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Skimmed Milk - Straight From The Cow!
There is a report in Chemistry & Industry, the magazine of the Society of Chemical Industry, that herds of cows producing skimmed milk could soon be roaming our pastures.
New Zealand scientists have discovered that some cows have genes that give them a natural ability to produce skimmed milk and plan to breed herds of milkers which produce only skimmed milk. They also plan to produce milk whose cream can make a butter that is very low in saturated fats and high in polyunsaturated and monounsaturated fats so that it is spreadable straight from the fridge.
So far, they have identified one cow, named Marge, with the genes required to do this; however, they say that a commercial herd is likely by 2011.
Experts say that these cows could completely revolutionise the dairy industry, which I find horrifying. Ed Komorowski, technical director at Dairy UK, says that the New Zealand approach could be used to breed cows that still produce full-fat milk but with only the 'good fats', which could swing things back in favour of full-fat milk.
The problem with this is that the so-called 'good fats' depend entirely on who decides which fats are good. At present, those fats called 'good' aren't!
In the UK, only 25% of milk sold is full fat. Komorowski says that "In future if whole milk can be made to contain unsaturated fats - which are good for you - then it might mean that people change back to whole milk products. The big thing about dairy products is taste, so this would be a way of giving the benefits of taste without the disadvantage of saturated fats."
He goes on: "If you can genetically produce milk without fat then that may turn out to be a very good solution to what might later be a big disposal issue." Producing skimmed and semi-skimmed milk means there is a lot of fat left over.
Komorowski noted, however, that although he believes the lower-fat milk may be healthier, it will be interesting to see how much milk the cows actually produce.
The cows were discovered when biotech company, ViaLactia, screened the range of milk compositions across the entire herd of 4 million New Zealand cattle. New Zealand dairy firm, Fonterra, has already made milk products from Marge's milk.
COMMENT:
I really am very worried by this sort of meddling. Naturally-produced food is usually healthy. It is only when 'experts' start to muck about to make it fit with their dogmatic ideas of what constitutes a healthy diet that it become dangerous to eat. These days, probably as little as than one or two percent of all foods found in supermarkets is actually suitable for human consumption. This new development is certain to reduce the availability of healthy food even further.
I don't drink milk; just the cream — in tea, coffe, cocoa and on fruit. I use cream because almost all the useful nutrients in milk are actually in the cream, not the watery milk part. That is mostly water — and I see no point in paying a high price for milk when water is relatively cheap out of the kitchen tap or faucet.
The nutrients in the milk are much better absorbed from hard cheeses than they are from milk. For example, for calcium can be absorbed into the body from foods, it has to be in the gut in the presence of fat and vitamin D. Skim milk contains neither. Trials have shown that, while some 50% of the calcium in full-cream milk is absorbed, only about 25% is absorbed from semi-skimmed milk, and just 5% from skim milk.
And there is another problem: Unsaturated fats are not necessarily 'good for you'. Some are positively harmful.
The only way to make butter 'spread straight from the fridge' is for it to contain a high proportion of cancer-causing polyunsaturated fatty acids. But making butter with this spreadable property is completely unnecessary. The 'spreads straight from the fridge' was an advertising slogan for a margarine in the mid 20th century because that margarine had tp be refrigerated otherwise it went rancid and inedible. This started a trend where people began to keep butter in the fridge as well. But butter doesn't need to be refrigerated. Unlike polyunsaturated margarines, which go rancid quickly at room temperature, butter is completely stable in a kitchen cupboard at room temperature. So butter is always spreadable!
There is no doubt in my mind that this 'skim milk straight from the cow' is a retrograde step that will increase the burden of chronic degenerative disease in the industrialised countries which adopt this unnatural product.
I doubt it will do the cow's calves any good either.
But I expect it will make a lot of profit for the company that makes it.
Last updated 6 June 2007
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