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.

Casein Not in All Sodium

I received this email the other day.

Concerning pre-packaged luncheon meats. I was told, maybe incorrectly, that "salts or sodium can have hidden Casein in them." I can't find an answer so far on the internet. I hope you can help me.

Here is a list from one package: sodium phosphates, sodium ascorbate, sodium erythorbate, sodium nitrite, potassium lactate, sodium diacetate.

I replied:

The answer to your question is that casein salts will always be listed that way, as sodium caseinate or calcium caseinate or even, though rarely, potassium caseinate. The sodium part doesn't matter for dairy allergies. (It does if you have high blood pressure and need to avoid sodium, but that's a different issue.)

Caseinate will always be listed. And modern labeling laws require that any product that uses casein say it is a milk product or a milk derivative. Caseinate can't be hidden.

How to Write a Blog Entry, with Spice

Think these entries just come to me fully formed, like Athena from the head of Zeus?

Oh my children, not so easy.

I'm up late, checking the news for any mention of lactose intolerance. What's this? An Australian gossip column. Always a first choice for health information.

Trotting through the marquee was Skeletal Spice's hairdresser, Ben Cooke (with pal Angela Weigard), so we asked him how Posh stays so skeletal. "She's wheat-intolerant and lactose-intolerant," Ben said. "She eats fruit, steamed white fish and vegies." We didn't think she gorged on chops.

It's not news that Victoria Beckham, alias Posh Spice, is lactose intolerant, at least not to those who read LI Celebrity Alert: Orlando Bloom and Victoria Beckham. And just what does a diet of fruit, steamed white fish and vegies have to do with lactose intolerance? Poshie, those chops are just as lactose free.

Silliness. But somehow that leads me to Want to be skinny? Sassy diet book tells how by John Rogers of The Associated Press.

Which tells of the latest manifestation of our celebrity madness, of how Skeletal, er, Posh, er, Victoria, made a book famous merely by picking it up and never reading it.

"Skinny Bitch" [by former models Kim Barnouin and Rory Freedman] quickly became a word-of-mouth hit upon publication in December 2005. More than 200,000 copies are in print, according to its publisher, Running Press of Philadelphia.

It got a significant international boost in May when L.A.'s hottest skinny celebrity, Victoria "Posh Spice" Beckham, playfully held up a copy at the trendy Kitson's boutique in Hollywood while paparazzi clicked away.

"She never bought the book ---- she just picked it up," Fraser Ross, the store's owner, told The Associated Press.

But no matter, "Skinny Bitch," shot up top sellers lists in Beckham's native England and broke through to the No. 3 spot on The New York Times paperback advice list of best sellers.

Hmmm. Promising. Skinny Bitch is a vegan cookbook, and those are a staple of my posting.

I do a bit of checking first. I don't endorse any of the books I mention in this blog, but I try to find out enough about them so that the truly nutty science-is-what-we-say-it-is wackjobs are screened out.

So what's the first thing that I find? A blog by lushposh. No, seriously. I've stopped trying to make this stuff up. And a blog post of hers titled Skinny Bitch: A Beginner’s Guide. It even has a picture of Kim.
Or of Rory. It doesn't matter. They've merged into one in my head, a mouthpiece for the worst junk diet advice you'll get this side of a homeopath.

All this from lushposh, who interviewed Rory and got the horseshit from the horse's mouth. Remember, lushposh is an admirer. She put all this stuff on her blog and thought it made wonderful sense. No child left behind, indeed.

The basic concept of the Skinny Bitch diet is surprisingly simple: "You need to get healthy if you want to get skinny." And to be healthy by the authors’ definition, you should eat foods that are easy to digest, rich in nutrients and free of harmful additives.

That means saying goodbye to sugar (aka "the devil") and products containing it, and not just because of empty calories. "When sugar enters your body, it’s acidic," Freedman says. "When you put acidic foods into your body, in order to protect your organs, your body produces fat cells."

Again, I am not making this up. This is coming from an author of one of the best selling diet books in the country. Or at least of a country in which sugar is acidic (it's not) and it doesn't make the most essential energy component of metabolism (glucose, the end product of all sugar breakdown) and causes fat cells to appear as protection (a scam unknown even to the Mafia.)

But there's hope.

"Kim and I are pigs," she declares. "We live to eat, and there’s no reason you should have to live without cookies. We just read the ingredients and look for better substitutes for sugar, like evaporated cane juice, brown rice syrup, molasses, raw sugar, beet sugar, maple syrup, things like that."

Things like that there. Let's go over them there things.

▪ evaporated cane juice - sugar
▪ brown rice syrup - sugar
▪ molasses - sugar
▪ raw sugar - sugar
▪ beet sugar - sugar
▪ maple syrup - sugar

Some of these are chemically identical to sucrose, or table sugar; others, like brown rice syrup, is a mixture of complex carbohydrates and maltose. Maltose is just two molecules of glucose. All of these sugars behave identically in the body, breaking down to glucose. None are nutritionally better for you. Perhaps one must approach them on the metaphysical plane to truly appreciate their spiritual side. Science it ain't, though.

The rest is a mosh of every bad vegan myth that any sensible vegan should be embarrassed to be associated with.

Meat takes a long time to break down in the body, and much of it ends up just staying put, blocking the intestines and slowing the metabolism.

Blather.

"You are physiologically addicted to cheese because it contains casein, which breaks down into opiates in your body," Freedman explains.

Yes, casein breaks down into casomorphins, a scary-sounding chemical whose dreadness can be found all over the vegan literature, although, tellingly, not anywhere else. It's identical to morphine apparently, although somehow also only one-tenth its strength. What happens to the casomorphins once you eat them? I haven't found any medical research that can answer that question, but no good anti-milk conspiracy theorist would let that stop them from proclaiming that cheese is addictive.

I can't stop a juggernaut like Skinny Bitches just by mocking its lack of science. That's obviously one of its selling points. The two-headed, four-breasted Kim/Rory monster dresses up the thinnest nutritional advice - skip sugar, eat fruits, go for whole grains - with thick slabs of pseudoscience, short skirts, bare midriffs, blonde hair and a you go girl insouciance filtered though a potty mouth. Who needs science when you have all that?

Me. Just me against the world. And against Posh Spice. Who looks like this.


I just lost, didn't I?

Why Some Foods Are More Allergenic Than Others

An absolutely fascinating piece of research was just published in The Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology

(DOI: 10.1016/j.jaci.2007.08.019.) "Evolutionary distance from human homologues reflects allergenicity of animal food proteins," by John Jenkins, Heimo Breiteneder, and Clare Mills.

Articles explaining the research can be found in more - ScienceDaily.com - or less - FoodNavigator.com - straightforward English on those sites.

The investigating team compared several types of proteins across a wide variety of types of animals, from insects to mammals to humans. If the protein was at least 55% identical to the human protein, few if any allergic reactions were produced. But proteins less similar triggered the immune system of the human body in some people.

"This explains why people who are allergic to cow's milk can often tolerate mare's milk but not goat's milk", said Dr Clare Mills of the Institute of Food Research. "Proteins in horse milk are up to 66% identical to human milk proteins, while known allergens from cows and goats are all less than 53% identical to corresponding human proteins.

Overall, the researchers believe that the reason why just a few percent of humans have milk allergies is that the protein similarities are so close to the border of tolerance.

"Animal food proteins lie at the limits of the capability of the human immune system to discriminate between foreign and self proteins", said Mills.

The researchers looked at all the main types of proteins and made a major discovery.

For the first time the researchers found that the majority of animal food allergens could be classified into one of three protein families. Tropomyosins, proteins found in muscle tissue, are the most important family.

"Tropomyosins in mammals, fish and birds are at least 90% identical to at least one human tropomyosin and none have been reported to be allergenic. In contrast, the allergenic tropomyosins are all from invertebrates such as insects, crustaceans and nematodes and at most are only 55% identical to the closest human homologue", said Dr Heimo Breiteneder of the Medical University of Vienna.

EF-hand proteins form the second largest animal food allergen family. Those in birds and mammals are not allergenic, while those in frogs and fish can cause allergy. The third animal food allergen family, caseins, are all mammalian proteins from milk. The researchers analysed milk from rabbits, rats and camels as well as sheep, goats, cows and horses.

In previous analyses of plant food allergens published in 2005, the scientists found that most belong to a highly restricted number of protein superfamilies. The research will make it easier to identify new allergens and help explain how they trigger an immune response.

I reported a year ago that work was underway to develop a vaccine for allergies, but that 7 to 10 years was likely to be needed. See Cure for Allergies? Don't Hold Your Breath. I'm not sure if this work makes that wait any shorter. However, it's extremely promising research and a critical needed step.