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.

Non-Dairy Protein Drinks

Last month I talked about lactose-free whey protein drinks. The lactose in those drinks is removed by a filtration process. The underlying protein is still dairy whey, however, so I can only recommend them for those with lactose intolerance, not for others who are trying to avoid dairy.

Patricia Biesen on examiner.com does a review of Dairy-free protein shakes, including some made with hemp and pea proteins.

Her short article is labeled "part 1" and she wrote that "In my next post I will post some tips and tricks to disguise the taste [of the protein drinks]", so I'm going to assume you'll be able to see some follow-up pages by the time you click over there.

Lactose-Free Whey Protein Drinks

When I researched my book, Milk Is Not for Every Body, in the 1990s, I went to the whey manufacturers for guidance. I learned that whey protein concentrate was normally a high-lactose product, with as much as a 55% lactose content. Whey protein isolate, though, was a very low lactose product, with no more than 0.5% lactose. See my Lactose Percentages page for these and many other numbers.

Sometime in the 2000s, this began to change. I started seeing products containing whey protein concentrate labeling themselves as lactose free. This disturbed me because I didn't see how it was possible.

The FAQ page on the website of the Whey Protein Institute would seem to confirm this:

Q: If I'm lactose intolerant should I avoid whey protein?

A: Individuals with lactose intolerance should select a pure whey protein isolate, which has less than 0.1 gram of lactose per tablespoon (20 grams). This is less lactose than the amount found in a cup of yogurt and research has shown that most people with lactose intolerance have no trouble taking this very small amount of lactose. Individuals with lactose intolerance should avoid whey protein concentrates as they usually contain lactose and the amount can vary greatly from product to product.

Yet, entering lactose-free whey protein concentrate into Google yields numerous hits. And federal regulations require that any product that labels itself as lactose free must be completely lactose free.

So how is this possible? A new manufacturing process. Take a look at this Product Bulletin pdf from Hilmar Ingredients. The site is protected so I can't copy directly, but here's a captured image of the relevant section if you don't want to click over:


The cross-flow microfiltration process is mentioned in various websites. I doubt if Hilmar is the only company to use it but the other hits I've seen have been to end users rather than manufacturers.

Anyone who is allergic to dairy proteins should of course stay away from these products despite their being lactose-free. They do give another option to those of us who are only lactose intolerant.

Whig = Whey

Liberal and conservative are labels - and sometimes slurs - thrown around in the news every day. Not many people know that their use in the U.S. were greatly influenced by the parties that dominated Victorian England, the Liberals and the Conservatives. Those names developed as descriptives from two earlier parties, the Whigs and the Tories.

Those grew out of political, social, and religious divisions among the aristocracy of England and Scotland starting in the late 1600s. They grew deeper after Scotland was forced into a union with England in 1707, creating the United Kingdom of Great Britain.

The Whigs weren't exactly men of the people, but they gathered their strength from the countryside, the great rural estates, and opposed those who were directly supportive of the King and known as the Crown party.

Over time, the Whigs became more representative of the masses, advocating an increase in the suffrage, allowing more people - people defined as men who were white and not poor - to vote. They called for Parliament to rule the country rather than the King or Queen. They were the anti-slavery party as well. The Tories represented more control and order.

Americans knew these political fights as well as they did their own. Our modern Democratic and Republican parties have evolved to represent similar divisions in the U.S.

Something I didn't know was the origin of the term Whig. In his excellent history, How the Scots Invented the Modern World, Arthur Herman gives this explanation:

Whigg is Scots for a kind of sour milk or whey. In hard times it was the main diet of the poor and indigent; since many of the Covenanters were thought to be lower-class trash, opponents taunted them with the word. When a group of Covenanters marched on Edinburgh to present the Engagement with Charles I in 1848, it became known as the "march of the whiggamores" or "sour milk men." Whiggamore soon shortened to Whig: in John Locke's day, it referred to anyone bound and determined to have a Protestant succession, whether in Scotland or England.

Whey Protein

Whey, you should remember from Lactose Intolerance 101, is the watery portion of milk that gets separated from the solider curds during cheesemaking. Take away the water and you have a mass of whey protein and lactose left. Both can be processed out and used in all sorts of ways. No pun intended.

There are two basic types of whey protein. Whey protein concentrate is just the powder that's left when the liquid whey is dried. It has a heavy lactose content, sometimes more than 50%. Whey protein isolate, as the name indicates, tries to isolate just the whey protein by removing the lactose. Whey protein isolate should be at least 99% pure protein, and I've seen it used in products that advertise themselves as lactose free.

How do you know what to do if the product doesn't specify concentrate or isolate? Unless there are other obvious signs, like a lactose-free label, I would avoid these products until I could doublecheck with the manufacturer.

I found a site called WheyImproved.com that has a multitude of articles on all things whey. The following is from Lactose Free Whey Protein:

Like the regular whey protein food supplements which come in the form of shakes or concentrates, lactose free whey protein food products help in muscle gain and in boosting the body�s energy level and immune system. These provide lactose intolerant people the complete health benefits of whey protein without causing gastrointestinal discomfort, diarrhea and other symptoms that affect daily life activities.

Lactose free whey protein food supplements are manufactured through the process called micro filtration. This process uses a ceramic filter to remove fat, carbohydrate and lactose from whey and isolate and purify whey protein. For every 100 grams of whey powder, 94 grams of protein is recovered which is relatively free of lactose, carbohydrate and fat. This final product is ideal in formulating food supplements fit not only for lactose intolerant individuals but also for those who are under the Atkins diet and other ketogenic diets.

Even though milk allergies can be specific to either the casein family of proteins or the whey family of proteins, many people are allergic to both. I would not recommend whey protein products for anyone who has a dairy protein allergy.

There's also a rarer variant called milk protein that will also have casein powder. It comes in a variety of blends that range from 46% lactose to 1% lactose.

Using Lactose to Make Biofuel

I'm on record as calling the use of food crops to make ethanol an idiocy. See Milk Prices at Record High.

Biofuel is not an intrinsically bad notion. There are a couple of pathways that make far more sense. One is to use land that is not suitable for food crops to grow product that can be converted. Switchgrass is one such plant.

Another pathway is to use material that is currently being thrown out as waste. Various sources of cellulose, like wood pulp, is already being converted this way.

And speaking of whey, he punned, whey is another current waste product. Whey is the part of milk that is mostly thrown away during cheesemaking, the casein protein being the useful product there. Manufacturers have been frantically trying for many years to figure out ways to use whey. You can make lactose from it, but that's a limited market.

So what about biofuel?

Where else but Wisconsin, the cheese state, would this story come from? Liz Welter of the Marshfield NewsHerald gave this report:

A fledgling business that produces ethanol from the waste product of cheese-making is ready to take wing.

A plant to commercially make the fuel from waste produced at Nasonville Dairy and other dairies will soon be underway near the cheese-making facility, said Joe VanGroll, co-owner of Dubay Ingredients and Grand Meadow Energy of Stratford.

...

Earlier attempts to make ethanol from waste weren't practical because the waste, whey, is a highly-sought commodity due to its protein -- a popular additive in both human and animal food products.

But VanGroll and [his partner, Clay] Boeger have a secret recipe.

"It's like the recipe for Coke, it's in a locked box. Only Clay and I know it," VanGroll said.

Dubay Ingredients uses waste that already has protein removed. This is called permeate -- basically water and a bit of lactose. The permeate is processed to remove the lactose, which is used to create ethanol. The permeate water becomes purified drinking water, VanGroll explained.

"We're using waste to make ethanol and there is no waste when we make it. All of the by-products can be used," Boeger said.

The world is awash in whey. Annual worldwide production exceeds 80 million metric tons. Approximately nine metric tons of whey results from the production of each metric ton of cottage cheese. Even diverting a small portion of that stream - some of which already is converted into a variety of useful and profitable chemicals, to be sure - would help with our long term needs for alternative fuel sources. Remember, no one solution will likely be found. Dozens, if not hundreds, of ingenious ways of producing biofuels are the near-term future.

Of course, no figures, either for production or costs, were given in Welter's article. This pilot plant may fail to scale to industrial size or may simply produce fuels that cost too much. Then again, what is the cost of waste? What is the price of adding tons of waste to landfills or other dumps for garbage? Let's hope that whey-based biofuels is one practical solution of the many that will be needed.

Blessed are the cheesemakers.

Cheese and Lactose

Lately it seems as if I've found at least one anti-food ailment crusader spreading his or her whine about cheese across the internet. Today's was Jay Rayner's I refuse to tolerate food intolerances on The Guardian's food page.

I suspect the vast majority of coeliacs are actually attention-seeking frauds, as with so many of the people claiming food intolerances and allergies. How many times have you heard someone claim at dinner that they couldn't eat cheese because they are 'lactose intolerant'? When, as the great American food writer Jeffrey Steingarten has pointed out, there is no lactose in cheese. The very process of cheese making removes the lactose.

I don't know who Jeffrey Steingarten is because I avoid food writers as assiduously as Rayner avoids fussy eaters, at least fussy eaters who aren't his type of fussy eater. I bet Rayner can be a terror at a dinner, sneering at the arugula or scorning the foie gras or smiling as a truffle he had nosed out of the ground earlier now appears shredded delicately over a quail's egg.

I do know that Steingarten is wrong. Not as wrong as Rayner would have him, however, but still wrong. Since unlike Rayner I do research everything I write, I found Steingarten's original statement. It's from his book The Man Who Ate Everything: And Other Gastronomic Feats, Disputes, and Pleasurable Pursuits.

I know several people who have given up cheese to avoid lactose. But fermented cheeses contain no lactose! Lactose is the sugar found in milk; 98 percent of it is drained off with the whey (cheese is made from the curds), and the other 2 percent is quickly consumed by lactic-acid bacteria in the act of fermentation.

It's true that most cheese comes from the protein-heavy curds after the lactose-laden whey is drained off. The process of aging cheese yields a hard cheese that normally has much of its lactose removed. So much so that a few cheese makers can advertise a true milk-based lactose free cheese. See the examples on my Reduced-Lactose Milk Products page on my Product Clearinghouse site.

There's a contradiction between all cheese being lactose free and only a very few making this a selling point by billing themselves as such. The reason is simple. Most cheeses are not lactose free.



(I need to make a quick side point here. Several brands of cheese that I don't list on my Reduced-Lactose page claim on their labels that they have 0 grams of lactose per serving. That claim is true but possibly misleading. U.S. law allows manufacturers to claim 0 grams of an item by rounding down from an actual value of less than 0.5 grams per serving. That doesn't sound like much. However, a serving of cheese in those cases is 1 ounce or 28 grams. If you assume that 0.4 grams of lactose remain, the lactose percentage of the serving is 1.4%. Not large, but not negligible either. How do I know that the actual amount is not really 0.3, 0.2, or 0.1 g per serving? I don't. I wish I did, but that specific number is not going to be made available to me or you or any consumer. I'm positive that the actual number is not 0.0. That's because another U.S. government regulation mandates that any food on whose package appears the words lactose free must be completely lactose free. If they could say it they would. It would be great for sales. Since they don't...)

Now, four reasons why the claim that all cheese is lactose free is wrong.

1) Not all cheese are made from curds. There are whey-based cheeses, the most familiar of which is ricotta, brown Norwegian cheeses like brunost, and German quarg. All are soft cheeses and are likely to have a lactose percentage approaching those of some liquid milks.

2) Some cheeses are not aged or hardened and produce familiar smooth or curdish cottage cheese, and cream cheese in the U.S. and has variants as paneer in India and Queso Blanco in Mexico. All of these soft cheeses normally have 3-4% lactose contents.

3) Even hard, aged cheeses show remarkable variation in lactose percentage when formally tested. I have a page I call the Really BIG List of Lactose Percentages in the Dairy Facts section of my web site. Cheese ranges were taken from Samuel A. Matz: Ingredients for Bakers, McAllen, TX: Pan-Tech International, 1987. A few averages I couldn't find in Metz appeared in Newer Knowledge of Milk and Other Fluid Dairy Products, rev. ed., National Dairy Council: 1993. As you can see for yourself, virtually every cheese shows a range of lactose from 0.0% up to a remarkable 5.2%, as high as the whey cheese ricotta.

Mozzarella, the pizza cheese often eaten in mass quantities, shows a range of 0.0-3.1% lactose. Some quick Googling found that the standard cheese pizza slice has 12-13 g of protein. Multiplying by 8 slices yields a minimum of 100 grams of cheese, maybe not far from a quarter pound if a generous hand was used, leading to the inescapable conclusion that a large pizza contains about 3 grams of lactose. I won't overstate that quantity, but I will remind people that cheese is also often added to the sauce and butter to the dough. 3 grams of cheese can cause someone sensitive to lactose to have a sore and mightily complaining intestinal track for the rest of the evening.

4) Nor does that eliminate all the cheesy comestibles. Americans have cheese food. We are entering a a realm that reinvents foods the way the witness protection program reimagines mob families.

Steve Ritter at the Chemical & Engineering News is our source scholar.

For pasteurized process cheese, the final product can have a maximum moisture content of 43% and must have at least 47% milkfat. An interesting twist is that the product alternatively can be labeled as pasteurized process American cheese when made from cheddar, colby, cheese curd, granular cheese, or a combination of these; when other varieties of cheese are included, it must be called simply American cheese.

[My Note: American cheese can have a truly wide spread, anywhere from 0.0-14.2% lactose. That's a concentrated lactose cheese product packing three times the lactose of a glass of milk per equal serving.]

Here are some of the other definitions:

Pasteurized process cheese food is a variation of process cheese that may have dry milk, whey solids, or anhydrous milkfat added, which reduces the amount of cheese in the finished product. It must contain at least 51% of the cheese ingredient by weight, have a moisture content less than 44%, and have at least 23% milkfat.



Pasteurized process cheese spread is a variation on cheese food that may contain a sweetener and a stabilizing agent, such as the polysaccharide xanthan gum or the Irish moss colloid carrageenan, to prevent separation of the ingredients. The cheese must be spreadable at 70 F, contain 44 to 60% moisture, and have at least 20% milkfat.

Pasteurized process cheese product is process cheese that doesn't meet the moisture and/or milkfat standards.

Imitation cheese is made from vegetable oil; it is less expensive, but also has less flavor and doesn't melt well.

For the record, Velveeta is pasteurized process cheese spread and Velveeta Light is pasteurized process cheese product. Cheez Whiz is labeled as pasteurized process cheese sauce, although that type isn't noted in the Code of Federal Regulations. A Kraft spokeswoman confirms that the word "sauce" just seems to be an add-on.

Eating heavy amounts of lactose may not occur very often in a formal cheese tasting among cubes of hard cheese. That may be the world of Steingarten and Rayner.

It's not mine. I know that much cheese served for the American palate has been cheapened by the use of oils or of milk fats and milk solids, each designed to return a dairy sort of taste to the final product.

Jay Rayner may never deign to enter American food blow-outs. Steingarten may choose to keep his innocence hid about the mysteries of the foods sucked down by the plebeians. Maybe the expensive, hand-labeled, personally-shipped delicacies of the garden that are dropped upon his massive center table, round and with arrow scars that carry stories that go all the way back to Guenevere and Lancelot even if the table truly was distressed by a pair of Welsh in the back of a furniture shop, maybe the good stuff sits there alone and distresses nobody.

Only Jay Rayner does. For he is a snob, and an ignorant snob at that, and worse, an ignorant snob who appears not to have learned a single thing over the past two or three years since he wrote his original column he thought so much of it and us that he reprinted it now.

Those giving him comments are giving him hell. I don't see any of the wounds doing more than glancing off, but collectively they may give him a belly ache that he'll open some comfort food for, perhaps a big can of beans on toast.

Don't tell him about Beano. It would just confuse the poor lad.

Answers to Questions from Readers, part 10

Q. What is whey? I heard it was the byproduct or waste water from cottage cheese. I've noticed that cookies or items with whey seem to bother me more than others.

Milk separates into lactose (milk sugar), whey proteins, casein proteins, water, fat, and a few vitamins and minerals. Most cheeses, not just cottage and other soft cheeses, are predominantly hardened casein. The remaining liquid is known as whey. It has some of the milk's proteins and almost all of the sugar. Commercial bakers love whey because it is indeed a cheap waste product, but one that gives a product many of the same nutritional and taste benefits of whole milk. Most commercial whey is dried, meaning that it is roughly 50-75% pure lactose and the rest mostly whey protein. If you are lactose intolerant, whey is one of the worst ingredients to encounter on a label. Most allergies seem to be to casein, but many people are allergic to the whey proteins as well. And of course, since the majority of the world's population is LI, by sheer chance many of them have protein allergies as well. It's not clear which is your problem, but you should avoid whey on a package label. See my SuperGuide to Dairy Products for more info on dairy.

Q. Do eggs contain lactose?

For some reason, probably since eggs are so often found in the "dairy" case in supermarkets, many people believe that eggs are dairy products and need to be avoided. This is completely false. Eggs come from chickens, not cows. They contain absolutely no lactose. (This is true of most mayonnaise as well.)

Q. Why does the lactase that is in me when I am born, decrease when I grow older?

Here's what one researcher had to say:

"Speculation as to why the lactose gene 'turns off' is a fascinating topic. One theory suggests that lactase deficiency evolved early in mammalian history, perhaps 75 million years ago, as a means to facilitate weaning and shorten the dependence of the child on the parent for lactation. The gas and diarrhea produced by lactose malabsorption would stimulate the child to become weaned. One competing theory suggests that lactose malabsorption in adults prevents competition of adults with infants for food (who can only digest milk early in life), and another theory proposes that lactose intolerance evolved as a defense mechanism against intestinal infections."

In other words, nobody knows for sure.

Q. My 80-year-old mother has been diagnosed as being LI. I've heard that it was unusual to have this happen so late in life. What do you know about this?

It is unusual, but hardly unknown. Different people are genetically programmed to lose their ability to make lactase at different ages, that's all. (Unless she had some sort of intestinal disease or surgery that might have damaged her intestines. That can cause LI at any age.)

No Likelihood of Reactions from Whey-Based Distillates

The European Food Standards Authority (EFSA) has a series of standards in place, much like the U.S. labelling laws, that require listing the presence of possible allergens in food. However, they left an out for manufacturers. Derivatives made from ingredients required to be listed won a temporary exemption from labeling if they had not been scientifically established to cause adverse reactions. That temporary exemption expires in November of 2007.

Medical studies had to be submitted if the exemption was to be allowed to be permanent. The EFSA was charged with conducting those studies.

An article by Jess Halliday on NutraIngredients.com details the results of those studies.

Of importance to us are the following results:

EFSA said that although the analytical evidence was derived from experiments predominantly using almonds, the panel deemed an allergic reaction to be "unlikely", on the grounds that during a properly controlled distillation process proteins and peptides are not carried over into the distillate at levels over 1mg/litre.

A similar opinion was handed down for distillates made from milk-derived whey - such as gin, pastis, ouzo, anis, vodka and other spirits - since proteins and peptides are not seen to be carried over into the distillate at levels above 0.5mg/litre and lactose was not seen to be carried over at levels above 0.4mg/litre.

... [And] the Association des Amidonneries de Céréales (AAC) received the "unlikely" verdict on its two submissions on wheat starch hydrolysates, one of which concerned maltodextrins in coelic disease and wheat allergy, and the other the potential effects of wheat-based glucose syrups in celiac disease and wheat allergy.