Where Is the Whey? Everywhere.

Holly asked me a question that is much deeper and puzzling than it looks at first. I'll try to cut through some of the confusion.

I recently had the ALCAT test done and it shows I have no reaction to casein and a severe reaction to whey. This surprized me because I have never had a noticeable reaction to dairy. I was told that it doesn't mean that I'm lactose intolerant - just whey intolerant. My question is: hasn't the whey been cooked out of evaporated milk, condensed milk, caramel, cream cheese, and most cheeses? I would think so but I can't find an answer anywhere.

Milk is like every other food we eat, a mixture of chemicals that we group into three basic families: the fats, the carbohydrates, and the proteins. That's not even including the pure minerals, notably calcium, potassium, and phosphorus, that make milk so healthy. Or the micronutrients like vitamins. All of these float in a vast sea of water. A full 88% of a glass of whole cow's milk is water. Carbohydrates - our old friend lactose - make up 4.66%, fats, 3.34%, and proteins 3.29% That tiny fraction of a percent of discrepancy is referred to as ash, and contains all the minerals and anything else that doesn't fall neatly into one of the big three categories.

The proteins, though comprising the smallest bulk of the three majors, has the most complex set of subfractions. For our purposes, all we need to concentrate on are the two main families of proteins, the caseins and the wheys. A table at an Ohio State website breaks down the families into five types each.



Having five types of casein is confusing enough. The wheys are worse. There are at least two immunoglobulins and several minor proteins.

And I'm not even going to talk about the Proteose-Peptone Fraction, which is defined as whatever is "not precipitated at pH 4.6 from skim milk previously heated to 95-100° C for 30 minutes." (I quoted that from the National Dairy Council. That Ohio State site gives slightly different numbers. Don't you love it when experts disagree on basics?) Those are at least four proteins that have some relationship to both the caseins and the wheys and I don't understand them at all. Everybody else ignores them, however, and so shall I.

In liquid milk, all the proteins, like the fats and the carbohydrates, are in a colloidal suspension. "A colloid is a substance microscopically dispersed evenly throughout another substance." You can't, therefore, go through milk and pick out the proteins very easily. It takes high-technology techniques like the membrane process of ultrafiltration, some called "very specific enzyme precipitation," or the ion-exchange processes.

Or cheesemaking. Rennet, produced in the stomachs of most mammals, is an enzyme that coagulates casein, clumping the individual molecules into larger lumps that can be much more easily separated from the rest of the liquid.

Why then do food processors and scientists need such high-tech procedures to do what villagers and nomads have done for thousands of years? Purity. Those curds of soft cheese that are formed are mostly casein protein. But they also contain some lactose and some fat and some water. And some whey. As long as there is water present, some whey will be there as well. The aging process also hardens the cheese, which is done by almost literally squeezing out the remaining water. Additional heating of cheese can harden it even further. Most of the lactose is removed with the water, which is why true milk cheeses can be sold as lactose-free. Most of the whey goes with the water as well. I can't guarantee that all of the whey goes, though. A few micrograms of remaining lactose is meaningless for anyone who is lactose intolerant. A few micrograms of remaining whey protein could trigger a reaction.

And that's where we come back to Holly's question. Processed dairy products may be low in whey, even negligible in whey for practical purposes. Allergies are impractical. They can affect people in doses too tiny to be otherwise noticed. That's exactly why those with severe dairy protein allergies are advised never to eat any dairy product. Removing every last molecule of protein is a task for a scientific lab, not a food processor. This difference is the main reason for the vast gulf between lactose intolerance and a milk allergy. You can take chances with lactose. Allergies require extreme caution and care. Some people, like Holly apparently, have mild symptoms to no symptoms at all. For others, the symptoms are frequent and severe. For those people allergies are serious and must be treated that way. And the more you know about food, its composition, and its processing, the better off you are.

Kitchen Chemistry - Dairy Division

I received an email from Emma Taylor of Accredited Online Colleges. On their blog they have a list of links they call Kitchen Chemistry: 100 Cool Food Science Experiments for Kids (and Cooks).

Science is awesome. Food is awesome. Blending the two together rocks faces off. Teachers and parents looking for some projects to introduce their students to the basic principles of chemistry, physics, biology and more can easily turn to the kitchen for inspiration. The following experiments vary when it comes to materials, difficulty levels and cost, so read them over thoroughly before making any commitments. Always practice proper safety precautions as well, most especially when tooling around with fire and acids and other lovely things.

The first 20 links go to experiments on Milk, Yogurt & Cheese. They include "DIY Yogurt: Making yogurt at home or in class makes for an excellent way to illustrate how helpful bacteria work — and all the good things they can do for the human body." and "Milk Glue: A brew of milk, vinegar and baking soda makes for a viable, sustainable adhesive for minor projects."

True, except for the yogurt one, the page is not really relevant to lactose intolerance, let alone avoiding milk. Well, tough. I like science. And the more you know about all aspects of milk, the better off you are. Besides, most kids and most people with LI can have most forms of dairy.

I'm going to reinforce the statement in the quoted paragraph. Because the links go to other websites, the quality, the presentation, and the age range of the experiments varies considerably. Check them out first before getting your kids involved. I haven't tried any of them and I can't vouch for their accuracy or practicality.

Dairying More Than 8000 Years Old

Archaeological news usually doesn't impress people unless a new tomb or underwater is found. So the fat residue on some old pots normally comes filed under the heading of specialists only.

Well, I'm a specialist and I think these old pots are megacool news. You see, they provide the oldest evidence of milk use ever found, more than 1500 years earlier than anything else known.

Photo by Olivier Nieuwenhuijse, University of Leiden

Talking about an article that was just published in the leading British science journal, Nature, Physorg.com wrote:

Professor Richard Evershed and colleagues describe how the analysis of more than 2,200 pottery vessels from southeastern Europe, Anatolia and the Levant extends the early history of milk by two millennia to the seventh millennium BC.

Vessels most likely to have been used for food preparation were selected to test where milk use started, and whether the use of milk products first began in the region where farming was pioneered – the Fertile Crescent – or whether it was an innovation of other regions.

Organic residues preserved in the pottery suggest that even before 6,500 BC milk was processed and stored, although this varied regionally depending on the farming techniques used.

Cattle, sheep and goats were familiar domesticated animals by the eighth millennium BC but until now, the first clear evidence for milk use was the late fifth millennium.

Why is this so important for those of us who can't drink milk? Everhard said:

Processing milk would have had two important advantages, providing a means of storing surplus milk as products, that is cheese, ghee, and so on, making them available throughout the year, and providing a solution for any problems of lactose intolerance; most lactose intolerant people have fewer problems with consuming processed milk products.

The spread of lactose tolerance moves along with a dairy culture from these beginners with low-lactose products in the Middle East. Those few humans with the mutant gene that allowed them to never stop making the lactase enzyme as adults had a slight reproductive advantage because milk and dairy products provided calcium and other critical nutrients. Since the mutant gene was dominant, they passed the gene to many of the children who passed it down to many of their children who passed it down to us, who live, at least in the West, in a dairy-laden culture. This was a good thing back when it meant survival and it's a good thing today.

I also advocate eating and drinking dairy products if you can do so without symptoms. It is a great source of nutrition. If you can't, at least we have many useful substitutes today. I'll probably get back to them tomorrow, but today is for our ingenious milk-drinking ancestors.

A Quiz About Eating Dairy Products

Gwen Schoen of the McClatchy Newspapers has a quiz on dairy products, taken from the eatright.org site of the American Dietetic Association.

It's too short to excerpt and too long to copy in full, so I'm just going to point you to the original and let you take the quiz there.

Lactase Drops and What to Drop Them In

Now that lactase drops are available for direct sale in the U.S. once again, I'm beginning to get more questions about their use.

Drops were the original form of lactase on the market. (Well, technically, lactase powder was the original form, but people didn't like dealing with powder.) The idea was simple. You added lactase to milk, the lactase split (digested) the lactose into the simpler sugars glucose and galactose, and you drank the milk. Voilà. No symptoms.

Except that like most miracle cures (as seen on TV) it didn't always seem to work quite as well in your own refrigerator as the directions made you hope. There's always a trade-off. It takes time for the lactase to work, and the milk has to be kept cold through the process. The more lactase you used, the faster it worked, but then you used up the bottle quicker. And was that one big drop or two little ones that just squeezed out together?

With time came convenience. Companies made 100% lactose-free milk and other lactose-free dairy products available in dairy cases everywhere. Lactase pills allowed you to have dairy without waiting for it. Slowly the drops market shrank, until nobody in the U.S. sold drops at all.

For all their faults, drops still have a number of advantages that kept people fans all these dry years (often mail-ordering them from Canada, where they never left the shelves). Store-bought lactose free milk can cost up to twice that of regular milk. Drops are a much cheaper way to get lactose free goodness, especially now with the prices of all foods rising. Lactose free milk is slightly sweeter than regular milk, so you can adjust the number of drops you use to regulate the taste for your personal taste buds. Drops can be used in any liquid dairy product. Those other lactose-free dairy products never sold really well either, which makes them hard to find in many places.

Nursing mothers whose babies become temporarily lactose intolerant, say from a "stomach flu" or gastrointestinal illness, can express their milk, add drops, and nurse their babies with it a day or two later without having to resort to formulas until their intestines heal.

Some limitations remain. Drops still need to be thoroughly stirred into a liquid and stored cold. And that means you can't use drops in cooking. While you can start with a lactose-free milk, you can't expect to mix the lactase drops into cooked pudding or cakes and get good results.

Different brands have slightly different instructions as well. If you're trying a new brand I'd advise you to start with what they tell you to do. However, the trade-off between more drops and faster work remains. You can decide for yourself which route you want to follow once you're sure you have the basics down.