Publications and Research

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

1-8-2014

Abstract

Background
Dairy products consumption is increasingly common globally. Most of the evidence concerning dairy products comes from observational studies in western populations which are inevitably open to confounding. To triangulate the evidence concerning dairy products, we examined the associations of whole cow’s milk consumption with cardiovascular risk factors in a non-Western setting with a different pattern of milk consumption and cardiovascular diseases from Western populations.

Methods
We used multivariable censored linear or logistic regression to examine cross-sectionally the adjusted associations of whole cow’s milk consumption (none (n = 14892), 1–3/week (n = 2689) and 3+/week (n = 2754)) with cardiovascular risk factors in Chinese ($50 years) in the Guangzhou Biobank Cohort Study.

Results
Whole cow’s milk consumption was negatively associated with systolic blood pressure (3+/week compared to none 22.56 mmHg, 95% confidence interval (CI) 23.63 to 21.49), diastolic blood pressure (21.32 mmHg, 95% CI 21.87 to 20.77) and triglycerides (20.06 mmol/L, 95% CI 20.11 to 20.002), but was positively associated with HDL-cholesterol (0.02 mmol/L,95% CI 0.01 to 0.04) and fasting glucose (0.08 mmol/L, 95% CI 0.01 to 0.16) adjusted for age, sex, phase of study, socio-economic position, lifestyle (smoking, alcohol use and physical activity) and adiposity, but had no obvious association with LDL-cholesterol or the presence of diabetes.

Conclusions
Whole cow’s milk consumption had heterogeneous associations with cardiovascular risk factors. Higher whole cow’s milk consumption was associated with lower levels of specific cardiovascular risk factors which might suggest risk factor specific biological pathways with different relations to blood pressure and lipids than glucose.

Comments

Copyright 2014 Sun et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Share

COinS
 
 

To view the content in your browser, please download Adobe Reader or, alternately,
you may Download the file to your hard drive.

NOTE: The latest versions of Adobe Reader do not support viewing PDF files within Firefox on Mac OS and if you are using a modern (Intel) Mac, there is no official plugin for viewing PDF files within the browser window.