the effect of cow’s milk versus calcium supplement on the components of metabolic syndrome in overweight or obese women

background: obesity and metabolic syndrome are serious public health problems. it is suggested that high calcium diet can improve lipid profile, blood pressure and insulin resistance. methods: in this clinical trial, 75 healthy overweight or obese premenopausal women were randomly allocated to one of the following dietary regimens for 8 weeks: 1) a control diet 2) a calcium-supplemented diet containing 800mg/d calcium carbonate 3) a high milk diet containing three servings of low fat milk (all of them providing a 500kcal/day deficit). at baseline and after 8 weeks, waist circumference (wc), blood pressure, serum triglyceride (tg), fasting blood sugar (fbs), and high density lipoprotein cholesterol (hdl-c) were measured. results: after 8 weeks, wc, fbs and hdl-c decreased in all groups (p<0.001), but there were no significant reduction in tg and blood pressure. reduction of wc in the milk group was significantly higher than the controls (p=0.028). also, reduction of hdl-c in the calcium and milk groups was less than the controls (p=0.023 and p=0.019, respectively). changes in fbs, tg and blood pressure were not significantly different among the 3 groups. conclusion: we found that increasing milk consumption led to more wc reduction. milk or calcium intake caused less adverse effect on hdl-c, but has no effect on the blood pressure, fbs and tg. so increase in milk or calcium intake can reduce wc among the metabolic syndrome complications.