h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I think one good reason for breastfeeding is the immune system: new babies don't have it up & running yet so get a lot of it from their mum through the milk. I forgot how long it takes before they build up their own immune system. And of course in this day & age you might just try and live very clean...

LK

1. you can't give babies cow's milk, because they can't digest the fat and mostly: the lactose. The powder milk you give babies is based on mother's milk. It is basicly identical, except that mother's milk contains a whole lot of antibodies. But nutrionally powder milk and mother's milk is the same.

2. soy milk is a substitute for milk and is nowadays designed for lactose intolerant people. It is nutritionally identical to cow's milk, but without the lactose. However, it doesn't have the same properties when you use it for baking and cooking. e.g. Soy cream also exists, but it's a bugger if you wanna wisk it into a nice foam.

3. no mammal is in principle designed to digest lactose. The only ones that can do that are. And even then, only the kaukasian race. Because the kaukasian race lives mostly in cold region with little sun, especially during winter (i'm talking about northern and western europe, the native americans are nog kaukasian but are of the asian race), we need another source to get our vitamin D and that is milk. The other races get their vitamin D by making it themselves. The sun reacts with the skin (the substance is called melanine, which gives you a tan) and this produces vitamin D. So, they have never needed to evolve the capability to digest lactose. They can however digest milky products so long as the milk has been processed, e.g. cheese or yoghurt. Then, the lactose is broken down.

cool, thanks varindweion. Didn't know that about the vitamin D.

I have milk with cereal, and sometimes a glass of milk with pretzels or chips. And sometimes I make a milkshake. But I don't ever really just drink a glass of milk. Well, OK, if I'm going out of town and I want to use it up before it goes bad.

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So there is a factory farm out there somewhere that is milking human mothers in order to produce the base? I think not.

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Identical? http://www.qtessencesoymilkmaker.com/soymilk.html

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Lactose is present in every kind of milk, including human. And every mammal is designed to drink milk in infancy. Would you like to reconsider this statement?

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Caucasians evolved the ability to produce lactase, the enzyme which allows you to digest lactose, well into adulthood. In other races, lactase production is active in infancy, then falls off.

The key info in this statement is this: every baby, human and mammal, produces lactase in infancy to digests and tolerate lactose. If they didn't, there would be no mammals.

Are all non-white adults lactose-intolerant?! I had no idea!

Ste

I can't eat cows-milk without getting THE most beautiful eczema. It's not a lactose intolerance, it's an inability to digest the very large calcium-protein molecules in cow's milk (casein. They make knitting needles out of it. Go figure). Calves need them to grow socking great cow carcasses. Humans... don't. I should imagine I'd have a shocking bad reaction to elephant milk as well.

Soya milk does not contain casein. However it (in its unfermented form) DOES contain estrogen-mimicking substances, which, while probably rather jolly for menopausal women, do not sound like anything I'd want to feed to an infant. In Japan and China and so on, they don't hoover down soya milk and soya flour as we do. They eat tofu, which has been fermented, the which process breaks down some of the phyto-estrogens, which makes it a little bit good for older women and a heck of a lot better for the infants that they do feed it to. Though I understand breastfeeding is far more common there than here (UK) and than in the USA, so it is not often an issue.

Oh, and one last point, my sister's free bottles of baby formula all said that they were nutritionally EQUIVALENT to breast milk, not nutritionally IDENTICAL. I think you can get an enormous heap of legal wiggle-room into the word 'equivalent'.

There is a factory somewhere which produces Mother's Milk.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mother%27s_Milk

lots of interesting information here but i was wondering how soy/a milk can be used as a milk substitute in order to get calcium, if indeed it can be used for such a purpose.

Perhaps the research conducted at Creighton University presented at this link http://www.ajcn.org/cgi/content/full/71/5/1166 will be of use in answering the original question, if someone else would care to give it a read and comment (it's not exactly my field of expertise, pardon the pun).

They use isotopic calcium labeling to test the absorption of calcium from cow's milk and from tricalcium phosphate Ca fortified soy milk. They seem to have a small sample population (16) and all male, so I don't know how accurate or universal their findings are, but they conclude that calcium absorption from Ca fortified soy milk was 75% as efficient as from cow milk. The results depend significantly on how the isotopic labeling occurred however.

The question seems a little odd to me frankly.

I personally would have though Soya milk was a milk subsitute only in the fact that it's a white liquid that can be used in food in much the same way without potential problems of lactose intolerance and fat content.

Is there any resemblance in a nutritional sense at all? I doubt it, one is an animal derived product full of fats and fat soluble vitamins and some minerals and the other is plant derived. I would imagine the protein content is the only close resemblance.

It also seems to assume that the only possible dietary source of calcium is milk and that ingestion of calcium would be the only reason to drink milk (or put it on your weetabix or whatever).

Here is a nice list of other foods that contain plenty of calcium http://nutrition.about.com/od/vitaminssupplements/qt/gettingenoughca.htm

Soya milk, 'works' becuase it it is full of nutrition for plenty of other essential contents of a balanced diet. It's not as far as I can tell a calcium source but then I don't think anyone claims that do they? The study posted above had to add a calcium source to it.

If your question is with regard to _calcium enriched_ soya milk then I think it would be trivial to add enough calcium to it to overwhelm any inhibitory effect of phytic acid in the drink.

Yes, they were dealing with calcium enriched soy beverage, if you will, as the "natural" soy beverage is quite low in calcium to begin with. The study merely points out that for a 300 mg calcium load for both cow and soy beverages, the calcium from the cow milk is more readily absorbed. I think this was the root of the original question. You are also correct that manufacturers of soy beverage could simply increase the level of enrichment until a single serving of soy would give the same calcium benefit as a single serving of moo juice. And of course, a healthy diet shouldn't depend on a single food for any particular nutrient.