Cream or milk? - Which is the more fattening?

You may be surprised to learn that the answer is that CREAM is less fattening that MILK. - The reason is that cream contains less salt/sodium than milk, and also contains less sugar than milk. (The sugar in milk is called lactose.) So if you are sensitive to salt, taking cream or whole milk in your coffee will cause less water retention/weight gain/fluid retention than taking semi-skimmed milk or that ghastly thin skimmed milk (yuk!). And if you are sensitive to sugar, e.g. you have type 2 diabetes or you have metabolic syndrome, then cream in your coffee will be better for you too than semi-skimmed or skimmed milk.

I am talking about real fresh cream, of course, not dairy cream, which contains added sugar, and not artificial cream like Elmlea cream substitute. Artificial, pretend foods like Elmlea are bad for your health.

It's strange, isn't it, that lots of processed foodstuffs are described as 'light' or 'lite' when they contain less cream, when actually cream is less dense (weighs less for the same volume) than milk or water? It's the cream that actually is lighter than the less healthy, more fattening alternatives. In natural milk that has not been homogenised, the cream rises to the top, thus clearly showing that cream is the lightest part of the milk, and also making clear that the salt content is less concentrated in the cream part, because salt is one of the heavier constituents of a bottle of milk and has more of a tendency to sink further down in the liquid.