Maybe Milk?

Discussion in 'Biology & Genetics' started by CutsieMarie89, Feb 22, 2008.

  1. John99 Banned Banned

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    i have only drank cows milk but milk from an animal is really the best tasting and even used in hot drinks. i like soy also but i get sick of it after awhile and hemp milk that i tried last week cannot go into hot tea or coffee at all because it just sticks together but it tasted like soy.

    although there is something strange about drinking milk from a cow everyday..
     
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  3. Fraggle Rocker Staff Member

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    According to Wikipedia, these are the only mammals whose milk is normally drunk by humans:
    • Bison
    • Buffalo
    • Camel
    • Donkey
    • Goat
    • Horse
    • Reindeer
    • Sheep
    • Yak
    • Zebra
    Clearly bison is recent and probably a fad, since bison were not even domesticated until recently. (The largest domesticated animal in pre-Columbian North America was the turkey.) The same is surely true of zebra, who are not even very easy to domesticate. The other animals have all been domesticated since ancient times.

    The discovery was made long, long ago, that milking animals is a more cost-effective use of one's investment in them than butchering them. Typically a female animal's production of milk in a single year provides the same nutritional value as killing her and eating her, an astoundingly efficient way of using a ruminant's metabolism to convert inedible grass into a rich source of protein and fat. Dairy farming was an important new food production technology that increased the ability of animal husbandry to feed a village or even a tribe of pastoral nomads.

    Horses, of course, are not technically ruminants. Unlike all the other animals on that list, which belong to the order artiodactyls or odd-toed hooved mammals, horses are perissodactyls or even-toed hooved mammals, like tapirs and rhinoceroses. All ruminants (animals that chew their cud in a two-step digestion process) are artiodactyls. Nonetheless horses are grazing animals that convert the cellulose in grass into protein and fat using teeth, enzymes and a bacterial culture, all specially adapted to the slow, complex, symbiotic process. In perissodactyls the bacteria work in their intestines; in artiodactyls the culture is in their stomachs.

    I can find no information on the drinking of horse milk in traditional societies, even though the horse is one of the oldest and most treasured domesticated animals. It appears to be a modern fad, but I do not know this for certain. I don't think it would be a good food source for traditional people since it's extremely low in fat and, therefore, in calories. Only modern Western people, whose industrial food-production technology for the first time in history has made obesity a major nutritional problem, have a reason to seek low-fat milk.

    I already noted that whale milk is about 50% fat. Other producers of extremely high-fat milk are seals and hamsters. Keep the kids away from that class rodent!

    Edit: It occurred to me that llamas have also been domesticated since ancient times so I looked up llama milk. Llamas are incredibly poor milk producers and it's a miracle their calves can live on it. Llama milk is now produced by North American llama ranchers, but it's obviously an expensive fad. It appears that the other New World camelids, the alpaca, guanaco and vicuña, probably fall into the same category.

    Pigs are artiodactyls but not ruminants (they don't have multiple stomachs) and therefore can't digest cellulose. Nonetheless they are good producers of highly nutritious milk. But no one milks pigs for practical reasons: they have more teats than cows and they are very difficult to restrain.

    Once I got started I had to look up the other artiodactyls. There are no articles on human consumption of giraffe milk. Only one person claims to know what deer milk tastes like and he thought it was awful. All I could learn about hippopotamus milk is that it's pink. I stopped looking.

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    Last edited: Feb 23, 2008
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  5. skaught The field its covered in blood Valued Senior Member

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    Ok so, no one has yet said anything about human breast milk? Anyone tried it?
     
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  7. Fraggle Rocker Staff Member

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    Quite a few people have drunk it by accident because women use breast pumps and store it in the fridge for their nannies while they're at work.
     
  8. Avatar smoking revolver Valued Senior Member

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    Gah, thanks for the mental picture, Fraggle...
     
  9. skaught The field its covered in blood Valued Senior Member

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    But what about its nutritional value? Would it be advisable for people to drink it if it was readily available? humans will continue to lactate as long as they are nursing someone... What if women could say harvest this and sell it? Sounds crazy, but not as crazy as drinking milk from an animal, especially an animal as filthy as a cow... yuck!

    A friend of mine who was nursing let me taste some of hers once. It was like... Hmm... kind of sweet. almost tasted like a banana. Tastes like the milk left over in a bowl of Honey Nut Cheerios with banana slices in it

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    YUM!
     
  10. kmguru Staff Member

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    Human milk is good for humans. But the idea of drinking it is just...I have accidentally tasted too...so it does taste Ok...but the thought of it is just not appealing...may be it is somekind of natural mental block....
     
  11. Fraggle Rocker Staff Member

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    Considering the things that men will put into their mouths--and let's keep this discourse polite by limiting the objects under consideration to things like cigars and clarinet reeds--it's amusing that so many of them gasp at the thought of something as natural and healthy as human milk.
    If it's not only edible but good for babies, I can't imagine that it could be very bad for adults. Probably a little high in fat, but probably well balanced with vitamins and minerals since it is capable of being a completely balanced diet for babies who have very high nutritional requirements.
    That's what the nearly obsolete term "wet nurse" means. Nannies used to extend their lactation indefinitely and feed the children of their employers. It's a fair amount of hassle for a woman to collect her milk for her own baby, much less collect it for a stranger's baby--much less a strange adult! So I doubt that women in the First World could be recruited into the occupation for the market price of milk. I'm sure in poor countries you could do it more easily, but then you have health issues. You'd have to be sure pasteurization would be adequate, which means you'd have to treat the women literally like cattle. Not an image that would make people clamor for your product.

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    The insides of their udders are hermetically sealed until milking time and the nipples are sanitized before milking. Their milk is hardly any filthier than their meat, and it does undergo pasteurization which is essentially speed-cooking to kill everything that routine veterinary care doesn't prevent.
     
  12. Avatar smoking revolver Valued Senior Member

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    Nah, I was talking about those breast pumps. I immediately thought of something you use to pump up your car tires.
     
  13. Orleander OH JOY!!!! Valued Senior Member

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    where's cow?

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    If Bison are recent, what did Native American milk? Nothing? Is that why so many of them are lactose intolerant?
     
  14. joepistole Deacon Blues Valued Senior Member

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    Well I will guarantee you no matter how much you like whale milk, I ain't gonna milk any whales!
     
  15. skaught The field its covered in blood Valued Senior Member

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    Hehe... yeah, it does create a funny image of a bunch of women sitting around reading magazines or chewing on hay while they're hooked up to some funky pumps...

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    But hey, I'd drink it, if it was healthy and lactose free, since I am lactose intolerant! I WILL NOT TOLERATE LACTOSE

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  16. Orleander OH JOY!!!! Valued Senior Member

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    no no no. My husband wasn't even allowed to touch me there when I was nursing. They belonged to the baby. Yeah, I was a bit mental about it, lack of sleep I suppose.

    Didn't this happen in Grapes of Wrath? and don't get me started on Roman Charity. (eeewwww)
     
  17. Fraggle Rocker Staff Member

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    Actually I assumed that cattle were lumped in with the various species of buffalo, but apparently when they said "bison" they meant the Eurasian ancestral species of cattle and were not counting the milk of the American bison, a modern boutique product. My mistake.
    Remember that the people of what is now the USA and Canada were still in the Mesolithic Era (hunter-gatherers) at the time of the European occupation, and only a few tribes had advanced to the Neolithic Era (agriculture: farming and animal husbandry). The largest domesticated animal among the tribes that had developed the technology of animal husbandry was the turkey. There were no large domesticated grazing animals in America north of the Rio Grande and, therefore, no milk.

    In contrast, not only had the Neolithic Era dawned many thousands of years previously in the region south of the Rio Grande and in South America, but civilization had already been developed and was well into the Bronze Age. (The Olmec/Maya/Aztec continuum in Mexico and Guatemala, and the Inca in the northern Andes region.) Unfortunately there simply were no "milkable" animals in Mexico. In fact, the Mesoamericans have the distinction of being the only people who built a civilization with no draft animals. (Of course then the brave and wise Europeans came along and destroyed it.) The Inca had llamas of course, the New World cousins of the camel, but as noted previously, llamas barely produce enough milk to feed baby llamas.
    Presumably so. But lactose intolerance is also common among their cousins who stayed behind in Asia. Tibetans drink yak milk, but milk is not a staple of the diet of the Chinese and most of the other well-known East Asian nations.
     
  18. Orleander OH JOY!!!! Valued Senior Member

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    is cheese and butter?
     
  19. Lactose is the most likely thing in milk to cause an allergic reaction.
    Many people have at least some type of food allergy, to something.

    I doubt that there is a mutated form of being that can ingest from another through superior complexing. It's nothing more than a reaction.

    No, in fact some don't even like the taste. Preference, and overall makeup lend to this.
     
  20. Fraggle Rocker Staff Member

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    No, Chinese and Japanese people don't make cheese and don't use butter. To them cattle are strictly beef. Of course in westernized places like Hong Kong they use western recipes and if you have Cantonese dim sum they'll serve dan tat which are little lemon custard tarts for dessert.

    They use tofu where we would use cheese.
    I'm lactose-intolerant. I don't exactly have an allergic reaction to it, I just can't digest it. It gives me gas. I have the same trouble with oats. But I can eat cheese and drink cream.
     
  21. iceaura Valued Senior Member

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    According to what I've been running into over the years, northern European whites with those reactions should seriously consider gluten allergy as a root cause.

    Just a matter of odds.
     
  22. Fraggle Rocker Staff Member

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    That's not it. I can eat all other grains until they come out of my ears. I can eat a whole loaf of bread.
     
  23. Aivar A.R. Registered Senior Member

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    So basically you can eat anything you want, it's not a matter of not being able to handle it (you can handle it; but you just can't ingest lactose), so it gives gas?
     

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