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Homogenization makes milk harder to digest?

Ocelot

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Ocelot
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Surly Amy over on Skepchicks skewers the naturalistic fallacy with regards to homogenized milk.

http://skepchick.org/blog/2010/09/ask-surly-amy-homogenization-how-does-that-work/

Yet there's one bit that I'm having a little difficulty digesting.

"and homogenized milk is slightly more difficult to digest than raw milk. This is because some of the natural enzymes are stripped."

This looks to me to be rather too identical to the usual pseudo scientific claims of the raw food lobby.

I know that milk contains lactose. I know that lactose is digested by an enzyme called lactase. We did that at school. I know lactose intollerance is an example of adaptive radiation and neoteny. That is to say that most mammals can produce lactase in childhood but typically the gene that produces it is switched off after childhood when in most mammals it's not needed any more. However with humans since the advent of domestication of animals, the ability to digest milk and dairy into adulthood would be useful. This is why a mutation that leaves our lactose digesting abilities in a childlike state (neoteny) has started to spread across the population. The adaptation is most common in western europeans and lactose intolerance is most common in the orient.
http://emedicine.medscape.com/article/187249-overview

I also know that my son had difficulty keeping down his milk and one of this things we tried was lactase. Two drops added to his milk 20 minutes before feeding to digest the lactose into simpler sugars.

Surely then if all natural milk contained lactase then there's be no lactose left in the milk by the time we got to drink it?

Maybe chilling the milk is expected to stop the enzyme from digesting all the lactose. But even then...

Usually lactose digestion takes place in the gut. That's where the lactose is produced. I thought that adding more lactase in with the milk won't help, as lasctose will be quickly denatured by stomach acid and that was why my ocelittle had to wait 20 minutes for his milk.

Yet I'm willing to be convinced that milk is the exception that proves the rule. The one place where the raw food lobby might indeed have a point. There's no source that's beyond doubt but I'll cut the skepchicks a bit of slack. They tend to be quite "on-message" so I'm prepared to ask if the reason might be something other than a simple mistake.
 
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Ocelot said:
...Yet there's one bit that I'm having a little difficulty digesting.

"and homogenized milk is slightly more difficult to digest than raw milk. This is because some of the natural enzymes are stripped."

This looks to me to be rather too identical to the usual pseudo scientific claims of the raw food lobby.
Click to expand...

Why would homogenization affect enzymes anyway? I can understand pasteurisation denaturing enzymes, but isn't milk homogenization a pressure emulsification process?
 
I thought that most homogenized milk was also heat-treated. I think that's the case here in the UK, and would result in changes to enzymes and so on. That's probably accounts for the change in taste. Come to think of it, I haven't seen homogenized milk for years.
 
On the contrary, most milk these days seems to be homogenised. It only means that the cream doesn't separate. All the supermarket milk seems to be in that category these days. You can't save the "top of the bottle" for your coffee.

Rolfe.
 
I have heard that homogenization does weird things to the fat particles which leaves them interacting with you in less healthy ways, but as I drink skim anyway I never bothered to research that at all to confirm it. I'm busier being pissed about how food labeling usually won't tell you true transfat content anyway.


ETA: http://www.ajcn.org/cgi/reprint/38/2/327.pdf <-this is a 1983 paper refuting the oh-no-small-fat idea that someone quoted in the comments to the article in the OP. I haven't got the gumption to look any harder at the moment. XD
 
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Rolfe said:
On the contrary, most milk these days seems to be homogenised. It only means that the cream doesn't separate. All the supermarket milk seems to be in that category these days. You can't save the "top of the bottle" for your coffee.

Rolfe.
Click to expand...

I really miss milk in those heavy rectangular bottles with the paper stoppers.

Yes, I know I am a fossil.

However, for me, what makes milk hard to digest is lactose. Humans make lactose as infants to digest mother's milk, but lose that ability as adults. An adaptive change in many Northern people who had become dairymen in antiquity was to retain the production of lactase enzymes into adulthood. I was fine until my mid-40s, and now I need to take lactase pills to digest milk products. Many people from tropical areas simply cannot deal with lactose at all.
 
Rolfe said:
On the contrary, most milk these days seems to be homogenised. It only means that the cream doesn't separate. All the supermarket milk seems to be in that category these days. You can't save the "top of the bottle" for your coffee.

Rolfe.
Click to expand...

You are right, thinking about it. However, the homogenized milk I remember from the time we used to get "proper" milk with a creamy top definitely tasted different from the latter. It came in different bottles - narrower and taller with crimped on steel caps instead of aluminium foil ones. I'm going back about 50 years.
 
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leon_heller said:
You are right, thinking about it. However, the homogenized milk I remember from the time we used to get "proper" milk with a creamy top definitely tasted different from the latter. It came in different bottles - narrower and taller with crimped on steel caps instead of aluminium foil ones. I'm going back about 50 years.
Click to expand...

They sound like the bottles that sterilized milk used to come in. Or I might be misremembering. I remember my mam sending me up to the corner shop for some extra milk, and NOT being happy when I once came back with sterilized.
 
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I remember getting silver top from the milkman, pasteurised but not homogenized. Either shake it well before pouring or save the cream for special. Then you'd wash the bottles up and leave them on the doorstep. Ah good old days.

Hang on what am I talking about: it was only last year. Was gutted to find out that there was no milkman serving the area after we moved though.

The sister in law got a bit of flack when her husband's parents returned from holiday and found that she hadn't popped round with a pint of milk and a loaf of bread for their return. Not that she'd been asked to mind you. I guess she must have grumbled about this unfairness because when she returned from holiday she found that her neighbours had kindly filled her fridge top to bottom with dozens of pints of silver top. A few of them were sent in our direction.

So anyway what's the consensus here.

Milk does in fact contain enzymes. (See I did learn something)
They don't much affect human digestion of milk.
Their action is not reduced by homogenization. If anything the agiation speeds up their action.
Which in any case is undesirable because it makes the milk "go off" quicker
Pasteurization on the other hand will affect many of these enzymes.
Which (once more) is unlikely to affect human digestion of the milk in any case.

Can we drill down into this unlikely/not much?

A1/A2 hypothesis is a whole different kettle of fish which is either "molded and withheld by vested interests" or more likely, completely refuted by the more in depth studies the initial research triggered.
 
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Professor Yaffle said:
They sound like the bottles that sterilized milk used to come in.
Click to expand...
Or bottles that have been reinforced to stop woodpeckers getting at the cream on top befor you bring them in from the front step! :cool:

Seriously - why would milk have enzymes in it to digest itself? That's what intestinal tracts are for. Same for any food for that matter, the bones and raw food pet feeding lobby are always banging on about "processing" destroying "natural enzymes" without ever being able to specify what they mean by that exactly. It's just anti-technology rearing its ugly, simplistic head and it's a shame that it has filtered as far as skeptichicks, apparently without being questioned. But they are a brilliant lot so I'll let them off! :D

Yuri
 
Professor Yaffle said:
They sound like the bottles that sterilized milk used to come in. Or I might be misremembering. I remember my mam sending me up to the corner shop for some extra milk, and NOT being happy when I once came back with sterilized.
Click to expand...

That's right! It was the sterilized milk that tasted funny and came in those bottles, I'd forgotten about it. My mother hated the stuff, as well. She came from the West Country and sometimes made clotted cream from the very rich Jersey milk that used to be available, with a gold top.
 
I remember in the Connecticut winters, the milk was left by the milk man in an outside box. The cream would rise and thicken with the cold, and the freezing milk would expand, pushing the 'ice cream' out the top. Us kids would scoop it off and eat it, irritating Mom- again.

But what were we talking about? ;)
 
I buy non-homogenized milk, not because "I want non-homogenized milk," but because I like the taste of this particular brand, and it happens to be non-homogenized.

It's expensive, but still less than the cost of organic milk. The kicker is that it comes in glass bottles, and the bottle deposit is $2.50! Now those are bottles that get returned.
 
hgc said:
I buy non-homogenized milk, not because "I want non-homogenized milk," but because I like the taste of this particular brand, and it happens to be non-homogenized.

It's expensive, but still less than the cost of organic milk. The kicker is that it comes in glass bottles, and the bottle deposit is $2.50! Now those are bottles that get returned.
Click to expand...
jeepers that's some deposit. Bet you curse when a bottle breaks.
 
Now doorstep milk deliveries in Britain are pretty much a thing of the past, do blue tits suffer protein shortages in Winter? The little beggars often pecked holes in the foil tops on our milk bottles. I assumed this was to get at the cream, but maybe they just liked pecking the shiny tops?
 
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