Switching fruit juice for skim milk with breakfast might help keep those extra kilograms off, new Australian research suggests.
Contrary to weight-gain fears surrounding dairy products, a study has shown that drinking a glass of milk with your cereal or toast leaves you less hungry at lunchtime than a morning juice drink.
"While it might not help you lose weight, it seems definitely to suppress the appetite enough to help you keep it off," said lead researcher Dr Emma Dove, from the School of Medicine and Pharmacology at the University of Western Australia.
"That really goes against what most people understand about dairy products."
Researchers enlisted 34 people and gave them juice one day and milk on another, both times supplying them with a big platter of sandwiches four hours later.
The findings, to be presented at a medical research conference in Brisbane this week, showed that after drinking milk, participants ate about 10 percent less and rated themselves as feeling much fuller and more satisfied.
Dr Dove said skim milk and juice had the same energy content but the higher protein content of milk gave it extra benefits.
"There are probably lots of mechanisms at play but we think it comes down to the activation of different types of hormones related to appetite, and how slowly milk moves through the digestive system," she said.
"So there's a message here that a change like this could potentially help with weight management."
Other dieting-related research will be presented at the conference, including one Brisbane study explaining why some people exercise hard but cannot lose weight.
Dr Neil King from the Institute of Health and Biomedical Intervention at the Queensland Institute of Technology found that some people have a resistance to weight loss because working out gives them a chronic drive to eat.
Work by the Garvan Institute for Medical Research in Sydney found that weight loss attempts often fail because the body, even when obese, defends against reduction in fat mass.
Another Sydney study found that the traditional Mediterranean diet, high in olive oil, fish and vegetables and low in dairy, wine and sweets, has protective effects against cardiac disease for overweight women.
Females who even partly adhered to the diet reduced their blood fat and blood glucose levels and increased overall health, University of NSW researchers said.