Further Commentary on the PURE Study: Dairy Intake, Cardiovascular Disease and Mortality

An editorial by Louie and Rangan discusses the findings from the Prospective Urban Rural Epidemiology (PURE) study on the association of total and individual types of dairy food intake with major cardiovascular disease events and mortality (1). The editorial authors report that the PURE study found that higher daily consumption of dairy products may be protective and that the associations were stronger for whole fat dairy foods in low and middle income countries with lower mean dairy intakes (i.e. South and Southeast Asia, Africa and China).

Louie and Rangan point out that while this current analysis is not as affected by the study design issues of other PURE study results, there were large limitations; the most notable being that dietary intakes were only assessed at the beginning of the study (1). A single assessment of dairy consumption may not be an accurate reflection of intakes over the course of the nine years of follow up and this reduces the certainty of the findings. The authors caution that readers should consider this study as only another piece of the evidence, and strong recommendations cannot be made for the consumption of higher fat (versus lower fat) dairy products. The study’s results only suggest that the consumption of dairy products may be encouraged for low and middle income countries and dairy products should not be discouraged for other consumers.  

For additional discussion of the PURE study findings, see the PEN Trending Topic: Dairy Intake, Mortality and CVD – The Debate Continues.

Reference

1. Louie JCY, Rangan AM. No need to change dairy food dietary guidelines yet. Lancet. 2018 Nov 24;392(10161):2242-4. doi: 10.1016/S0140-6736(18)31945-7. Epub 2018 Sep 11. Citation available from: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/30217461