This Nasty Myth About Milk Just Isn’t True

Hopefully, you’re not on your lunch break right now, since this subject might leave you feeling a little ill. But don’t worry — it has a happy ending. Unless you’re lactose intolerant, you probably have a pretty good (or at least neutral) relationship with milk. It’s in your cereal, you use it for baking, and you know that adding just a bit of chocolate syrup to it makes it even more delicious. But if you’ve heard this specific myth about milk, don’t worry. It’s not true.

Maybe you’ve heard that you produce more phlegm because of milk. While gross, science is proving that it’s not the case at all.

Phlegm is best known as a secretion formed by the mucous membranes of your respiratory passages. In short, it appears in high quantities when you have a cold. While there’s a ton of pharmaceutical products out there that try to fight phlegm (or “snot”), it’s just a biological fact of life. Still, you may have been told to skip the milk when a cold is coming on. It might not be the beverage you crave when you’re sick, but regardless: it doesn’t cause any additional harm.

Medical journal Archives of Disease in Childhood recently published a study called “Milk, mucus and myths” which finds that dairy isn’t linked to making cold symptoms worse — even if that’s what your mother told you.

If you’re a parent yourself, you should have no fear if your child grabs a yogurt while sporting a runny nose.

It won’t fix the problem (your cold), but it won’t cause additional phlegm. In today’s world, where all food suddenly contains poison and teens are trying deadly new trends (Tide Pods? Morel mushrooms?), it’s nice to have a little bit of positive news for a change.

So, how did it start? It’s tough to tell, but according to Munchies, you might want to blame the popular parenting book Dr. Spock’s Baby and Child Care for helping it spread. Released in the ’40s, it was pretty much a must-have for new moms. In that book, Dr. Spock said that milk and dairy “may cause more mucus complications.” And boy, did parents cling to that.

You might want to celebrate this news with a couple of milkshakes.