• milk
• coronary heart disease

The self completed questionnaire study by Ness et al¹ found that men who reported drinking more than a third of a pint of milk each day were not at increased risk of death from coronary heart disease (CHD) in comparison with those drinking less than this or none.

The study inappropriately equates daily milk consumption with the answers the participants gave to the single question that asked how many pints of milk the men usually drank each day. This was in 1970 or 1973, when in Britain milk was normally delivered to households in pint bottles. The meaning of the question lacks precision, and may have caused some of the participants to exclude milk taken out of the home in hot beverages and in milk drinks such as milk shakes. The authors note that the question did not ask about milk used in food preparation, so some answers could have excluded regular milk intake in …