Milk and Dairy Product Consumption and Cardiovascular Diseases: An Overview of Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses

https://doi.org/10.1093/advances/nmy099Get rights and content
Under an Elsevier user license
open archive

ABSTRACT

Milk and dairy products containing milk fat are major food sources of saturated fatty acids, which have been linked to increased risk of cardiovascular-related clinical outcomes such as cardiovascular disease (CVD), coronary heart disease (CHD), and stroke. Therefore, current recommendations by health authorities advise consumption of low-fat or fat-free milk. Today, these recommendations are seriously questioned by meta-analyses of both prospective cohort studies and randomized controlled trials (RCTs) reporting inconsistent results. The present study includes an overview of systematic reviews and meta-analyses of follow-up studies, an overview of meta-analyses involving RCTs, and an update on meta-analyses of RCTs (2013–2018) aiming to synthesize the evidence regarding the influence of dairy product consumption on the risk of major cardiovascular-related outcomes and how various doses of different dairy products affect the responses, as well as on selected biomarkers of cardiovascular disease risk, i.e., blood pressure and blood lipids. The search strategies for both designs were conducted in the MEDLINE, EMBASE, Cochrane Central Register of Controlled Trials, Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews, and Web of Science databases from their inception to April 2018. From the 31 full-text articles retrieved for cohort studies, 17 met the eligibility criteria. The pooled risk ratio estimated for the association between the consumption of different dairy products at different dose-responses and cardiovascular outcomes (CVD, CHD, and stroke) showed a statistically significant negative association with RR values <1, or did not find evidence of significant association. The overview of 12 meta-analyses involving RCTs as well as the updated meta-analyses of RCTs did not result in significant changes on risk biomarkers such as systolic and diastolic blood pressure and total cholesterol and LDL cholesterol. Therefore, the present study states that the consumption of total dairy products, with either regular or low fat content, does not adversely affect the risk of CVD.

milk consumption
dairy products
cardiovascular diseases
coronary heart disease
stroke

Cited by (0)

This supplement was sponsored by the Interprofessional Dairy Organization (INLAC), Spain.

The sponsor had no role in the design of the studies included in the supplement; in the collection, analyses, or interpretation of the data; in the writing of the manuscripts; or in the decision to publish the results. This study was partially funded by the University of Granada Plan Propio de Investigación 2016, Excellence actions: Unit of Excellence on Exercise and Health (UCEES), Plan Propio de Investigación 2018, Programa Contratos-Puente, the Junta de Andalucía, Consejería de Conocimiento, Investigación y Universidades, and European Regional Development Funds (ref. SOMM17/6107/UGR). Publication costs for this supplement were defrayed in part by the payment of page charges. The opinions expressed in this publication are those of the authors and are not attributable to the sponsors or the publisher, Editor, or Editorial Board of Advances in Nutrition.

Author disclosures: JF, MVC, MJ, AG, and VM-V, no conflicts of interest.

Supplemental Tables 1–5 and Supplemental Figures 1–8 are available from the “Supplementary data” link in the online posting of the article and from the same link in the online table of contents at https://academic.oup.com/advances.

AG and VM-V contributed equally to this work.

Abbreviations used: CHD, coronary heart disease; CVD, cardiovascular disease; DBP, diastolic blood pressure; IHD, ischemic heart disease; MI, myocardial infarction; RCT, randomized controlled trial; SBP, systolic blood pressure.