For healthy body weight, nonfat and low-fat milk is the obvious choice for kids, right? Not so fast. New evidence suggests that children who drink whole milk actually weigh less and have lower BMIs compared to kids who don’t drink milk or who regularly consume nonfat or low-fat milk. Like other studies, this seems to suggest that some dietary fat may actually have a positive effect on overall health and weight.

In the release from the University of Gothenburg, dietician Susanne Eriksson, author of the thesis notes: “This is an interesting observation, but we don’t know why it is so. It may be the case that children who drink full-fat milk tend also to eat other things that affect their weight.” The scientists also discovered a difference between overweight children who drink full-fat milk every day and those who do not. Children who often drink milk with a fat content of 3% are less overweight. The thesis shows also that the children eat more saturated fat than recommended, but those children who have a high intake of fat have a lower BMI than the children with a lower intake of fat.