Milk's Not the Worst Thing Your Teenager Can Do

How bad has the anti-milk and milk is poison campaigns gotten? Parents are now going to doctors worried sick because their healthy children are *gasp* drinking milk.

You're going to think I'm making this up, so I have to quote this letter to the doctor column of the major UK newspaper, The Guardian.

Since my 15-year-old son was born, he has been a great milk drinker. Now, at 6ft tall, healthy, active and without an ounce of fat on him, he drinks between 12 and 16 pints of milk a week, and we're a little worried about the possible long-term effects. He is of mixed Indian/English background – I say this because I know that lactose intolerance can be a problem for Asians, having experienced it first hand. What can we advise him?

What a horrible tragedy! He's fit, fat-free, 6ft tall. He's practically superhuman. Let's stop this madness!

Fortunately, Dr. Tom Clark doesn't see the need to panic. In fact, he says, calmly, "There are a whole lot worse teenage habits to have than drinking a lot of milk."


I can't help but be reminded of PETA's horrifying - and failed - "Got Beer" campaign. Back in 2000, they seriously tried to make the claim. "The campaign compares the nutritional and moral benefits of beer vs. milk, and says beer comes out on top."

Honestly, milk is better for your 15-year-old child than beer. As long as he's fit and doesn't start showing lactose intolerance symptoms, then he's just fine. Maybe he'll become a doctor, even, giving more good medical advice.

Animal Glandular Products

"Search" is the most amazing aspect of the Internet. Forget about YouTube or FailBlog. It's when you enter terms into Search that you find the things that prove that solipsism can't be true. Your mind could never invent these, so it's impossible that the universe is a figment of your imagination.

Don't believe me? Then believe your eyes. I present Animal Glandular Products: Milk, Camel, Infant Formula, Lactose Intolerance, Ambergris, Chocolate Milk, Lanolin, Dairy Farming, Milkshake.

Milkshake?

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Frijj?

It's a brand name of milkshake. And the madness comes full circle.

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A Better Way to Use Lactose

Are you lactose-intolerant? Do you turn up your nose at milk? Are you so contemptuous of dairy that you feel you'd rather stick your foot in it rather than drinking it?

Go ahead. That may be a good idea.

Erin Andrews, the ESPN reporter, had an article on Zimbio.com talking about the best way to get a spa-quality pedicure at home.

Erin Andrews photo courtesy of Drew Shealy via Wikipedia

Point number three:

3. Soak feet in a flat-bottomed tub filled with warm water. To create a spa-like experience, add in bath salts, aromatherapy oil or epsom salt, then soak for 10 minutes. Try adding one-half cup of milk to your foot bath; the lactose will help loosen dead skin.

Is this true? Why should this work? What's the mechanism?

I can't imagine any answers to these questions. Frankly, I think it's totally insane quackery.

It can't hurt you in any way I can think of, though, so if you want to have fun with milk you can't drink, be my guest.

Attention Lawyers: The Other MooTopia

In my last post I talked about MooTopia, a "designer milk" that's been around for years, yet has such a low profile that its own company's website doesn't even mention it.

It gets funnier. Unless you're a corporate lawyer.

Mootopia is also the latest ad campaign from the California Milk Processor Board. Which you shouldn't care about in the least, unless you're one of the people who live for this sort of stuff. In that case you know them as the progenitors of the insanely successfully "got milk?" ad avalanche that's been running for 17 years!

Every once in a while, though, they crank out a variation. And starting just this past April, the new ad campaign - from the same fabled ad firm - has been "the comic complications of living someplace where one’s milk cup always runneth over — a 'milky magical land' known as Mootopia."

You read that correctly. The most powerful force in the milk world stole another milk manufacturer's brand name as the focus of their new campaign.

[Disclaimer: Hey, for all I know there was a deal made by Select Milk Producers Inc., the makers of MooTopia milk, to license the name MooTopia to the California Milk Processor Board. But I haven't yet found a single reference that links the two. Yes, you're reading about it here first. A Planet Lactose exclusive. Stop the presses!]

Here's what Stuart Elliott of New York Times has to say about the campaign.

On a Web site (VisitMootopia.com) and in television commercials, female inhabitants of Mootopia, using straws to drink from a lake of milk, learn how problematic having beautiful, shiny hair can be. The men are all so strong from drinking milk that arm-wrestling contests settle no arguments.

And the dentist in Mootopia realizes he chose the wrong profession because he cannot even give away free cleanings to people with what he calls "perfect teeth."

Running ads about the effects of deprivation "was a strategy that worked well for us lo those many years," said Steve James, executive director of the milk board in San Clemente, Calif.

But some recent, short-term initiatives that played up the functional benefits of milk — like a campaign spoofing the steroids scandal in baseball, proclaiming milk was a "performance-enhancing substance" — were well received, he added.

That led to consideration for a shift in the direction of the campaign, Mr. James said, to portraying milk as a "superdrink," superior to sports drinks, sodas or energy drinks, "without getting all clinical."

The website is VisitMootopia.com, a flash animation hog that takes forever to load. (Forget about viewing it on your iPads.) All the commercials are there. And only there. They've been removed from YouTube. (And quite properly, since they were uploaded without permission. There is a mootopia channel, but oops: it's a user named mootopia.)

I love corporate screw-ups because I'm a one-person operation and I have to do all the work and make sure everything is right all the time. Corporations pay hundreds of people thousands of dollars to do similar stuff and still manage to get it wrong astoundingly more often than I do.

Oh, please send this around until it goes viral. I'd love to read about the milk ad superfirm of Goodby, Silverstein & Partners looking for Dewey, Cheatum, and Howe to whip up a quick settlement wiping the white milk from their red faces.

Milk Means Milk Say Milk Producers

When I write about soy "milk" or vegan "ice cream," I'm always careful to put the words into quotes. Unless I forget. Which I usually do.

Most people don't bother with the quotes. Milk is any white liquid, or else there'd be no such thing as milk of magnesia or milkweed or the lac chemicals like lactates or lactalbumin. Everybody knows that soy "milk" is just the white liquid that is pressed out of soy beans, and almond "milk" and rice "milk" are similar liquids made from those bases. None of them are the same as the milk that mammals make, whether that's from cows or sheep or goats or camels or human nursing mothers.

Everybody knows that, right?

That stops me, right there. If I've found out anything at all from writing about, well, anything and everything, is that nobody knows nothing. Nutritional information is a dark hole that people fall into and the origins of food are a mystery as impenetrable as those by Dan Brown. At worst, parents kill kids by serving them soy milk instead of infant formula.

Therefore I have some sympathy for, of all people, the National Milk Producers Federation.

According to an article by Leslie Kwoh of the Newark Star-Ledger:

Tired of competing with "phony" milk beverages made from soy, almond and rice, the group today petitioned the Food and Drug Administration to restrict the use of the word to only animal-based products.

"The FDA has allowed the meaning of 'milk' to be watered down to the point where many products that use the term have never seen the inside of a barn," said Jerry Kozak, president and CEO of the federation, in a statement. "Although some phony dairy foods may have a passing resemblance to their authentic counterparts, they are very different in nutritional value."

European countries see no problem with requiring phrases like "soy beverage" to be used instead of "soy milk." The question is whether the issue creates enough confusion to be worth the time and money that the changeover would cost. Obviously the Milk Producers think the word "milk" is sufficiently valuable that it's worth their while to fight for its exclusive use.

Next time you see people making air quotes around the word "milk," refrain from punching them. Maybe they're not being obnoxious. Just accurate and nutritionally pedantic.

Milk Promotes Itself to Teens

Most Americans fail to get enough calcium in their diets, teens especially. As Dr. Nancy Krebs reported at the NIH LI Conference, most Americans get the vast majority of their dietary calcium from dairy products.

Put those facts together and you have an opportunity for milk to promote itself to teens. Not surprisingly, the Milk Processor Education Program (MilkPEP), the "Got Milk?" people, jumped heavily onto target market.

Successful Promotions magazine (there's magazine for everything) ran an article on MilkPEP's Get Fit by Finals campaign. The article Got Fitness? by Jean Erickson is available in Flash Paper format, the new worst way to read text on a computer screen. (Yes, it keeps viewers from copying text by highlighting and pasting, but who would want to copy text that they can't read?)

The Internet-heavy campaign features NBA All-Star Chris Paul of the New Orleans Hornets (give them back the Jazz name already) and WNBA All-Star Diana Taurasi. "Activation kits" were also sent to 40,000 schools.



It all seems to work.

Web traffic increased by 17% over previous teen fitness programs, and repeat visits to the site rose to an all-time record.

No hint in the article of how the program handled lactose intolerant, milk allergic, or vegan students, though.

Whole Milk or Low Fat? The Answer's Not Clear.

Whenever the professional nutritional community discusses the use of dairy products, they always recommend using low-fat or even fat-free milk and dairy products. Courtney Helgoe argues that this advice may be totally wrong in an article for Experience Life Magazine.

Her argument is interesting, although not completely convincing. She highlights a major problem, one that I constantly complain about, that there are far too few good studies about the role of an individual food in the totality of our diets and many of the ones that exist are not as comprehensive as people make them out to be.

However, what makes her argument less than it could be is that she keeps talking about low-fat diets interchangeably with diets that use low-fat milk. There is no reason whatsoever to think that the people who take whole milk out of their diets are getting sufficient - or way too much - fat from other sources.

The entire article is interesting and well-researched and I recommend reading it with that caveat in mind.

Except. If the article were simply about the fat content of milk, I probably wouldn't bother to critique it at all. This is a blog about lactose intolerance. What jumped to my eye was a statement about the lactose in milk that I think is just plain wrong.

It's also likely that one will drink much more skim milk than whole (or eat more low-fat yogurt, fat-free sour cream, low-fat ice cream, etc.) for three reasons:

1.It generally takes larger servings of low-fat foods than full-fat foods to switch on our bodies' satiety signals.
2.There’s a psychological tendency to feel that because we're "being good" by eating these low-calorie, low-fat products, we are justified in "making up for it" by eating more of them — or more of something else.
3.Low-fat foods don’t keep us satisfied for as long and may also destabilize blood sugar, so we're likely to experience cravings to want to eat again sooner.

This last point deserves some explanation: Low- and no-fat dairy delivers more fast-absorbing lactose to the bloodstream, and more potential for corresponding insulin spikes and resultant sugar cravings. Full-fat dairy doesn’t have this effect. "The proportion of lactose decreases with every increase in milk-fat content," [Anne Mendelson in Milk: The Surprising Story of Milk Through the Ages] explains. So relative to skim milk, "heavy cream contains only minute amounts."

It's true that the lactose content of dairy products gets lower as the fat content gets higher. But the difference is hardly huge. "Minute" is the wrong word to use.

Check my Big List of Lactose Percentages. Heavy cream, which I have listed as whipping cream, has 60% of the lactose of skim milk. That's a difference, but not as significant as the quote would make out.

Lowering fats in your diet is still probably a good thing. If the only difference you make is to eat low-fat dairy products and you think that's sufficient you're wrong. Nor will taking out fats work if you devour tons of empty sugar calories. A good diet is a balance across all foods, all categories, all meals.

See table below for lactose percentages in fluid milks.

Fluid Milks	Range	Average
Regular Whole Milk	3.7-5.1%	4.8%
2% Lowfat Milk	3.7-5.3%	4.9%
1% Lowfat Milk	4.8-5.5%	5.0%
Nonfat (Skim) Milk	4.3-5.7%	5.2%
Chocolate Milk	4.1-4.9%	5.0%
Half-and-half	4.0-4.3%	4.2%
Light Cream	3.7-4.0%	3.9%
Whipping Cream	2.8-3.0%	2.9%

Modified Milk Ingredients

Jeff sent me a nice email, citing my website as the starting point he needed to track down a mystery in the ingredients list.

Following a link I originally got from one of your pages led me eventually to the first actual explanation I have seen of what exactly “modified milk ingredients” signifies in an ingredient list. From: MilkIngredients.ca.

Question:

What is meant by the description: Modified Milk Ingredients?

Answer:

The term "Modified Milk Ingredients" can be used on a product label where the formulation call is for a blend of a dairy by-product (such as whey) with a milk-based ingredient (such as skim milk powder/whole milk powder.) Rather than list the ingredients separately, the manufacturer is able to use this generic description which also allows for changes to be made to the dairy formulation at a later date without having to re-do the label information on the packaging material. In this scenario the product has been "modified" by mechanical means.

The use of the term "Modified" in this case should not be confused with the term "Genetically Modified Organism" (GMO) which involves a product/ingredient for which the composition has been altered chemically or genetically from its original form.

Remember that this answer is taken off of a Canadian site so the technicalities may not be exactly equivalent under U.S. law. It should still be close enough to warn you that the contents will be a dried milk powder and dried milk powders are high in lactose.

Good Afternoon, Calgary

A little late, unless they do reruns or repeats, but I did a live interview with Canadian radio station CHQR today. Mike Blanchard interviewed me to get my reactions on an article that had appeared in the Toronto Globe and Mail called "Is milk good for your kids?"

Hey, you know me. Try to pin me down on a complicated, contentious subject and I strike back with a forthright "Yes. And No." Which I believe strongly.

The article is mostly one sided, with eminent doctors citing studies that have shown some negative effect of milk. These articles are true but the kind of truth that results from not mentioning any studies on the other side, like those that show that low-fat milk can help control, even lower, high blood pressure and so lower hypertension. The alternative view is given by representatives of farmers groups, who unfairly are not given a chance to cite particular studies.

If you read carefully you see that even the nay-sayers are reluctant to remove milk from children's diet. They do question whether the Canadian government guidelines should proclaim it to be "essential".

I agree that milk is definitely not essential for those children and adults who are allergic to milk. A great many alternatives now can be found in stores, "milk" substitutes made from soy, rice, nuts, hemp, and coconuts. Parents need to compare the nutritional labeling to regular milk to ensure that the nutrients these "milks" contains are close to the original. With dozens of different brands and styles and market segments aimed for, ingredients often vary widely.

Those of us who are lactose intolerant can use these products as well, but we can also find ready-made lactose-free milk and other diary products or use lactase pills - several brands of which are made by Canadian companies - to reduce symptoms if you're having regular dairy products.

Dairy is well known for high calcium content in a palatable form. There is calcium in cheese and pizza and ice cream and custards and all the other delicious dairy products that are omnipresent in western food cultures. You can trying getting your kids to load up on green vegetables and fish for their calcium but many parents report that it's a harder job.

And there is a hidden danger of merely yanking milk away from a group likely to drink large quantities of it. The alternative is all too often not soy "milk" but soda. Sweet soda contains twice as much sugar per glass than milk does and has virtually none of the many nutrients milk is famous for, according to NutritionData.com:


In short:

• Know what problem you're trying to solve.
• Know both the pros and cons of the food you're concerned about and the food you want to replace it with.
• Learn whether your child will accept and adapt to the new diet.
• Learn to stop being frightened. Unless you child had a true allergy, which only affects 2-3% of children, and therefore must eliminate milk, dairy products are always an option. They may not be essential. They may not be necessary, since vegans can have perfectly healthy diet with the same kind of attention and intimate knowledge of their food that I suggest. But there is no good reason to think that they are actively harmful. The data is sketchy and limited. We need better studies all around before we start eliminating major food groups.

In the end it's a private choice for adults and a reasoned choice for parents of children. You can keep a child perfectly healthy and happy either way. Convenience, cost, and availability, especially of packaged food, restaurant meals, and eating with Friends and family, may become the determining factor.

You can find a middle course through the dueling experts. It's called common sense. Parents are good at finding that middle ground, even in a subject as contentious and poorly understood as milk and dairy.

Milk Doesn't Cause Mucus

The claim that milk creates mucus or phlegm that may or may not be the result of a milk allergy has been around for years, so I suppose that it's not surprising that we'll need years to dispel it. I keep trying. I posted Udder Confusion in 2006 and Milk: No Mucus, No Asthma in 2007 so it's time to attack the myth yet again.

I'm getting help from Dr Raymond Mullins, an allergy specialist interviewed by Genelle Weule for ABC.net.au.

[W]hile many people swear milk produces mucus, the effect can't be explained by science, says allergy specialist Dr Ray Mullins.

A 2005 review of studies concluded that there was no link between milk consumption and mucus production or asthma. In one study, participants infected with the common cold virus reported symptoms of increased in mucus production after drinking milk, but when their mucus production was actually measured there was no statistical difference. In another study, there was no difference in the sensation experienced between drinking soy milk and cow's milk.

This doesn't mean people don't experience the sensation, says Mullins, but rather that there is no actual increase in mucus production.

He puts the sensation down to the texture and viscosity of milk, and notes that most people do not report similar effects with other dairy products such as cheese.

If you believe that milk will cause mucus, then any feelings of mucus you get from milk will simply reinforce that belief whether or not any true increase is present.

There's no scientific connection, though, nothing that can be found in theory or isolated in tests. If you can drink milk, then know the facts about it and make your own decisions based on those facts, not unfounded beliefs.

"Milks" Galore: Soy, Rice, Almond, and Hemp

Over at the Los Angeles Times, Elena Conis writes an amazing piece comparing cow's milk and goat's milk to a wide array of milk substitutes, soy "milk", rice "milk", almond "milk", and hemp "milk."

It's amazing for two big reasons. One is that no errors pop out at me the way they normally do in articles written by reporters. The second is that it's dated Oct. 19, 2009, today being Oct. 17, 2009. Sunday paper articles often come out early, but Monday articles? Tis truly strange.

Conis also glancingly covers most of the major claims made by the various sides in the issues and looks at the medical studies on them. Most of what she says is that there isn't much good evidence either way for milk or the various milk substitutes being globally harmful or helpful. You can drink them without fears but they're not a cure-all. That's also the right approach to take.

The link goes to the single page version of the article. There is also a separate nutrient breakdown comparison chart accompanying the article.

Anti-Milk Nonsense: The Dumbth List

Although it's usually attributed to Mark Twain, it was really Charles Haddon Spurgeon who said "A lie will go round the world while truth is pulling its boots on."

I feel the same about the Internet and stupidity. Or Dumbth, as Steve Allen once called it. Just two weeks ago yet another deluded vegan made my blood pressure soar by posting - in a college newspaper, no less - that:

Humans are the only animals on the planet that drink another animal’s milk. Thus, by definition, drinking cows’ milk is extremely unnatural.

You can't approach that statement. It makes no sense from any direction. There are no foods that humans are designed to eat. Not one. They're omnivores, eating every digestible plant or animal part on the planet. And the list of what humans do that other animals don't would fill the Internet. Because it is the Internet.

How could you look yourself in the mirror after saying that? Isn't reason itself one of humanity's unique attributes?

Number two on the Dumbth list is harder to track. Here's my nominee for tonight, mostly because I just read it online and I haven't calmed down yet.

"Margarine is but one molecule from being plastic."

You need to know a little something to understand just how incredibly dumb that statement is. Not much. A grade schooler with a decent science teacher would make a face at an adult spouting that line. I could wish more decent science teachers existed in the world.

Margarine, of course, is a concoction. It's no more a single thing than butter is a single thing. Butter is mostly animal fat with a sprinkling of animal protein and sugar (our old friend lactose). Margarine imitates butter by substituting vegetable oil and water for the animal fat. The rest is a sprinkling of preservatives, stabilizers, and colorants. Nobody denies that margarine is artificial. But it's artificial in the same way a cake is artificial. Cakes don't grow. They are put together from a recipe.

The whole "one molecule away" business is just as bad. Lactose is made out of two simpler sugars, glucose and galactose. The chemical formula for glucose is C₆H₁₂O₆. The chemical formula for galactose is C₆H₁₂O₆. Yes, they are chemically identical. They are structured differently and that gives them different properties. The sugar called maltose is composed of a glucose plus a glucose. Starches are composed of strings of glucoses. Identical, but structured differently. Chemicals - and everything is a chemical or a conglomeration of chemicals - can vary tremendously even if their molecules or atoms are the same. Being one molecule away is meaningless. It's like saying that the U.S. is one ocean away from Europe.

Snopes.com traces the origin of this bit of idiocy back to a 1999 email. The line is too good to kept to only one food. They collected some of the variants.:

I was told that the difference between Cool Whip and Styrofoam is one molecule... is this true???

Is velveeta processed cheese food really one molecule different from plastic?

heard that Pam spray is 1 molecule away from plastic and is therefore dangerous??

I am tired of hearing my husband say that Cheez Whiz is only 2 ingredients different from garbage bags. Can you please help me set him straight?

Happy to set him straight, my dear.

If you have other examples of high-level dumbth about dairy, share them. Let's see if we can create a debunkers' top ten.

Milk Not Dangerous

I don't normally take potshots at columnists at college student newspapers.

Humans are the only animals on the planet that drink another animal’s milk. Thus, by definition, drinking cows’ milk is extremely unnatural.

OK, that's the argument I hate the most in the world. Humans are the only animal who do ten million things. Humans are the only animal who cook foods. Humans are...

Where was I? Right. Beth Mendenhall is just a columnist for the Kansas State Collegian. I can hold professional reporters up to ridicule if they get basic facts and information wrong, but I can't really expect a student to be expert on every subject.

In fact, 60 percent of adults worldwide are unable to effectively digest lactose, the main sugar found in milk. So why do Americans insist on consuming massive amounts of dairy products?

Stop that. Stop quoting. You're just taunting me.

You know who's supposed to be correcting the illogical and ignorance of college students? College professors. I don't know if the Collegian runs many articles by professors, but they did the next best thing. They published a point by point rebuttal by Ben Wileman, a graduate student in veterinary medicine - a pretty advanced student since he already has a Dr. in front of his name - under the title of Milk not a dangerous thing for people to drink.

Beth wrote the usual drivel that can be found at a million places on the Internet. There is absolutely no reason to subject yourself to it. The piece by Dr. Wileman has sense and facts. I recommend it. Please read it. I hope that he goes on to have this calming and edifying effect on legions of students in the future.

Cream vs. Milk: The Battle of Carbs

Here's an email I received with confusion whose source I never could quite figure out.

I'm a diabetic, so I really limit the carbs I consume in a day. That's how I stay off meds. I see that milk has quite a lot of carbs I suppose due to the lactose. But cream does not have a significant amount of carbs. So thats what I stick with. Why !! does cream not have carbs or lactose?? Is there some process that takes place in manufacturing the product that takes it out?? I really curious about this. I have found a half&half product that claims to have taken the fat out. So that's what I use. It claims to have very low carbs.

Milk, like most foods, really, is water plus small amounts of carbohydrates, fats, and proteins.

The carbohydrates in milk are all from the sugar, which is lactose. This is true for all forms of liquid milk, from skim milk to heavy cream. The only major difference is the amount of fat they contain. The lactose - carbohydrate - content is similar.

Whole milk 4.8%
Half-and-half 4.2%
Cream 3.9%

[The numbers are taken from my own Lactose Percentages page in my Lactose Intolerance Clearinghouse.]

Not surprisingly, half-and-half - half milk and half cream - has a lactose content about halfway in between.

The difference between them in an ounce, which is about a splash of cream in coffee, would be about 1/4 of a gram. That's a really tiny amount.

Now, about the low fat half and half. That sounds oxymoronic, but such substitutes really exist, both in low fat and fat-free varieties. Here's an ingredients list for one such:

Nonfat milk, milk, corn syrup solids, artificial color, sugar, dipotassium phosphate, sodium citrate, mono and diglycerides, carageenan, natural and artificial flavors, vitamin A palmitate.

It's just fat-free milk bulked up with sugar - corn syrup solids, which means it may be lower fat, but would be higher in carbohydrates, not lower.

And this site has a direct nutritional comparison.

Half And Half (Land O Lakes)
Serving Size: 2Tbsp (30mL); Calories: 25, Total Fat: 1.5g, Carbs: 1g, Protein: 1g

Fat Free Half and Half (Land O Lakes)
Serving Size: 2 Tbsp; Calories: 20, Total Fat: 0g, Carbs: 3g, Protein: 1g

Just as I said. The amount of carbs increase in the fat free variety. You need to balance off the solids so that the fluid doesn't taste too watery. The half and half has 3.5 grams of solids; the fat free version has 4 grams of solids, just distributed differently.

Switching fat and sugar for all sugar isn't much of a bargain for anybody, and particularly not for a diabetic.

Always read the nutritional information given. It will save you in the end.

Planet Lactose World News

I try to remind everyone here on a somewhat regular basis that lactose intolerance is a worldwide problem. Every known culture has a percentage of people who are lactose intolerant.

I found an article by Julia Ranniko on Monsters and Critics.com that discusses lactose intolerance in Germany.

"For some people, just a few drops of milk in their cafe au lait can overflow the barrel. But a lot of other people can handle minimal levels of lactose pretty well," says Isabelle Keller of the German Society for Nutrition.

The food industry has taken note of the problem and is regularly offering products with reduced lactose levels - milk, yoghurt, cream, cheese or pudding. But hidden lactose can be tricky, warns Keller, since lactose can be included in unexpected products, such as pre-prepared soups, rolls or sausage.

That's the same problem that people in the U.S. face. And according to the article, as many as 15% of Germans are LI, a high figure considered that most estimates only put the percentage in the U.S, at around 20%.

And now for the news from China. How many of you knew that China's two biggest dairy giants were based in Inner Mongolia? Put your hand down, you're not being serious. No, this is really true says an article by Ding Qingfen in China Daily.com.

China, with no history of consuming dairy in major amounts, still drinks only one-quarter as much milk per capita as the world average. The dairy giants are trying to increase that consumption. And one of the ways they're doing so is to emphasize the availability of low-lactose milk, a must in a nation where most people are lactose intolerant.

Yili launched a nationwide promotion for its high-end categories after the Spring Festival in late January and "it proved to be big success", [Zhang Jianqiu, executive president and spokesperson of Yili] said.

"Our top dairy products such as Satine and Low Lactose Milk generated the biggest profits in the first quarter," he noted.

One Third of Canadian Toddlers Are Vitamin D Deficient

I've posted that teens and adults are not getting sufficient vitamin D. But toddlers? Don't toddlers, you know, drink milk?

Apparently not enough, according to the TARGet Kids! (Toronto Area Research Group) study, a cross-sectional population-based dietary survey and clinical examination of Canadian toddlers. Medscape reporter Martha Kerr wrote that the study found 82% of the toddlers had vitamin D insufficiency and 32% were outright deficient.

You'd never guess what the risk factors were. OK, you'd probably guess if you've been awake at any time in the past decade. Snacking while tv watching and not enough milk drinking are the major culprits.

Low milk consumption "was independently associated with low vitamin D levels," Dr. [Jonathon Maguire, MD, a Fellow in the Division of Pediatric Medicine at the Hospital for Sick Children and the University of Toronto in Ontario] told Medscape Pediatrics. There was a 1 nmol/L increase in 25-OH vitamin D level for every ounce of milk consumed (P = .006).

High body mass index (BMI) was associated with vitamin D deficiency, with a 4.7 nmol/L decrease in 25-OH vitamin D level per BMI unit (P = .0009). "This may be associated with a higher fat content of the body," he commented. "Drinking more milk is not associated with a higher BMI, as some people think. In fact, the opposite is true."

TV viewing while snacking was also associated with vitamin D deficiency; the level is 9.6 nmol/L lower if the child watches TV while snacking (P = .022). "This might be related to more time spent indoors, a poorer nutritional intake, low levels of physical exercise ... or a combination of such factors, indicating an unhealthy lifestyle," Dr. Maguire commented.

Doctors are encouraged to screen children for these health risks, especially for drinking less than 12 ounces of a milk a day.

The study doesn't say, but for the sake of vegans I'd recommend a milk alternative that gives the equivalent calcium and vitamin to regular cow's milk.

Lactaid's 25th (and 35th) Anniversaries

When I first learned I was lactose intolerant, in 1978, I had never heard the words before. Didn't know what lactose was. Milk, well, milk was supposed to sooth the stomach. The concept made no sense.

No books were available on lactose intolerance. Almost no articles could be dug up at the library. No web, of course. I poked here and there, doing my own research.

Who doesn't know about lactose intolerance (LI) today? The phrase is a standing joke. Just mention milk and somebody will throw out a reference to LI. People think they're LI even if they're not. Consume any dairy product, suffer any digestive complaint? Boom, you're LI. See lactones on a label? Lactylates? Lactates? Lactic acid? Lactacystin? Must cause lactose intolerance. Not one of them contain any lactose, and not one of them would have been noticeable or comprehensible on a label in 1978, but today the connection is automatic. Amazing.

There were no specialty foods aimed at the lactose intolerant in 1978. What few diary alternatives existed were created for the kosher market, as a way to get around the prohibition of eating milk with meat. Today, the corner supermarket will have shelves full of milk-alternatives of all types, varieties, and bases. Some are from international food conglomerates; many are made by small firms struggling to find a niche for their products.

That's one major reason I maintain this blog, to help readers find the complete range of products and services available if you want to reduce or eliminate dairy in your life. I'm constantly passing along press releases about new foods, new companies, new cookbooks, new ways of dealing with the issue.

And by concentrating on the new, I suddenly realized how little attention I've given to the one constant in the LI world, the one that made lactose intolerance as well known as it's become, the one that everybody knows so well it's become almost the generic word. Lactaid.

I have in front of me a copy of a January 1984 news clipping announcing the introduction of LactAid brand lactose-reduced milk to Rochester. Yes, with a capital "A" in the middle. LactAid wasn't new even then. It had been introduced late in 1979. (Four years to get to Rochester. You'd think LactAid was high fashion.) New to Rochester meant new to me. No web, remember.

A quart of LactAid cost 89 cents in Wegman's then, which made it "roughly 20 to 30 cents higher than regular milk." In today's shopping trip I checked current prices. Fat-free regular milk cost 76 cents. Fat-free Lactaid was up to $2.19. We're still very much a niche market, and we continue to pay that price.

LactAid the firm had been around for a decade by then, although I didn't know that either. It's first product was a lactase powder that could be mixed with milk to remove most of the lactase. Alan Kligerman, the inventor of Sugar-Lo, an ice cream for diabetics and later Beano, introduced Lact-Aid powder in 1974, making this year Lactaid's 35th anniversary. Lactaid finally got its lactase pills on shelves in 1985.

In 1990 Dairy Ease, made by a division of a pharmaceutical giant, emerged as a competitor with its own line of milk and lactase. That energized Lactaid, which had been taken over by McNeil Consumer Products, a subsidiary of the equally gigantic Johnson & Johnson corporation. The two companies staged massive competing promotional campaigns in 1993. They have to be among the most successful ad campaigns in history. Lactose intolerance became a household word.

Lactaid eventually won out over Dairy Ease, which no longer makes lactase and whose milk is distributed by Land O'Lakes but is much harder to find. In fact, Lactaid has no real competitors in the LI market. It just keeps rolling along. While I've mentioned Lactaid products and promotions a few times in this blog, there's never been a reason for me to do a big intro to the firm. But anniversaries count, even if they're only meaningful to me.

The company's website, lactaid.com, unfortunately requires Adobe Flash Player to see all the contents, an annoyance that is increasingly common and worthwhile only to the graphics types in the marketing department, not actual consumers.

The products are only accessible through a lot of mousing and clicking, so I'll summarize them here:

Milk: fat free, low fat (1%), reduced fat (2%), whole, chocolate low fat (1%); all except the chocolate also available calcium-fortified
Organic Milk: fat free, reduced fat (2%)
Dietary Supplements [lactase]: original, fast act caplets, fast act chewables
Ice cream: chocolate, vanilla, cookies & cream, strawberries & cream, butter pecan
Cottage Cheese: low fat
Eggnog: Christmas holiday season availability only
Evaporated Milk: available only in Puerto Rico

None of the products are truly national. The Fast Act lactase is available in the largest number of states, but many of the products can be found in fewer than a half dozen.

That's too bad, but at least the lactase caplets and chewables are available online from anywhere in the country from such dealers as Amazon.

So happy 35th anniversary, Lactaid. Hope you stick around for another 35 years.

Milk

"Know your enemy" is one of those old adages that live up to their reps as sage advice. I try to preach knowledge and understanding of all things related to food, nutrition, digestion, regulation, merchandising, and a whole lot of other heavy topics.

What's the one most majorest enemy to deepen your knowledge of? How about milk itself?

There aren't too many good resources on milk. Nor are there any good readable full histories of milk in our culture.

Anne Mendelson's Milk: The Surprising Story of Milk Through the Ages, despite the title, isn't that good history we've been needing. It's barely a history at all, but a variety of text surrounding 120 recipes, all of which, naturally, contain milk or milk products.

Oh well, it's an interesting oddity with the kind of background material the internet seldom bothers with.

Product Description

Part cookbook—with more than 120 enticing recipes—part culinary history, part inquiry into the evolution of an industry, Milk is a one-of-a-kind book that will forever change the way we think about dairy products.

Anne Mendelson, author of Stand Facing the Stove, first explores the earliest Old World homes of yogurt and kindred fermented products made primarily from sheep’s and goats’ milk and soured as a natural consequence of climate. Out of this ancient heritage from lands that include Greece, Bosnia, Turkey, Israel, Persia, Afghanistan, and India, she mines a rich source of culinary traditions.

Mendelson then takes us on a journey through the lands that traditionally only consumed milk fresh from the cow—what she calls the Northwestern Cow Belt (northern Europe, Great Britain, North America). She shows us how milk reached such prominence in our diet in the nineteenth century that it led to the current practice of overbreeding cows and overprocessing dairy products. Her lucid explanation of the chemical intricacies of milk and the simple home experiments she encourages us to try are a revelation of how pure milk products should really taste.

The delightfully wide-ranging recipes that follow are grouped according to the main dairy ingredient: fresh milk and cream, yogurt, cultured milk and cream, butter and true buttermilk, fresh cheeses. We learn how to make luscious Clotted Cream, magical Lemon Curd, that beautiful quasi-cheese Mascarpone, as well as homemade yogurt, sour cream, true buttermilk, and homemade butter. She gives us comfort foods such as Milk Toast and Cream of Tomato Soup alongside Panir and Chhenna from India. Here, too, are old favorites like Herring with Sour Cream Sauce, Beef Stroganoff, a New Englandish Clam Chowder, and the elegant Russian Easter dessert, Paskha. And there are drinks for every season, from Turkish Ayran and Indian Lassis to Batidos (Latin American milkshakes) and an authentic hot chocolate.

This illuminating book will be an essential part of any food lover’s collection and is bound to win converts determined to restore the purity of flavor to our First Food.

New Yugoslavian Lactose-Free Milk

Seems to be a boom in European products for the lactose intolerant. Following yesterday's discovery of a Dutch manufacturer of lactase capsules comes the announcement of a new lactose-free milk.

What looks to be a press release is brief but to the point.

Imlek has presented a new product in its portfolio, Moja Kravica lactose-free milk, for all persons with intolerance to milk sugar, i.e. lactose.

This easily digestible product of Imlek will enable all milk consumers to enjoy its taste and beneficial effects, free of discomfort caused by lactose in ordinary milk.

Moja Kravica lactose-free milk is rich with calcium, proteins, vitamins, and lactic acid, and in addition to a good taste, it is ideal for any time of a day and for all those with developed intolerance to lactose and people who take care of a healthy and balanced lifestyle and consumption of milk, as an important source of calcium.

Imlek the company is located in Belgrade, Yugoslavia. Those familiar with the language can take a look at the company's website and tell me what exactly the crocodile superhero is promoting.

Lactose-Free Milk Lasts Longer

Lactose-free milk is actual real cow's milk, exactly like regular milk in every way. Except one. Maybe two.

First, of course, lactose-free milk is lactose-free. Chemically and nutritionally, that's not a big difference. The lactase enzyme is used to break down - digest - the complex sugar lactose into the simple sugars galactose and glucose. That makes the resulting milk slightly sweeter. It's an oddity of sugar chemistry that both components of lactose are sweeter individually than when combined. Everything else about the milk stays the same.

Like almost all other commercially-available milks in the U.S. lactose-free milk is both homogenized and pasteurized. Homogenization breaks down the fat globules in milk and disperses them so that they don't separate and float up to the top. In the old days, the fat - in the form of cream - could be skimmed off the top of milk. That left the rest of the milk with uneven and constantly changing amounts of fat. People preferred milk with a set and regulated amount of fat, so homogenized milk is standard. Pasteurization is also standard. Indeed, mandated by law. Pasteurization kills the microorganisms that can make you sick from milk, and not lactose intolerant sick but deadly ill sick.

There are a number of types of pasteurization. The McClatchy newspaper syndicate had a column on milk that covers some of these types.

Q: What's the difference between milk that expires in 7 to 10 days and milk like Lactaid that lasts for more than a month?

A: First, remember that the date on the milk isn't an expiration date, it's a sell-by date. The store has to sell it or pull it by that date.

That doesn't mean you can't continue to use the milk. Milk is vulnerable to very slight temperature variations, always a problem in home refrigerators, which may not stay below 40 degrees or where the door may be opened and closed constantly.

But as long as your milk is kept cold in a container that blocks light, it usually will keep past the date.

The difference in the sell-by date on milk products is in how they were pasteurized.

In addition to regular pasteurization, where milk is heated to 161 degrees for 15 seconds to kill bacteria, there is low-heat pasteurization -- 145 to 150 degrees for 30 minutes -- and ultra-heat, in which the milk is heated to as high as 250 degrees for less than a second.

Ultra-high heat is used for many specialty milk products, such as lactose-free milk and even some certified-organic milks, to extend their shelf life.

Those products are usually transported longer distances or kept longer before they're sold.

The simple truth is that lactose-free milk sells in tiny quantities compared to regular milk. And the average consumer of lactose-free milk uses much less than the many families with children that go through gallons of the regular milk every milk. So fewer people buy lactose-free milk less often. That's powerful incentive to make milk that keeps for as long as possible. The ultra-pasteurization process can make tiny changes to the taste of the milk that some people notice, though most don't. There should be absolutely no difference in any nutritional value, though.

Some regular milk also comes ultra-pasteurized, including some other types of specialty milks and also so-called "shelf stable" milk that needs no refrigeration. Ultra-pasteurized milk is also much more common in Europe, which is why many tourists find the taste of milk different there.

You can do anything with ultra-pasteurized milk that you can with regular milk. And in comes in all forms, whole, 2%, 1%, fat free, chocolate, fortified, flavored. It just lasts longer. And that's a good thing.