Milk And Butter

THE non-fat part of milk is an unsurpassed food for old and young alike; butterfat is almost unequalled as a dietary promoter of cholesterol in the blood. Infant mortality is lowest in countries where milk is abundant. We have yet to discover a population where adults eat little butterfat which has a serious problem of coronary heart disease. What should sensible adults make of this?

An abundance of cream and butter is demanded by gourmets wedded to French haute cuisine and, indeed, to all Western cooks to whom food excellence means expensive steaks and a luxuriant bath of butterfat on everything else. But in the Far East, where the aesthetics of food is no less highly cultivated, the idea of including such foods in the diet is strange. If we try to "prove" that we are right and the Chinese are wrong in this regard by elementary experiments with weanling rats we actually show only that milk is a wonderful food to promote the growth of young animals. Moreover, on more critical examination it appears that the great virtue of milk is in its non-fat contents - the proteins, vitamins, and minerals.

Milk fat is in no way so uniquely valuable even for growing rats. Milk fat contains small amounts of "essential" fatty acids, but these are provided in far greater abundance by the majority of vegetable oils. Milk fat as a source of fat-soluble vitamins is important only if the diet is otherwise deficient in them; a varied diet containing fish, green and yellow vegetables, and the germ of cereal grains offers ample supplies of these vitamins.

It was once thought that butterfat might be undesirable because of its content of cholesterol, but it is now known that this is unimportant. The important fact about butterfat in regard to cholesterol is its high concentration of saturated fatty acids which raise the cholesterol level in the blood. Butterfat and beef fat are similar in this respect and in fatty acid composition, the main difference being that butterfat contains about 10 per cent of its fatty acids in very short chains. These short-chain fatty acids make butterfat more fluid than it would be otherwise, which explains some of the difference in cooking properties between butter and suet. Possibly, also, these short-chain fatty acids in butterfat help to make it more readily absorbed in the gastro-intestinal tract of the infant.

But the infant and the adult differ in regard to cholesterol. The infant needs cholesterol as an essential ingredient in the growth of its brain and nervous system, but once these tissues are formed the cholesterol in them is fixed as a part of a finished cellular architecture, removed from participation in the cholesterol metabolism in the rest of the body. As the nervous structure of the body approaches final form and size, the need for cholesterol as a building material is greatly reduced.

Butterfat is an excellent source of calories, both for children and adults, and it is easily digestible. These virtues, however, are shared with most other food fats and with simple carbohydrates. Butterfat also has admirable cooking properties, but, again, these are not unique though many cooks may think so because they have not learned to cook with other fats. Chinese cooks are similarly at a disadvantage when they attempt to use butter in cooking. The point is that with experience a wide variety of fats and oils can be used with much the same success in frying, baking, and making sauces. Actually, it is easier to use oils instead of butter for frying because the short-chain fatty acids in butter are less stable at high cooking temperatures; they more readily smoke and break down to yield products having a disagreeable flavour. Oils have an advantage, too, in being usable in baking without the need for melting first for blending with the other ingredients.

Milk And Milk Protein

Milk is a highly perishable food that needs very special handling - scrupulous cleanliness, pasteurization, and refrigeration - but butter is far more stable. This is the main reason why in many dairying countries the dairy industry has been based economically on the sale of butterfat and why practically all butterfat produced by the dairy farmer goes to human consumption as butter, but much of the non-fat part of his product goes to feed domestic animals on the farm. This is fine for the pigs which quickly grow into bacon, thereby providing an additional supply of stable, fatty food for human consumption. Nutritionists have long realized that the pigs have the better share in this nutritional division. With modern technology and transportation this arrangement is no longer necessary, whole milk can be got to market and into the household and into the schools without undue spoilage. The custom of paying the farmer for pounds of butterfat and not for gallons of milk is changing and we hope that before long the dairy farmer will be recognized, and paid, primarily as a producer of first-class protein. This makes both economic and nutritional sense.

For, though we doubt the wisdom of large amounts of butterfat for adults, no one questions the value of the protein and other non-fat substances in milk. The American public at least is beginning to recognize this; witness the phenomenal rise in the sale of skim milk, and not at a give-away price, either, and the sooner skim milk is made available to the British housewife the better. Skim milk is an excellent food for old and young alike. There are other interesting possibilities as well. Partly skimmed milk containing 2 per cent butterfat but the full complement of protein could usefully be produced for sale, and "filled" milks, in which the butterfat is reduced but the non-fat solids are actually increased, find many buyers in towns in the United States where they are available. These latter "milks" have good flavour and body and approach an ideal food from the standpoint of the nutritionist. Unfortunately, legislation designed to protect the consumer from watered and adulterated milks hinders the introduction of these admirable products in this country.

Many of the recipes and menus given in the later sections of this book involve the use of skim milk. A simple way to get this if it is otherwise unavailable is to allow ordinary whole milk to stand overnight in a jug in a cool place - and skim it.

Very recently experimentation has begun with synthetic "milks". Dr. Haqvin Malmros, professor of medicine at the University of Lund, in the rich dairyland of southern Sweden, wanted to give his patients the values of milk without the saturated fats, so he replaced butterfat with corn oil as an emulsion in skim milk. Two years of experience show the result to be a palatable substitute for all the purposes for which ordinary whole milk is used, the patients are well nourished and their blood cholesterol levels are kept low. No such product is commercially available as yet but some dairy producers are making tests. It is to be hoped that the Ministry of Health and the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food get together to encourage this admirable innovation even if they have to cut their administrative red tape to do so. There are experiments in Canada in the manufacture of "ice cream" in which vegetable oils are substituted for most of the butterfat. It is even conceivable that cheese may be made with some of the butterfat replaced by unsaturated vegetable oils.

Ordinary cheeses range from the plain cottage type containing almost no fat to cream cheeses that are 50 per cent or more butterfat. Most cheeses are really concentrates of rich whole milk, full of good proteins but also relatively high in saturated fats. Persons who have a problem in the control of the cholesterol in the blood should be sparing in the use of all except cottage cheese. The most flavoursome types of cheese go a long way, so cheese fanciers need not be denied their favourite flavours so long as they exercise moderation.