Milk (part 1)

AAaaahhh, milk.

Wow, does this produce some interesting reactions.

There are so many possible "pros" and "cons," it is difficult to know where to start writing.

We are the only mammal that a) drinks milk after weaning, and b) drinks the milk of another animal regularly and deliberately. (I stress the regularly; kittens will gladly lap up cow's milk straight from a pail, puppies will do the same with milk and cream, etc. Orphaned kid goats can be given cow's milk, the list kind of keeps

going.)

We probably started this weird thing of drinking the milk of another species with sheep or goats. Our 'cattle' at the time were most likely the aurochs, which could best be described visually via their modern descendants, the Spanish Fighting Bull, only the auroch was probably quite a bit bigger and meaner. (The last true auroch known died in a private game preserve in 1627 in Poland. How sad.)

Most likely as they penned the aurochs in, gradually they were able to slowly tame them, or breed them for tameness, and someone somewhere got the bright idea that since we are drinking the milk of the goats, and these are milk producers, we can drink their milk, too.

• In actuality, we can drink the milk of any mammal. Virtually every mammal that we have domesticated, we use some form of milk product. Yak milk in Tibet, buffalo milk in Italy (mmm, mozzarella!), horse or llama milk in the Andes, reindeer milk in Lapland. Whether it is to our 'taste' or not, is another story.
• Did you hear about the guy that started the dolphin farm? He drown milking one.

And really, the reasons why we do not drink from all mammals are practical, more than anything. The only areas where there is widespread lactose intolerance, are Asia and the Horn of Africa. There are tribes in Africa that exist on milk, blood, and the cattle both of them come from. (they also have the lowest incidences of coronary heart disease, which should tell you something is wrong with meat = heart disease, but I digress.)

"Oriental" countries' largest domesticated mammals were the horse and the pig. Pigs are reportedly quite difficult to get any 'supply' of milk from. It is more a matter of quantity, rather than quality. High Steppes cultures have the mighty Yak for their milk, and they make use of every single inch of that animal.

So, there is no reason why we couldn't drink the milk of any of our fellow mammals. Quantity becomes the largest problem, although taste probably runs a close second, when you consider that what the mother eats dramatically effects how the milk tastes. So, line up a tiny stool and milk a rat. Grab your SCUBA tank and grab that whale teat! (That would probably not be a problem of quantity.)

What about the poor platypus? Milk away! (But not the male of the species, which has a spur that produces venom. Then again, if you are trying to milk a male you may have other problems from the get-go.)

Milk is something that is designed to help create life. As such, it is supposed to be eaten, one of the very few things on our planet meant for that. Most things are there to reproduce themselves; tomatoes are not there to become salsa, they are there to make more tomato plants. Milk is designed from the start to be drank.

Sigh.. so this is where it gets dicey.

From a practical point of view, our 2nd chromosome is where the gene that expresses 'turning off' the production of lactase, the enzyme that aids the digestion of lactose, the sugar that is only found in milk (trivia-- it is also found in yellow forsythia blossoms in the spring. weird, eh? Too lazy to find independent scientific evidence of that, though.) is found. There are some very interesting debates about this.

It appears that if your ancestors drank milk, (The World minus Far East and parts of Africa,) you have a higher likelihood of that gene expressing in favor of producing lactase. In fact, that gene expressing in favor of producing lactase is the dominant expression of that gene. So once you have a genetic history of it being turned on, it will tend to be turned on.

This makes quite a bit of sense, with recent (last 20K years) evolution. Once we figured out that it made more sense to milk the females of the species, and let the animal live, instead of slaughtering her for meat which would spoil quite soon anyways, we would rapidly develop an evolutional bias towards being able to continue digesting milk. Why not, when it could keep us alive?

Adding to that, we probably rapidly developed age-stable milk. Yogurt... cheese... especially cheese. Cheese can age for upwards of 2 years; try THAT with your normal milk. But talk about nutrition on 'the go!' You could store cheese from your animals, and have a stable food source for the inevitable partial famines that are our historical norm.

But is it healthy for us?

Well, in a word, yes. Yes, even cow's milk. But, it depends on what you mean by milk.

That milk you buy in the store is not 'milk.' It is an industrial product. It has been homogenized (a process which does stop the cream from separating, but totally changes the way that the milk tastes. Having had both, homogenized milk tastes slightly rancid to me. It also hides or masks the taste of the dead bacteria floating in there from pasteurization. Yup, for realz.)

It is also highly likely that it comes from a cow that is milked 3 times a day by a machine, a cow that is fed grains to keep her milk production up even though the grain kills her from the inside, trapped in a stall next to 500 other cows on a production line, standing over a river of your own manure that collects in a toxic lake, automatically injected with antibiotics due to all of the above. Here is that cow--

Yup, that is pretty much where they spend their lives. How 'cow' is that?

So I am stealing the next picture off the website from my friends at Golden Guernsey. Which animal would you rather be, and which would you rather have providing life giving sustenance?

Back to milk....

Without the enzyme lactase, drinking milk causes nausea and diarrhea. "Lactose intolerant" people know that feeling!

What is interesting, is that raw milk has lactase in it. After all, when a baby (of any species) is born, it takes a little while for that digestive system to kick into full swing. The milk has to provide its own means of digestion (after all, the baby is not getting the milk in the womb, it is getting nourishment from the placenta.)

So raw milk is a complete package for nourishment. It seems as though milk proteins evolved alongside the genetic tolerance increase near northern European dairy settlements some time about 8,000 years ago. Coevolution; As we were able to drink more milk for longer periods, the cows evolved to provide our protein requirements.

So since milk comes with it's own digestive system, why are people intolerant of milk?

Most likely, it is because they are drinking pasteurized milk. The pasteurization process kills off the lactobacilli, so YOU are not making lactase, and the milk's food enzyme activity has been killed off. You don't have sufficient lactase to break down the milk sugar (which is a 2-part sugar; lactose is glucose and galactose, making it a disaccharide. There, you've learned something,) and viola, here comes the G/I discomfort. Most people who are 'intolerant,' but can eat cheese or yogurt (where microbes during the fermentation process have consumed pretty much all the lactose,) can handle raw milk easily, and there is a good chance that even people who are 'completely milk' intolerant can handle raw milk, especially from Guernsey or Jersey cows.

The other end of the milk intolerance is a mild allergy to casein, the protein in milk. Guernset and Jersey cows have a higher amount of Casein-b, which has a lower allergic reaction. Casein survives the pasteurization process, but the jury is out on UHT pasteurization (which I have heard that Oberweis uses. Boo on them.)

During homogenization, milk is pumped at high pressure through a mesh screen, and it reduces the milk fats to tiny particles that cannot coalesce back into their former selves. It solves a problem in that it makes the milk more stable for shipping, you don't have to deal with the cream separating from the milk, and it solves a cosmetic problem; When you pasteurize the milk, dead bacteria and white blood cells sink to the bottom of the milk. Homogenizing the milk spreads this throughout the milk. Makes you say yum, doesn't it?

Homogenization also completely destroys the natural flavor of milk. It breaks up the fats into smaller molecules, which produce a rancid flavor and actually make the milk sour faster. This is because the fat particles are smaller and coated with milk protein, where normally they are mostly separate.

But drinking milk is immoral (the vegan argument.)

-- Go away... If you hate me for drinking milk, what will you think when I slice into a steak? "Ethical vegetarian" is completely ridiculous. we're omnivores. Thanks.

We don't 'need' to drink milk.

-- We 'don't need' to do many things. Milk is a complete protein food (it has all the amino acids.) In addition to that, it is convenient, stores well, and has a good dose of everything you need for proper nutrition. If you are trying to lose weight, you should be cutting sugars out of your diet, so milk should be off the list anyways until you get to where you want to be, but there is no real reason not to drink some of it. And it's soooo good.

More in part II!

Philosophy, Ranting, Stream of Consciousness....

So, I am a skeptic. I would debate the sun rising tomorrow. (At 0100-- "It hasn't risen YET.")(0300-- Still waiting!!)

I tend to need proof. I'll go on sketchy incomplete information, sometimes, but really, I'd like to know why.

This is part of what has gotten me recently into health and nutrition. There are just scads of information out there, and so much of it is just wrong!

I start with the 'sniff test.' If it sounds wrong from the start, there are pretty good odds that it's a lemon. (warning, I have my mix-o-matic blender going for when I run into metaphors. I may even mix my mixed metaphors.)

So here is where it all began. We were at the Brookfield Zoo, in the Chicago suburbs, on my mom's birthday, and they had an exhibit titled something like "The world connected" Or some such thing. I figured that would be cool to check out, so why not?

They had an illustration of people fishing, and under it was 'fish are caught off the coast of Chile.' OK, I am on board with that. The following sequence came along.. 'Fish are then flash frozen,' 'fish are shipped to the USA,' 'fish are ground into fish pellets/meal,' 'the fish meal is fed to cattle,' 'voila, you eat them!' (Or some such nonsense for the last picture of a cheeseburger on a plate.'

So... I wandered on, but mentally I kept returning to that last picture, and the picture that had the cow munching happily away on some cattle kibble. To myself, I kept thinking 'cows don't EAT FISH. WTF is wrong with this picture??!?!'

Within a few days of this, I had my conversation with Ash who turned me on to FatHead, and the rest is long sleepless nights reading study after study, blog after blog, gathering up information. Learning. Unlearning. Re-learning.

I have spent hours... and I mean days worth of hours, just trying to find a single study that says HFCS is good for you. Yeah, I know, but there must be ONE. Surely our loving government would not approve a foodstuff/additive/substitute for general consumption (it's in roughly 30,000 of the 35-40,000 items in a major city grocery store) without knowing the long term effects of introducing it into the food supply, would it?? Honest??

So about 2 weeks ago I posted some of the things I have found in the last year, and I will be backing them up one at a time, with footnotes, references, etc, so it is taking me a while to collect all the information right now. So sit tight, sports fans!

I've read more than I ever thought could be written about cholesterol. There is more to read. But I can tell you this right now, we're the only country in the world that is afraid of cholesterol. Here is a good sniff test question-- Would your body, all things being equal, and under normal circumstances, make anything for itself that was harmful?

Of course not. We would not have survived as a species. Period.

Well, your body makes cholesterol. Your diet (defined as what you eat, not a 'Diet,') has almost nothing to do with 'blood serum' levels of cholesterol. In fact, you are not measuring cholesterol in any of the tests, you are measuring the size of the proteins that carry the cholesterol around. LDL, HDL... Low Density Lipoprotein, High Density Lipoprotein. Cholesterol itself is not water soluble, so it can't dissolve in blood; it needs something to 'ferry' it around.

If you had no cholesterol in your diet, your body can manufacture all you need. This should tell you something. This is a BIG MONSTER clue that maybe this is something we need, not something we should be getting RID OF.

This will piss some people off- There are no historically vegan cultures. And vegetarians should be careful. Even historically vegetarian cultures eat some eggs, or trade for fish or fish roe, or drink milk (whole raw milk, not that low fat crap we have here.) Enjoying that low slow decline in your nervous system from lack of B12? If you MUST take supplements to support your diet, then there is probably something wrong with your nutrition.

There is an interesting concept called Bioavailability. Basically, it means how much nutrition can we absorb or take in of something before it exits the system. Bioavailability of human mother's milk is a perfect 100 for protein. For eggs it is also 100. Beef scores about 78-85, depending upon the cut/organ. This continues down until we reach the plants. Animal proteins are called 'whole proteins' due to their complete amino acid profile (This should be another one of the BIG CLUES.) If you are eating animal tissue, you can get your entire protein requirement from it. If you are eating plants for your proteins, you can get most of the amino acids, but not all.

So the bioavailability of meats tends to be quite a bit higher, so it is easier to 'access.' So in an 8 oz serving of beef liver, you would easily get a day's protein requirements for a fairly sedentary individual, but to get it from plants would require a good 2 lbs of plant. Makes my jaws hurt just thinking about it. (numbers are not exact, but the exact numbers ARE coming.)

So much more to come!

On another note...

On another note, I wanted to shout out a congrats to my cousin Anthony, who is most of the way through his IOE as a brand new FO with Silver Wings (used to be Gulfstream.) He busted his ass to get there, like so many of us have. Dealt with all kinds of crap, debt, you name it, but he persevered, and now he is flying for a living.

All the pilots already know this (so do their spouses, too,) but it takes a little bit of almost masochism to want to get involved in our job sometimes. Starting out, the pay is rancid... really not good. I think I have told this before-- flew through the night, snowstorm, heavy winds, no visibility, rain, hail, etc, from Chicago O'Hare to Kalamazoo, Michigan. 50 passengers, none of whom even glanced in the flight deck. We pulled up our arrival time, and it was an hour, exactly. I said to my Captain "I just made $19.90, pre-tax."

Thankfully he has a supportive wife, because it takes an even stronger partner to put up with what a pilot goes through just to do this goofy job.

But a better job is damn hard to find.

I know it is 'just' a Beech 1900, but welcome to the big leagues, Tony.

Congrats,

Scott

A Little About Food

So, last year, I had a conversation with a friend of mine that went something like this--

me: So, I signed up for the Chicago Triathlon this year. What was I thinking?

friend: Really? Come do the Warrior Dash with me!

blah blah blah

friend: So have you seen the movie Supersize Me?

me: Nah. I don't agree with the basic premise. Nobody eats McDonald's 3 times a day, every day for a month. At least go to Wendy's, too (yum, Frosty!)

friend: Then you gotta watch Fat Head.

Thus began my descent into the Rabbit Hole of nutrition. Once I started reading more, I opened an account with Pub Med. I already know the basics on how to look for gaps in logic, and I can understand scientific literature fairly well, I was just rusty. At various times in my life, I've wanted to be :a physicist, a pilot (something came true!), a computer programmer (boring!), etc, but I always had a love for the 'hard' sciences. Those where you design an experiment based on a hypothesis generated by (hopefully) multiple observations, and then you control the variables as much as possible, experiment, and then check your results.

O.k.. small digression.. but like I said, it's quite a rabbit hole!

Here are some of the things that I have come to know. I'm sure there will be a post about the philosophy of knowledge, after all, how do we know what we know, and how do we know that we know it (or something else that will give you a slushi brain freeze.)

Some of these will be expanded upon in later posts; I've actually been working on some of that anyways.

I originally ordered this in order of certainty, but I write stream-of-consciousness, so I am sure It's totally out of order below #5. #13 could easily be #8, etc:

1. High Fructose Corn Syrup is a poison. I'm even looking for studies (peer reviewed, unbiased, etc, ) that prove this wrong, but there is just nothing out there. Get it out of your diet, get it out of your house, get it out of your life.
2. Wheat and cereal grains are almost as bad as #1 for you. There may even be a connection or additive effect here between the two. This indicts all of the modern grains. Wheat, barley, oats, rye. They are all grasses, we are not cows. It is a tribute to our omnivorousness that we can eat them to being with.
3. Sugars on the whole are not that great for you. Naturally occurring, they usually have lots of fibrous materiel around them... mother nature's packages. You have to eat a lot to get the sugar load, but modern cultivated fruits are a little different from the wild ones, especially in nutritional value.
4. Eat Meat. Like it or not, Vegetarians, modern humans are designed to eat nutrient dense foods. Plants just do not cut it for everything. At the very least, have a little fish now and then, preferably line caught.
5. Grass fed ruminants are the most nutrient dense food we have. The nutrient profile is perfect, the O-3 and O-6 ratios are exact for what we need, the nutrient levels (especially in liver, and other organ tissues,) are off the charts.
6. Eggs are awesomeness in a shell. You can do magic with them.
7. Cut 'boxed' food out of your life. The friend mentioned above (Hi Ash!) was the first who referred to it as "Shop the Outside" (I think.) Eat all the stuff around the outside of the grocery store, and skip the stuff on the shelves in the middle.
8. The jury is still out on milk. Partly because most of the studies on milk use dried casein for the study, and that has well known problems with oxidized cholesterol and inflammation. Talk about stacking the cards. If you are not allergic, milk, raw milk, is probably quite healthy. Fermented/aged milk products rock the house-- yogurt, cheese, butter, kefir....
9. Veggies, fresh and in season, are a must. I have increased my veggie intake at least 100% (which, considering how little I used to eat, is still not that much.) I eat more and more when I can. Even broccoli makes me say yum (with a small protest) now.
10. Strength training is excellent for both men and women. Girls, you will never... and I mean never... have enough testosterone to 'bulk up' the way that men might be able to. It takes years of dedication, and casual workouts ain't gonna do it. Learn how to lift something heavy. It's good for you.
11. Cardio is not that great. High Intensity Interval Training is much better. Long term cardio might even be downright unhealthy for you.
12. Cholesterol is good. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know. But your body makes it naturally, and diet cholesterol intake has almost no effect on blood serum levels. Sniff test-- Under normal circumstances, does your body make anything that would harm you? Every single cell in your body needs cholesterol to function, and your brain is a'chock full of cholesterol. More to come on that for SURE.
13. Fat intake helps you burn fat. Yup. Honest Injun'.
14. Carbs make you fat. Carbs of all kinds, from simple sugars (fructose, glucose,) to the big 'uns (starch, glycogen, and cellulose.)
15. Soy is most likely really not that good for you, unfermented. This is a mega issue with vegetarians and vegans. Lots of bad words spoken in forums on this one.
16. A calorie is not just a calorie. It is not just calories in/calories out. Your body is not a closed system. More to come
17. Most treadmill type exercise is a waste of time. You don't burn fat that way. Like Dr Lustig says in his video "That cookie you ate? 250 calories? Yeah, an hour walking on the treadmill... good luck."
18. Cooking 'oils' are about one of the worst things out there. Cook with butter, lard, ghee, coconut oil. Olive oil is for tasting, not cooking.
19. We need sunshine. Every single one of our cells can make its own Vitamin D. It takes sunshine. Vitamin D deficiencies are related to depression. Ever wonder why in the winter and when it is cloudy for days on end people get more depressed?
20. Nearly everything we have been told about nutrition in the last 40 years has been exactly 180 degrees wrong. Our grandmothers and grandfathers lived to be 90 cooking with lard, eating fat, not exercising, and staying outdoors. We are dying in our 50s with tons of exercise, cooking oils, eating tofu burgers and wearing SPF WTF just leaving the house. What are we missing here?
21. We don't get fat because we are eating more, we are eating more because we are getting fat. Subtle difference, but wildly important, related to hormonal control of the body. It's not willpower; you are trying to use your will to overpower a million years of evolution in your hypothalamus for hormone control. You ain't gonna win this fight.

Basically, here is what it comes down to;

Eat Real Food.

Get some Exercise and Sunshine. Go for a walk, and lift your face to the sun.

Every now and then, lift, throw, move something heavy.

Laugh. Dance. Enjoy.

Sleep well.

I have bunches more to write on almost all of this. Posting will take a little while, because I want to have the footnotes, so if you are reading this you can do what I do; just go read the study yourself.

Re-learn to engage your brain. Does it pass the 'sniff test?' If something sounds crazy, is it because it is crazy, or am I just looking through the telescope from the wrong direction? IS anything hidden? Correlation is not causation (mantra-- keep repeating this.) Just because something is observed to happen at the same time, does not mean A effects B. It doesn't even mean B effects A. --- Statistically, ownership of computers has increased on a perfect trend line that parallels yogurt consumption. Does owning a computer make you buy yogurt? Does eating yogurt make you want to go buy a computer? (Does Yoplait own shares of Apple?)Are they related through a third mechanism 'confounding' what we are looking at? (owning a computer means you can look up health information more readily, you read yogurt is good for you, more people buy yogurt. Not direct causation.)

I am going to try and index, or at least footnote, my references, so that will take a little time, too.

Plus, I may make some more yogurt, or butter, or maybe pickle some zucchini, or something, and get distracted... and... um...look! Bubbles!

Thanks for coming along for the ride.

Cheers!

Scott

Food Werx, Vol 4 - Cheese!

Bring in the cheese!

So I have been having fun

experimenting with milk and milk

products. But I am out of raw milk. I saw a video on YouTube showing a

simple way to make a simple cheese and it seemed like a good idea to try.

A few notes - even really good milk, like Oberweis, may not work. Oberweis supposedly does a variation of ultra-pasteurization, the difference being in regular pasteurization, the milk is heated to 161F for 15-20 seconds, where as the UHP is 275F for a minimum of 1 second. This pretty much destroys any chance for you to use the milk to make any kind

of cheese, according to the various 'make cheese at home' gurus. So, find a good milk and use it!

I used Kilgus' Non-homogenized milk. This is our regular milk (other than the raw milk we just got access to a few weeks ago.) You gotta shake it to mix in the cream that floats to the top, and it tastes sssoooo good.

O.k, off on our adventure!

I worked with a half gallon of milk.

So, you scald the milk, which is heat it on medium until it reaches 170F. This can be seen visually by the bubbles starting to ring the edge of your cook pot. At this point you remove the pot from the heat, and add in a cup of buttermilk and then 4 tablespoons of lemon juice. This acts as the separator, curdling the milk and removing the whey. Let the milk sit for 20 minutes while the acids from the juice do their thing, and then skim the curds out of the milk. Reserve the whey if you want, it is good to make pancakes, or in place of water in just about anything. Maybe for risotto.... hhhmmm....

Gently skim the curds out into a

cheese cloth covered colander, either

putting the colander in a larger pot to save the rest of the whey, or let it drain down the sink if you don't want to keep it. Then gather the cheese cloth into a tight bunch, compressing it and squeezing the curds together.

Tie the top with a string, and then

hang the curds so they can drain the last of the whey and moisture out.

Let them hang for about 30 minutes or a bit longer, and then peel open the cheese cloth. Voila, there is your cheese!

It is really great spread on fresh toasted bread, and I am NOT a bread guy (anymore.)

This was really simple to make, requires no special tools (even the temp you can eyeball by watching the edge of the milk for the bubbles to gather,) and you could use a clean dish towel in place of the cheese cloth. I guess maybe the string could be a special tool. Depends on how well you stock your kitchen!

We pretty much devoured the cheese with dinner. It has a very soft taste, nothing strong at all.

You can make this with 2%, or even skim milk if you wanted. Takes under an hour start to finish, including heating the milk. Can it get any better?

Cheers!

Scott

Food Werx, Vol 3 - Yogurt

So I have been having fun making simple foods, and while I was making the butter, I remembered a video I had seen on how easy it is tomake yogurt; Since I had the time, andThomas was my sou chef, I figured it could be done.

I had separated a good portion of the cream from the top of the milk, but not all of it, not nearly. I blended the rest back in, and then did my prep work to make yogurt. Here is the plan;

The volume of milk will give you your volume of yogurt; it is not reduced, or anything, so what you start with is what you will have at the end. We need--

milk

non-reactive pot (stainless steel preferably, just NOT aluminum)

yogurt starter (from a favorite plain yogurt; I used Trader Joe's Plain.)

thermometer

large pot or sink for cooling water bath

insulated 'cooler' as a fermentor

Sterilize the jar you will be using to make the yogurt by putting it and it's lid into a few inches of water at a boil for 10 minutes or so. Nothing like being sure.

Pour your milk into the non-reactive pot, heat over medium heat until the temperature is between 185F and 190F.

A note on thermometers; A simple way to calibrate, or check the scale of your thermometer- boil water, and then read the temperature off of the thermometer. Water boils at 212F, and a physical trait of transitioning from solid to liquid to gas is that once that temperature threshold is reached,

the substance (water) will NOT increase in temperature until it is in the next state. So when you boil water, once it reaches 212F, the remaining water will r

emain at 212F while the surface water turns into a gas as it boils off. So just read your thermometer in boiling water, and adjust your temperature accordingly. Mine boiled 'at' about 209F, so I did everything with a reading 3F less than required, or stayed at the low end of any temperature bands.

Once the milk reaches 185F, take the pot of milk off the stove, and set it in the cooling water bath.

Once your milk cools to 122F - 130F, pour a cup of the hot milk into a bowl, and whisk with your 'starter' yogurt (about 2T of yogurt per quart

of milk.)

Pour the whisked milk/yogurt mix right back into the scalded milk, and whisk together.

Now pour the milk into your sterilized jar/s, tighten on the lids, place the jars into the 'cooler' and pour a 'bath' of 130F (NOT warmer, 130F+ kills the bacteria that will make your yogurt) water around the jars, up to the lid.

Close the cooler, let sit for a minimum of 3 hours. (I had let mine sit for 3 hours, and I did not like the consistency, so I let it sit another 3 hours, then popped it into the fridge while I went on a 2 day trip.)

Eat and enjoy!!

I was gone on my trip, and Nicole tried it and said it tasted great. I gave it a try when I got home, and I thought it was pretty damn good, too. It's on the menu for breakfast tomorrow!

The finished product: