subject: milk

Fighting the Resistome

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Fighting the Resistome

We are incredibly lucky. We live at a time when antibiotics work their magic saving people from infections. Only a few generations ago, infections reigned supreme and struck down some people in most families. It had always been that way, but memory quickly fades. Modern society assumes that the effectiveness of antibiotics is here to stay—it’s a monument to human ingenuity. However, the continuing emergence of antibiotic-resistant microbes and the lack of new antibiotics in the developmental cupboard are looming threats to human health, and a stark reminder that today’s respite from infection could easily be temporary. Read More...

Harnessing Cheese Microbes to Reduce an Allergy-like Reaction to Cheese

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Harnessing Cheese Microbes to Reduce an Allergy-like Reaction to Cheese

Cheese has been a part of human diet for thousands of years. Its production relies on the complex interplay between many different microbes, which contribute to the flavor, texture, and aroma of cheese during the ripening process. This is particularly true of long-ripened cheeses, which can spend months on the shelf being acted upon by bacteria and fungi. “In long-ripened cheeses, you produce your cheese wheels and store them in your ripening cellar for the desired amount of time, and then you have the formation of a biofilm on the cheese rind, which is very important for the aroma and flavor production,” says Dr. Stephan Schmitz-Esser of Iowa State University. Read More...

Residue of Ruminant Milk Identified in Prehistoric Baby Bottles

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Residue of Ruminant Milk Identified in Prehistoric Baby Bottles

It has been quite an amazing year for milk-related anthropology research. First came a study in the fall of 2018 on barium levels in the molar of a 250,000 year old Neanderthal fossil that demonstrated the child was weaned between two and three years of age, similar to the age of weaning in modern human populations. Using the same methods on even more ancient teeth, a study published this summer found that australopithecines living 2 million years ago likely weaned one to two years later than modern humans. Then in September, an analysis of plaque on several 6,000-year-old human teeth from Great Britain provided the oldest direct evidence of human consumption of cow, sheep, and goat milk. And to end the year comes a study that combines the topics of weaning and dairy agriculture—organic residue analysis on 3,000-year-old ceramic artifacts suspected of being baby bottles found fatty acids unique to ruminant milk fats, demonstrating cow or sheep or goat milks were used as weaning foods for infants and young children after the advent of agriculture. Read More...

Skim Milk Beats Hot Chili’s Burn Just Like the Full-Fat Option

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Skim Milk Beats Hot Chili’s Burn Just Like the Full-Fat Option

Every so often on The Jimmy Fallon Show, celebrities attempt an interview whilst eating chicken wings that are dowsed in chili sauce. With every next chicken wing the sauce gets hotter, and the celebrity responses become less coherent. There is always a glass of milk on the table. It is there, presumably, because the show’s producers know that milk has been shown to be especially useful at extinguishing the sensation of burning in the mouth. Read More...

Future Plastic: Biofilms Derived from Colostral Milk Proteins

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Future Plastic: Biofilms Derived from Colostral Milk Proteins

We all know that plastics are bad for the environment, and there is ongoing research indicating they are harmful to humans as well. When microplastics—less than 5 mm in length—get into oceans and tributaries, they end up in the fish and plants that we may consume. But plastic is an integral part of our lives. Computers, cars, and many household appliances are, or include components made of, plastic. Medical equipment like syringes, gloves, and the little plastic filters that go over thermometers for each new patient are one-time use items that help ensure good hygiene. And, of course, much of the food we buy is wrapped in plastic for both convenience as well as protection from contamination. In fact, it’s hard to imagine giving up the assurances that plastic can provide us when it comes to keeping our food safe. But advances in the development of milk protein-based edible films may soon make those wrappers not only less wasteful but even beneficial to our health, thus letting us have our cake and safely eating it, too. Read More...

Chew on This: Softer Diets of Preindustrial Dairy Farmers Influenced the Shape of Their Skull

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Chew on This: Softer Diets of Preindustrial Dairy Farmers Influenced the Shape of Their Skull

The human family tree has an extinct genus that is remarkable for their massive jawbones, molars, and cranial crests (picture a bony mohawk). All of these anatomical features are proposed adaptations to the tough, fibrous diet of genus Paranthropus; hard and chewy diets require large chewing muscles, which in turn require larger jaw and cranial bones (and crests!) for points of attachment. Read More...

Cows May Go Green

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Cows May Go Green

It’s a tough gig being a cow. Productivity expectations for meat and milk are high, and at the same time, the cow gets a bad rap for belching a potent greenhouse gas, methane, which is a by-product of its digestion. Some people say it’s like driving a car very hard on a winding mountain road and then complaining about the car’s increased exhaust gas emissions. Reducing emissions and fuel consumption while maintaining performance is the golden ambition of car manufacturers. A similar goal is also true for the cow. People in many government agricultural agencies and the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) want the beef and dairy industries to use more productive cattle emitting less methane and using less feed i.e., increasing industry production efficiency while decreasing its environmental footprint. It’s a tall order seemingly resisted by the realities of cow biology, however recent ground-breaking research may have opened new opportunities to meet these ambitious aims. Read More...

Does Human Milk Composition Make the Infant Body Clock Tick?

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Does Human Milk Composition Make the Infant Body Clock Tick?

Human beings have internal clocks. Locked in a room with no source of daylight nor regularly scheduled stimulation, our bodies cycle automatically through periods of slightly longer than 24 hours, sleeping and waking more or less as if the sun were rising and falling over a horizon that we could see. But we are not born this way. Instead, infants develop body clocks gradually. Researchers investigating this aspect of development have recently wondered how much human milk contributes to the process, in the knowledge that its levels of nutrients and hormones vary over the course of the day. Read More...

Milk Components Offer Safe Options for Targeted Drug Delivery

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Milk Components Offer Safe Options for Targeted Drug Delivery

Milk has evolved through mammalian history as a soup of complex molecules that provide nutrients, as well as developmental and immunological support to infants. Some of these complex molecules have been naturally selected for their abilities to deliver bioactive compounds in such a way that the infant body can make use of them. This involves, for example, the ability to bind ions with positive and negative charges, such as iron and calcium ions, respectively—and protecting delicate compounds from stomach acids so they can be absorbed through the intestinal wall. In short, some of the soup of complex molecules in milk are ready-made nano-scale delivery units that could be harnessed by science to carry modern medicines into the body to precise locations. Read More...

Comprehensive Cow Milk Metabolite Database Now Online

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Comprehensive Cow Milk Metabolite Database Now Online

    Some recipes are meant to be top secret—Colonel Sanders’ fried chicken; Big Mac’s special sauce; your great aunt Ingrid’s sherry cake. But the ingredients in cow milk shouldn’t be private and confidential. The advent of targeted metabolomics approaches, which characterize large numbers of small molecules in milk, offers the opportunity to produce a detailed and comprehensive picture of cow milk’s chemical composition. And yet, many studies employing these new techniques have not publicly reported their findings, or report the components they have found but not their concentrations. Rather than having scientists continuing to re-invent the analytical milk wheel, a team of Canadian researchers has just published a “centralized, comprehensive, and electronically accessible database” of all detectable metabolites in cow milk. We may never know what Colonel Sanders uses to season his fried chicken batter, but the (detectable) chemicals that make up cow milk—all 2,355 of them—are now on the record. Read More...

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