You can’t beat the real deal – full-fat milk

If there’s one thing I love more than being proved right, it’s being proved scientifically right.

And I am right about full-fat milk. Always have been.

New research has revealed that it’s superior to the semiskimmed stuff, because it keeps children fuller for longer and less prone to snacking.

Yet among my peers, I am the only person with full-fat in the fridge, in the children’s cereal, in my morning coffee.

If I pop round to a friend’s for a catch-up, I’ve been known to take a carton with me – and away again afterwards, of course, lest they or their children be poisoned by a splash of delicious, naturally occurring fats.

Knocking back the real stuff is also my tiny act of rebellion against the creeping encroachments of the cleaneating cabal. These days, brazenly buying blue top signals a certain insouciant recklessness, an act of defiance in an increasingly purse-lipped world of health hypervigilance that is based on ignorance.

In simple terms, fats are chains of carbon atoms with hydrogen atoms attached. When we consume fat, it is digested and enters the bloodstream where it transports the fat-soluble vitamins A,D, E and K around the body.

Full-fat milk contains all four fat-soluble vitamins. If you take out the fat, you remove the delivery system.

“Do you drink fat milk because you’re Irish?” a girlfriend once mused, trying to pinpoint the cause of my waywardness.

Maybe it is; as a child on my uncle’s farm, I often tasted warm milk squirted straight from the teat of a Holstein Friesian into my mouth.

I also collected speckled brown eggs from the henhouse, and blackberries straight from the bramble.

The best food, I learnt, was unadulterated. That’s the real reason why I drink full-fat; it tastes of proper dairy, not like its ever-paler imitations, skimmed of all their goodness and all their joy.