’re being faced with new knowledge that robs us of that which we thought we could take for granted.

I’ll bet you think milk makes you fat. Guess again, friend.

MALE SPEAKER: Two new studies have a counter intuitive finding. People who make a habit of consuming high-fat dairy tend to be leaner. NPR’s, Allison Aubrey reports.

BRIAN: This is NPR’S Morning Edition earlier this year reporting on a Swedish study concluding that yes, consuming dairy fat may make you skinnier. Right around the same time, a different study made headlines for suggesting that there was no evidence connecting saturated fat to an increased risk of heart disease.

MALE SPEAKER: With advice as all over the map as this, it can be tempting to throw up your hands and give up on healthy eating altogether, but today on BackStory, we’re taking a different tack. We’re embracing healthy eating in all of its manifestations through time. The history of nutritional advice is our topic for the rest of the hour.

We’ve got a surprising story about the early days of vegetarianism and one that explores the origins of that nutritional advice on today’s food packaging. We’ve even got an in-studio cereal tasting all ready to go.