Milk and dairy products

Milk is a raw foodstuff, invested in healthy food in the production of a number of dairy products of different textures, taste, color and ingredients. Such as yogurt, curd, eiran, yellow and white cheeses, labneh, cream, butter, animal ghee, powdered milk, concentrated evaporated milk, whey, and others.

Milk was originally an aqueous emulsion containing fat globules, soluble sugars and proteins, within a specified pH. Generally, productive treatments deal with the main milk components, which are five components: water, pH, fats, proteins and sugars. Other ingredients in milk remain associated with key ingredients, such as vitamins, minerals, salts, enzymes and antibodies.

There are four main types of productive treatments, the first of which has to do with preparing milk for direct consumption, the second has to do with reducing the amount of fat in it, the third is the preparation of fermented dairy products, and the fourth is the production of cheese from it.

Preparing milk for eating and reducing fat in it is done through “pasteurization”, homogeneity and reinforcement. Pasteurization aims to purify milk from harmful microbes to extend the shelf life of milk. Because milk fat is in the form of small fat globules mixed with milk liquid, and because it is prone to float in the form of a layer of cream separated from milk, the size of the fat globules is reduced, broken down and mixed with the rest of the milk components, which is called the homogenization process. In the process of enhancing milk, vitamin «D» is added to facilitate calcium absorption, and another group of vitamins and minerals is added.

As for cheese production, it deals mainly with milk proteins. The fermentation processes depend on the interactions of bacteria with the milk lactose sugar to produce lactic acid, as it will come.

Milk fat

Under the headline “Eating saturated fats and the risk of coronary heart disease” will be published within the next March 15 issue of the International Journal of Cardiology, publishing a scientific review of Harvard researchers about the results of an interesting previous study conducted by a group From European researchers and included about 80 thousand people in Britain and Denmark, about the difference in the effect of different types of saturated fats on the risk of cardiovascular disease.

The results of this previous medical study, published in the last December issue of the same medical journal, reported that people who consume the quality of “short chain saturated fats” in their chemical composition (Shorter – Chain Saturated Fats), that is, they have less From 14 carbon atoms, as in dairy fat, they have a higher risk of heart attacks. Likewise among those who reduce their intake the quality of saturated fats with a long chain in their chemical composition, that is, they have more than 16 carbon atoms as well as in the fats of meat and animal fats.

The researchers said that a number of previous studies have noted that different types of saturated animal fats have different effects on the extent of cholesterol disorders. In this regard, the intake of saturated fats in dairy derivatives in particular, and not in milk itself, has positive effects that differ from the negative effects of eating saturated fats in meat and animal fats. This is what aspects of it were presented in the July 20, 2018 issue of “Your Health” supplement to “Al-Sharq Al-Awsat” when talking about the relationship of consuming whole milk to heart disease.

“Our long-term analysis of the diets of large groups of individuals in two European countries shows that the type of saturated fats we consume can affect cardiovascular health,” commented Dutch doctor Yvon Slogs, the lead researcher in the European study.

Fermented dairy products and the heart

On the other hand, the results of the scientific review study of researchers from Finland indicated that there is a difference between the effects of consuming fermented dairy products (Fermented Dairy Products) than non-fermented (Non – Fermented Dairy Products) on the risk of cardiovascular disease. And according to what was published in the last December issue of the British Journal of Nutrition, the researchers followed the quality of fermented and fermented dairy products, which were consumed by about two thousand people in Finland for twenty years.

They noted in their results that the higher the people who consumed fermented dairy derivatives, compared to the lowest ones, they had a 30% lower risk of heart disease, and that the higher people who consumed non-fermented dairy derivatives, those possibilities had a higher rate. And eating the quality of fermented dairy products low-fat reduces the risk of heart disease. The researchers said: “These results indicate that fermented and non-fermented dairy products can have different relationships with the risk of coronary artery disease.”

And in another study by European researchers from Sweden, Britain and Ireland, published in the December 18 issue of the Journal of Clinical Nutrition, the researchers included about 25 thousand people in a follow-up medical study for ten years. It was about the effects of eating dairy products on the risk of cardiovascular disease. In their results, they note that an increase in the intake of dairy products, unlike milk, reduces the risk of death from cerebral arterial disease.