VIDEO: All About Milk
Transcript
Hi everybody, welcome to another video – fun facts all about food. Today we're going to be talking about milk. I get so many questions about milk. I want to first start off by clarifying that when I use the word milk, if you ever hear me use the word milk, I am talking about milk from a mammal, not a plant. I will always be very specific if I talk about milk that comes from a plant. In my book, “milk” comes from a mammal and that's kind of the whole point. Mammal means mammary glands that's where we get that word. It refers to mammals having the ability to feed their young from the female breast tissue or the mammary glands. That's where the word mammal comes from. Humans obviously have milk, cows obviously have milk, but so do dogs and horses and any mammal that you can think of. All mammalian milk has protein, fat, carbs, vitamins and minerals and that's what's kind of cool about it. Not a lot of substances have
Protein, fat and carbs but it makes sense when you think about it because a baby mammal has to survive on just that one substance for some period of time, so it has to be a pretty complete food. That being said it's not a truly complete food – it does not have any fiber and it doesn't have all the vitamins and minerals that a mammal will eventually need as it grows, so other foods do get introduced at some point. But it's a very cool food for babies.
Now here's the question: is it weird to drink the milk of another mammal? I think it's really a philosophical question at the end of the day. Weird or not, the reality is we've been doing it for a very long time. 9000 BC, to be specific, is when we have evidence of humans starting to domesticate and drink the milk of herds of cattle and things like that. It's been around for a very long time but there is a key difference. Way, way, way back then, people were not drinking the liquid milk. Adults did not have the ability to digest lactose, so they would ferment the milk into things like yogurt and cheese and that's how they would consume it. When you ferment dairy, bacteria eat the lactose and so by the time you eat it the lactose is pretty much gone or very low so it's much more tolerable. However, thousands of years ago there was a genetic mutation allowing adults to maintain the lactase enzyme into adulthood and so people did start to be able to have liquid milk into adulthood. This was a life-saving thing because there were times when there was not other food available and milk gave people the calories they needed to get through tough times. So nowadays many, many adults can tolerate lactose, although not all. It kind of depends on your ancestry. So yeah, milk’s been around for a really long time. That being said, not all populations do have a history with milk. Certainly you can survive without milk. Now, you do need something as an infant and it is worth noting that people used to breastfeed a lot longer than the six months to a year that we mostly do now, but in the long run, no, you do not need milk. Humans have existed without it and they have existed with it for a really long time.
So what is milk? Really, it's water, it's largely water. Milk is 88% water which is why it can hydrate babies so well and we don't have to give babies separate water. It's also carbs, fat and protein. It's about 5% carbohydrate, lactose, among others. It's about 3 percent protein – that’s going to be like casein and whey and a few other types of protein. And then it's about 3 percent fat, and then about one percent vitamins and minerals.
So let's talk really quick about the carbs. I already mentioned it – lactose is one of the primary carbs and it does require an enzyme called lactase in order to break it up and allow it to be absorbed into your blood. If you don't have enough lactase that carbohydrate will travel to your colon where the bacteria in your colon will eat it, producing a lot of gas which can lead to stomach upset, bloating, gas, that sort of thing. So that's usually the symptom of lactose intolerance. They sell lactose-free milk, Lactaid brand, which is just milk that already has lactase in it so the carbohydrates are basically predigested in the milk so you don't have to do it yourself.
The next thing I want to talk about is the protein. The protein in milk is actually probably where a lot of the problems people have with milk come from. First and foremost that's the allergenic part of milk so if somebody has a milk allergy, it's the milk protein that they are allergic to. What's interesting about milk proteins is they differ from breed to breed of cow and from mammal to mammal which is why somebody who has a milk allergy can still have their mother's breast milk – it’s a different protein in there. And you may see people who can have can't have cow's milk but they do okay with goat milk. The proteins in milk can cause a straight-up allergic reaction, and they can also cause some stomach upset if you are having a hard time breaking them apart if you're missing some of the enzymes needed. And then it can also cause some congestion – congestion is a common side effect of intolerance to milk proteins. So most people who struggle with milk, the proteins are usually at fault.
Last but not least there's the fat part of milk. Ironically this is something that hardly anybody has trouble digesting. Milk fat's actually very easy to digest and metabolize. The history of skim milk boils my blood. You guys, it had nothing to do with health, nothing whatsoever. Basically skim milk is a byproduct of butter. If you leave a cup of milk, a gallon of milk out – fresh milk – the fat will come to the top. Then they would skim that off, churn it and they would turn it into butter and then the byproduct of that would be buttermilk. But when you skim off that 3% of the milk that's fat that leaves you 97% of skim milk which is just water protein and carbs. They used to just feed it to livestock or honestly just send it down the river and it was just kind of a waste product. But for World War Two they discovered that they could actually make powdered skim milk that they could send with the troops. It was a big boon for the milk industry – a lot less waste, they started to actually make money off of the skim milk which usually was worth very little. When the war ended the industry did not want to go back to wasting that skim milk so in the 1950s they started campaign telling people that they could lose weight if they switched to skim milk. Keep in mind there wasn't a huge weight problem yet – there would be soon – but they basically just capitalized on affluent customers that wanted to look good. So they sold them skim milk. It had nothing to do with health. It was obviously just a play for the dairy industry to make money on what was otherwise kind of a waste product. Anyhow, I am a big proponent of whole milk, as you guys know. It's the only milk we use in our house and the only one I recommend to my clients.
Last but not least, let's talk a little bit about pasteurization and homogenization. Pasteurization was invented in 1864 – relatively new if you keep in mind that milk has been around since 9000 BC. They discovered that it could kill all of the bacteria in the milk thus making it theoretically safer. I have some thoughts on this… When you kill off the bacteria you also kill off a lot of the beneficial properties in milk. When a baby breast feeds they are getting raw milk, not pasteurized milk, and that's how they get all that immunity and all the great properties in milk that are not there in a pasteurized milk at the grocery store. I don't let myself get too worked up about this though because the reality of our life today is that raw milk is actually illegal in a lot of states, my own state included. So while I deep down would probably prefer raw milk, it's not really a viable option, so I just don't think about it too much. That being said I do appreciate dairies that use batch pasteurization where they can use a much lower temperature as opposed to this ultra-pasteurized milk that we're seeing now, which is at crazy, crazy high temperatures. So that's something to look for on your milk labels.
Homogenization is another one that's really interesting. That's even more recent – that was invented around 1899 and didn't really hit the supermarket shelves till around the 1920s. That’s just the idea of mushing all the fat globules together with the protein molecules by putting them through really, really small holes at a really high pressure. The concern is that this might be why milk allergies are on the rise or at least it may play a role because it's changing the chemical structure of the milk. There’s really no reason for homogenization other than it prevents you from having to go like this [shakes milk bottle] before you pour your milk. So I actually prefer brands that are not homogenized. I'm not totally strict about this, I do buy brands that are homogenized if that's all I can find. But I often go with this one [Kalona SuperNatural] which is semi local, it's from Iowa and the Midwest, and they do sell non-homogenized milk. So that's one of my favorite brands out there.
Hopefully that answers your eyes questions about milk. I'm going to come back with a part two video on my thoughts about plant milks. They're mostly not great, but I have some pros. So we'll talk soon and have a great day everybody!