IMPORTANT NOTICE ABOUT COMMENTS

COMMENTS HAVE BEEN DISABLED

Because of spam, I personally moderate all comments left on my blog. However, because of health issues, I will not be able to do so in the future.

If you have a personal question about LI or any related topic you can send me an email at stevecarper@cs.com. I will try to respond.

Otherwise, this blog is now a legacy site, meaning that I am not updating it any longer. The basic information about LI is still sound. However, product information and weblinks may be out of date.

In addition, my old website, Planet Lactose, has been taken down because of the age of the information. Unfortunately, that means links to the site on this blog will no longer work.

For quick offline reference, you can purchase Planet Lactose: The Best of the Blog as an ebook on Amazon.com or BarnesandNoble.com. Almost 100,000 words on LI, allergies, milk products, milk-free products, and the genetics of intolerance, along with large helpings of the weirdness that is the Net.

Friday, June 05, 2009

Butter and Lactose

I got a good two-part question recently. I just have a minute today so I'll answer the quick and easy part now and tackle the other tomorrow.

I have read that there is little to no lactose left in butter, which I don't understand, since churning it creates cream, which I really must avoid.


This one's easy because it's a simple mistake of getting things backward, not hard to do when you're trying to remember something you've "read."

Churning butter does not create cream. Churning cream creates butter. The churning process pumps air into the fat, with the other solids and much of the water falling away. This remainder was the original buttermilk. (The modern buttermilk product is not very similar.)

Butter is about 20% water and 80% fat, with a slight amount of lactose left in the rounding. It really is low lactose and since you don't use very much butter in any particular serving of food can probably be eaten by most people even with lactose intolerance.

Could there be another problem with butter, though? That's what I'll talk about tomorrow.

Bookmark and Share

No comments: