Soon, you won’t be seeing advertisements on TV and the Internet linking milk and other dairy products to losing weight.

That’s because the Federal Trade Commission says research doesn’t back up the claims that three servings of dairy products a day can help you stay slim.

Word about the advertising modifications came in a letter from the commission to the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, a Washington, D.C.-based advocacy group, who filed a complaint in 2005 with the FTC over “false and misleading advertising.

The strictly pro-vegetarian group asked the FTC to order the dairy industry to quit making the claims.

But FTC officials said in the letter that dairy-industry groups and the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which oversaw the campaign, agreed on their own to change the campaign until more research can unarguably prove that dairy consumption leads to weight loss.

'Pack on pounds?'

The campaign featured slogans like “Milk your diet. Lose weight!” and 3-A-Day. Burn More Fat, Lose Weight, as well as “Body by Milk” aimed at teenagers.

 “Milk and cheese are more likely to pack on pounds than help people slim down,” said Dan Kinburn, the committee’s lawyer.  “This case calls into question other advertising claims made by the industry, especially the notion that milk builds strong bones. Evidence shows it does nothing of the kind.”

Kinburn and other committee leaders said the dairy industry’s weight-loss campaign was based largely on small studies by Dr. Michael Zemel, a nutritionist at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, who the organization claims got funding for his research from the dairy industry.

According to the committee, independent research, including a recent article in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, found that consumption of dairy products either has little or no effect on weight loss or actually increases body weight.

'Minority of people'

However, the FTC is allowing the dairy council to continue to say in advertisements that you shouldn’t avoid milk and milk products because you’re concern they may make you gain weight.

Greg Miller, a nutritionist and the National Dairy Council’s executive vice president, told the New York Times the organization plans to redo the section of its Web site regarding weight.

Miller said most doctors and other health professionals believe that dairy products do help with bone health and maintaining a healthy weight.

 “I think there’s a minority of people out there that just have very loud voices,” he said. “This is a vegan group that doesn’t want anyone to eat dairy.”

Standing behind claims

A spokeswoman for the National Fluid Milk Processor Promotion Board, a dairy industry group, said the “Milk Your Diet” campaign was not misleading and the board stood behind the weight-loss claims.

The new campaigns will focus on how people can use dairy products as part of healthy diets, the spokeswoman said.

Meanwhile, according to the Times, Marion Nestle, a nationally known nutritionist at New York University, called the advertisements “ridiculously misleading” but the marketing modifications “groundbreaking.”

She contended in her book What to Eat that the $50 billion dairy industry is a powerful lobbying force in Washington that pressures the federal government on nutrition policy.

Although dairy products are part of her own diet, Nestle said people can still eat healthy without them, the Times reported.

Source: Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine

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