According to a new Australian study, while on a low calorie diet and quite contrary to popular belief, a higher intake of dairy foods can help fight obesity.

Wendy Chan She Ping Delfos from Curtin University of Technology, as part of her Ph. D. research, compared three with five dairy servings in a 12-week low calorie diet prescribed for overweight participants.

Much to her surprise, Delfos found subjects who consume five rather than three dairy servings per day, showed greater weight loss and reduced risk factors for heart disease and diabetes, as they lost more weight and abdominal fat, including having lower blood pressure.

Delfos says, it is commonly believed that going on a weight loss diet means completely cutting out key foods like high in fat dairy products.

However, this study shows, people going on a weight reduction diet can actually benefit from increasing dairy consumption beyond the normally-recommended three daily servings, so long as total energy intake is less than required, during the weight loss period.

The increased five servings dairy intake per day in a reduced calorie diet has never been studied before. Such high protein, calcium and vitamin D diets, among other bioactive nutrients, can prove to be an important part of a prudent weight loss or weight maintenance diet.

As well, according to the medical researcher, combining resistance exercise with the increased dairy intake diet had the same health benefits as the five dairy servings a day, and could have long-term benefits.

'However, the participants who engaged in resistance exercise did show significantly less muscle loss during the weight loss trial and had a higher fasting fat oxidation rate (burning of fat) during the trial.

The group of participants engaging in resistance exercise also had a lower percentage of total fat regain at a follow-up visit 12-weeks after the initial trial.'

Dairy products consumed by 40-study participants consisted of 40-grms of cheese, two small tubs of yoghurt and two glasses of low fat milk.