Milk is a healthy, nutritious and fortifying food. Its consumption, in various forms, is the basis of our diet, but in most cases we consume too much, also exposing ourselves to health risks. There are those who recommend taking good quantities of it every day, but we often forget that milk and dairy products are practically everywhere. Milk derivatives are in fact used in many industrial products, and this leads to exceeding the daily quantities. Milk is actually used to raise puppies. A calf, thanks to the milk supplied by its mother, can grow rapidly, passing from 50 to 500 kilograms in a short time. “It is a food that helps to grow and make you fat – underlines the biologist and nutritionist Valerio Galasso, interviewed by Alberto Ferrigolo of the breaking latest news -. Even if we consume it every day, the effect could be just the latter”.
Milks are not all the same
Cow’s milk contains type A1 casein, “which is very demanding for our intestines”. Instead, goat or sheep’s milk is more tolerated, because it has a type of casein and more digestible A2 proteins. Being produced to support the growth of “smaller sized animals, which must reach from 1 to a maximum of 6-7 kilograms, it corresponds quite closely to the growth characteristics of a child rather than those of a calf…”, commented the doctor Galasso, who signs a book for Feltrinelli with the writer Erri De Luca entitled “Spizzichi e bocconi”. Moderate consumption is also advisable for other factors. Most of the milk intended for human consumption “comes from intensive farms in which antibiotics, growth factors and hormones are used which we then find verbatim in the milk. Unless you know the origin, or even the animal itself, its owner. But the milk produced by large companies is very likely to come from a type of intensive farming that uses all these drugs and products”.
It is important to choose good quality milk
“I am of the opinion that if a person wants to drink and consume dairy products he must consume whole milk and whole milk product – says the nutritionist biologist -. All those lactose-free products, skimmed or even partially skimmed, are all products that simply serve to continue consuming a type of food that our body tells us it is unable to digest. Physiologically speaking, we lose the enzyme lactase, which is the enzyme that breaks down lactose to digest it and therefore from a certain moment on some bodies stop being tolerant of milk. The fact that it is only lactose is just a detail, because many times it is actually a question that pertains to proteins, which are less tolerated by our intestines. And please, lactose can create intolerance and therefore quite important intestinal problems, but then it is the constant consumption of that type of protein that creates more serious and severe problems”.
Strict rules are useless
But milk is a precious food, which must be part of our diet. Doctor Galasso is keen to clarify it: “The consumption of milk and yoghurt must always be regulated on the individual himself, on his intestinal problems, problems of osteoporosis, etc. But the problem is that most people don’t read the labels and think that one yogurt is as good as another, whereas to make a yogurt you need three ingredients: milk and two bacteria. If we look at the yoghurt labels, they have at least five or six lines of ingredients and they are super-modified products, full of preservatives and maybe then those bacteria if we go to consume them close to the expiry date they are already as good as dead… Their effect probiotic vanishes. The same goes for milk. I am absolutely not in favor of consuming it every day, especially for children who still have a delicate intestine and have to undergo this daily commitment to digest it”.
Milk in the Mediterranean diet
The expert concludes by saying that he does not want to “condemn the consumption of milk and say not to use it anymore. Instead, I would like to try to make people understand that maybe a high-level gorgonzola, a high-level Parmigiano Reggiano aged for quite a few months, even 36, are products that can be eaten once in a while and that’s perfectly fine. And that’s how the Mediterranean diet consumed them, there was certainly no daily consumption of cheese or milk”. Milk consumption is essential, but it would be right to personalize consumption: “We don’t create standard rules valid for everyone when we are completely different from each other”.