subject: milk

Success of African Cattle Linked to Admixture Event 1,000 Years Ago

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Success of African Cattle Linked to Admixture Event 1,000 Years Ago

If cattle had ancestry.com or 23andMe (er, make that 31andMe), it would look a lot like this study. An international team of researchers sequenced the DNA of 172 cattle from 16 breeds indigenous to Africa to understand their genetic history and identify genetic markers for traits related to the cattle’s survival and success (and that of the pastoralist populations who rely on them) across the continent over the last several millennia. Read More...

Dental Time Machines: Tartar Provides Direct Evidence of Dairy Consumption in Africa

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Dental Time Machines: Tartar Provides Direct Evidence of Dairy Consumption in Africa

Six-thousand-year-old tartar is a dental hygienist’s nightmare but an archaeologist’s dream. That’s because the same yellow, cement-like deposits that have to be manually scraped off during a dental visit are also dietary time capsules. Like an insect preserved in amber, food particles from a lifetime of meals get trapped in tartar’s mineral matrix and become part of the fossil record. Rather than infer what past populations might have eaten, researchers can analyze ancient plaque and say what one particular individual actually ate. Read More...

Primate Milk Microbiome Reveals Shared and Unique Features

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Primate Milk Microbiome Reveals Shared and Unique Features

Mammalian milk was once thought to be free of bacteria, but it is now well understood that milk has its own microbiome, or community of bacteria. Although only recently “discovered,” microbes were likely one of milk’s original ingredients and have an evolutionarily ancient relationship with their mammal hosts. Many bacterial species are likely common to all. But because some bacterial strains could potentially benefit infant health by promoting the growth of beneficial bacteria in the gut or enhancing infant immunity, there may have been numerous opportunities for the evolution of species-specific milk bacterial communities. Does each mammal, including humans, pass on its own unique mix of bacterial strains in milk or is there a more general milk microbiome shared across mammals? Read More...

Replacing Red Meat with Dairy Could Lower the Risk for Type 2 Diabetes

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Replacing Red Meat with Dairy Could Lower the Risk for Type 2 Diabetes

From eating clean to eating like a caveman, there is no shortage of fad diets promising weight loss and improved health. But what is trendy might not always be effective. Although dietary regimes that eschew carbohydrates and focus on proteins seem ideal for keeping blood sugars in check, not all proteins have the same effect on insulin sensitivity and glucose metabolism, and some can even increase the risk for developing type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM). For people wanting to maintain a high protein diet, a new study offers some helpful guidance—replacing red meat consumption with other protein sources, including dairy, lowers the risk of developing T2DM. Read More...

The Effects of Dairy on Metabolic Risk Depend on the Type of Dairy Product Consumed

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The Effects of Dairy on Metabolic Risk Depend on the Type of Dairy Product Consumed

Researchers have long been interested in understanding the effects of different types of dairy products on cardiometabolic health. Studies have looked at the effects of consuming different types of dairy on metabolic markers such as body weight, body fat, lean mass, or cholesterol. Although some studies have found that dairy products are associated with lower cardiometabolic disease incidence, other study results have been mixed or inconclusive. As a result, there’s still a lot researchers don’t know about the effects of long-term habitual dairy consumption on cardiometabolic risk, or the potential pathways linking the two. Read More...

3D Printing Milk-based Products while Maintaining Their Nutrients

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3D Printing Milk-based Products while Maintaining Their Nutrients

As 3D printers have become more affordable and accessible over the past 10 years, their potential applications have also increased. One emerging application of 3D printing is food printing, which could enable the creation of aesthetically pleasing food products with customized nutrients and internal structures. Read More...

IMGC 17th International Symposium on Milk Science and Health Will Be Held Virtually October 13-16, 2020

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IMGC 17th International Symposium on Milk Science and Health Will Be Held Virtually October 13-16, 2020

The International Milk Genomics Consortium (IMGC) is the world’s signature organization that for 20 years has been linking scientific research on lactation and milk to the applications of that research to the health of babies to adults. IMGC will hold its 17th annual conference from October–13-16, 2020 in a lively, engaging, and interactive virtual format. The conference will bring together a multidisciplinary field of experts from all over the world to discuss their scientific research on milk and human health. i Read More...

California’s Dairy Industry Has Grown Kinder to the Environment

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California’s Dairy Industry Has Grown Kinder to the Environment

Milk is big business in California. It’s the agricultural product that brings in more farm revenue than any other in the state. It employs about 190,000 workers, and involves 1.78 million cows. Indeed, dairy has been important to California’s economy for decades, and over time innovations in animal husbandry, feeding and in growing crops that dairy cows eat have led to substantial changes in greenhouse gas emissions. Recently, Ermias Kebreab and his colleagues at the University of California, Davis, calculated exactly how much these emissions have changed in the 50 years from 1964 to 2014. Although the total emissions from the state’s dairy industry increased over that period, the state also produced much more milk, and the industry has become more efficient in terms of its emissions. Read More...

A Gene that Helps Humans Consume Fermented Dairy

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A Gene that Helps Humans Consume Fermented Dairy

Humans have many unique attributes, as does the family of species within which humans evolved—the hominids. About 15 years ago, geneticists added to the list of hominid-unique attributes by noting that species within this family have a gene called HCA3 that other mammals lack. Now a group of researchers from Leipzig, Germany has figured out what this gene does and why it was preserved by natural selection. Their evidence suggests that HCA3 blessed the hominids with the ability to eat many bacteria-riddled foods without getting sick. These include some foods that played important roles in the story of human evolution, such as fermented milk products. Read More...

Feeding Method Affects Human Milk Microbes

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Feeding Method Affects Human Milk Microbes

It seems counterintuitive that breastmilk would be anything but sterile—human infants have a naïve and immature immune system and their first food should be free of potential pathogenic organisms, right? But study after study demonstrates that milk indeed contains microbes. Precisely where these microbes originate and how they make their way into human milk, however, is still being worked out. There are two, non-mutually exclusive hypotheses to explain their origins: one argues that milk microbes originate from the mother’s gut and are passed to the mammary gland (entero-mammary translocation) and the other that bacteria from the infant’s oral cavity move back into the mammary gland and influence the types and quantities of bacteria passed via milk (retrograde inoculation). Because not all milk microbes are equally beneficial for the infant, finding support for one or both of these hypotheses offers the potential of modifying the milk microbiome in ways that could improve infant outcomes. Read More...

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