Adults in Calcium, New York, who increased calcium intake by drinking more lowfat milk and other milk products and walked more frequently successfully lost weight after a 16-week overhaul.

In this innovative Calcium Weighs In community intervention, researchers overhauled the health habits of 199 men and women in a small, rural community of Calcium, New York. The free program provided one-on-one nutrition counseling and group classes, urging participants to set reasonable health goals, choose lowfat dairy foods including milk, cheese and yogurt and exceed a 10,000 step per day goal to increase physical activity.

At the end of the 16-week program, the 116 participants who completed the program lost an average of 13.2 pounds. Total dairy intake increased to nearly 3 servings per day, on average, meeting the 2005 Dietary Guidelines for Americans recommended goal.

The best way to tackle the obesity problem in this country is by changing one community at a time and we made a huge impact in Calcium, NY, said renowned obesity researcher and study co-author James O. Hill, PhD, director of the Center for Human Nutrition in Denver. We were able to improve overall health simply by getting adults moving and changing eating habits to include more lowfat or fat free milk and other milk products, a model that can certainly apply to other Americans.

Additional nutrition studies suggest that drinking the recommended three glasses of lowfat or fat free milk a day can help maintain a healthy weight. And according to Weighing in on the American Diet, a new comprehensive report on the weight management practices of Americans conducted by The NPD Group in collaboration with the Milk Processor Education Program, dieters who made drinking lowfat or fat free milk a daily habit were more likely to be at a healthy weight and have better quality diets, richer in essential nutrients, compared to those who didn't.

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The current recommended daily intake (RDA) for men aged over 19 is 400 micrograms, and the authors say that if other studies confirm their findings of the link between folate intake and aneuploidy, then a possible intervention would be to increase the RDA for men considering becoming fathers for at least three months before trying to conceive in order to reduce the risk of chromosomal abnormalities in their children.

Ms Suzanne Young, a researcher in Prof Eskenazi's group and the study co-ordinator, said: Increasing folate intake can be as simple as taking a vitamin supplement with at least 400 micrograms of folate or eating breakfast cereal fortified with 100% of the RDA for folic acid. In addition, green leafy vegetables, such as spinach, can have up to 100 micrograms of folate per serving.

Disentangling the effects of folate from other micronutrients (e.g. the other vitamins) can be difficult, but the authors think they have succeeded in doing this by looking at several different nutrients in statistical analyses. Ms Young said: The results of the different analyses were different, which gave us some confidence that we could look at the effect of these micronutrients separately. The definitive way to answer this question would be with a randomised control trial with folate supplementation.

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