The first food you ever ate. Guaranteed.

If you didn't guess it, its MILK!

And now, a little MILK humor...

What did the cow say to the bull?

I’m udderly in love with you. <3

For this post, I will once again reference our close friend and Oxy acquaintance, Oscar Mueller in his book, Roads to Health and Happiness, published in 1936.

To start out, Mueller says that “milk is the most valuable of all foods, for it contains nearly all the vitamins.” But what vitamins does milk actually contain?

There are many fat soluble vitamins found in milk:

A – for good vision, growth of body tissue, and immunity*

D – good for absorption of calcium and good for bones and teeth

E – an anti-oxidants that prevent damage to cells) and K are found in milk fat.

There are some aqueous vitamins found in milk:

B – maintains healthy nerves and blood cells. There are actually lots of different B vitamins in milk: pantothenic acid, pyridoxine, cobalamin, niacin, riboflavin, all which serve a variety of functions but I won't get into it on here.

* drinking skim milk significantly reduces the amount of vitamin A found in milk

According to the New York Times Science Desk, cow’s milk for children is the number one source of vitamin D, but can interfere with the absorption of iron. Two cups a day, according to an article by scientists at the University of Toronto published in Pediatrics, is the ideal amount of milk to maintain sufficient vitamin D without affecting iron absorption. Vitamin D is important in the absorption of calcium, and can also be obtained from sunlight.

Milk also has a lot of calcium, about 350 milligrams in one cup.  Calcium is present in all types of milk (whole - skim) because it is found in the water-soluble part of milk (ie the fat content wont change the amount of calcium in your milk). Calcium helps build strong bones and teeth as well as many other functions. (“Milk has benefits, but issues for some” Philadelphia Tribune, 2012).

And now, I have to give a quick shout out to my Dad, and show some proof that everything you (Dad) tell me about calcium and vitamin D isn’t completely disregarded.

So yeah, I guess milk really does have “all” the vitamins. But is it as good for us as was once (and still is) thought?

To start off, I have to put Mueller's book in context. The dairy industry must have been a lot different in 1936 than it is now.  So now I interject with a little bit of milk history and vocabulary. 

Homogenization: Milk was first homogenized in 1919.  Homogenization is blending the butterfat in milk by preheating it and forcing it through a tiny hole. The size of the butterfat particles are reduced so they won’t rise to the top and separate from the other particles of milk.

Pasteurization: In 1920, pasteurization became widespread in the dairy industry and is attributed with lowering infectious disease rates in the US by 90% (TIME, 2007). Pasteurization is a heat treatment in milk to kill the germs in homogenized milk. It also gives milk a longer shelf life. Pasteurization actually became popular in New York from the work of Nathan Straus, a Jewish guy who campaigned for national milk health regulation. Straus is responsible for saving the lives of many children in poverty levels in New York by eliminating unsafe milk.

And now, back to the science...

Although milk was homogenized and pasteurized during Mueller’s time (cerca 1936), from the research I’ve done, it appears that the huge technological advancements in the dairy industry, eg. the introduction of rBST to improve milk production, standardization of pasteurization, and artificial insemination of cows, didn’t happen until post 1936. 

In fact, in the 1930’s it was discovered that BST (bovine somatotropin) is a natural hormone produced in small quantities in the cow's pituitary gland and is used in regulating metabolic processes. BST can now be synthesized using genetic engineering, and when injected into dairy cows in large quantities actually increases milk production by making their digestive system more efficient at converting feed to milk.  However, BST wasn’t approved for use in the US until 1994. 

For all you rBST haters, who just gasped at the mention of BST, according to an article in the  New York Times, 2007, “Don’t Cry Over rBST Milk,” scientists have found no compositional differences in milk with or without rBST. And for all of you who don’t care if rBST is in your milk, those who do care say that it can increase health problems in humans for a variety of reasons. Firstly, it makes cows need to be milked more, which can lead to udder infection, which is treated with antibiotics, which could increase the growth of antibiotic resistant strains of bacteria, which can also affect milk drinkers who are allergic to antibiotics. Woah.  That was a mouthful.

For this reason, the milk that Mueller is talking about and the milk that we are talking about are very different kinds of milk.  Mueller is also most likely referring to whole milk, or high fat milk, rather than the low-fat or skim milk that many consumers drink today, since skim milk wasn't popularized until the 80's. However, the milk that we drink and the milk that our ancestors drank in 1936 still have many similarities, including the same vitamins and minerals, like vitamin B, vitamin D, and calcium.  Milk is also still a huge part of the average American’s diet, although a lot of children and adolescents don’t consume the government-recommended amount of dairy products  (Philadelphia Tribune, 2012). 

Mueller also talks about milk being “particularly valuable to convalescents.” I found it interesting that Mueller didn’t mention milk being particularly valuable for children, since that is what we hear about most these days, however I looked into the “convalescent” issue as well.  In an article by C. Genari at the University of Siena, Italy on “Calcium and vitamin D nutrition and bone disease of the elderly,” calcium intake influences bone mass in all age groups. So I guess older people are included in this category as well, although Genari pays particular attention to children, pre-menopausal women, and adolescents in his article.

However, with old people breaking their hips all the time and what not, it makes sense that maybe they should drink a little milk every now and then too, and some studies cited in Genari's article even showed that increased calcium intake (over 4 years) reduced fracture incidence in postmenopausal women with an average age of 73.6. 

Furthermore, in 1998, the expert committee of the European Community in the report on Osteoporosis-Action on prevention said the RDA (recommended daily allowance) for calcium for those 65 and older is 700-800 milligrams per day. Mueller suggested that the elderly drink ½ class of milk a day, which is only about 150 milligrams of calcium. So the elderly now-a-days should drink about 2½  cups of milk a day, or eat enough other foods with calcium, like cheese, yogurt, fish with bones, dark leafy greens, fortified orange juice, and soybeans.

What’s one way to get more calcium besides milk? Ice cream!!! Mueller suggests ice cream as a “popular and valuable form of milk.” He even goes as far as to call it “one of the most wholesome foods” (when it is made of proper ingredients).  Well Mr. Mueller, I definitely agree with you on that, but I'm not sure what the science would say...with all the chemical flavors, sugar, and candy added into our ice cream these days.

So stop browsing the internet, reading this blog, or doing whatever you’re doing and go out and enjoy some good wholesome ice cream!

I would take my own advice, but I’m still stuck in the library writing this blog…

* I could also go into all the other milks for all the adventurous drinkers our there: goats milk, sheeps milk, breast milk (just kidding) or for all the lactards: soy milk, rice milk, almond milk...But I think talking about cow's milk is enough for now.

MOOOOOOOre from me later :)