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- Hey there, I'm Josh Clark,
and welcome to Brain Stuff.
And this is the Brain Stuff where I explain to you
the difference between types of milk.
It's actually interesting,
so don't go anywhere yet.
Have you ever been to the store and been like,
" Hey, what's with all the colors
" among these different types of milk?"
Or have you been to the store and been like,
" Mom, please buy the whole milk.
" It tastes so much better than skim!"
And she's like, " No."
And you're like, " Why?"
Well, I'm here to explain.
See, all milk is generally pretty much the same.
It's 87% water, about 8.25% solids.
That's your protein, your carbohydrates,
your vitamins, your minerals, all that kind of stuff.
And then what you have left over typically is fat,
and fat, as you may have guessed,
the fat content is what explains the differences
in those types of milk and hence the different colors
of those kinds of milk on the little cap and everything.
Now whole milk, which is basically like
squeezed from a cow, heated, and then quickly cooled,
aka pasteurized,
and then sold to you to drink,
and is delicious,
has the most milk fat.
According to, I believe, USDA standards,
it needs to have at least 3.25% milk fat
to be whole milk, right?
That means that an eight ounce serving of whole milk
has eight grams of fat,
about 150 calories, half of which are fat calories,
and in our fat psychosis gripped western culture,
that's a lot of fat.
So what do you do?
Well, starting in the 60s and 70s,
we turned to an age old tradition of drinking skim milk,
which had been long cast asunder in favor of whole milk
because skim milk was viewed as something less desirable,
but considerably more healthy possibly.
Let's get into this.
You have different kinds of milk fat content.
You have your whole milk, like I said,
you have your reduced fat milk which is 2%,
which has 2% milk fat.
You can see the pattern going here.
And then we have low fat milk,
which has 1% milk fat.
And then of course we get to skim,
and skim milk is called skim milk
because whenever you remove fat from it,
it's literally skimmed off the top of the milk,
since fat, aka the cream, tends to rise to the top,
making removing the fat and cream,
the best part frankly if you ask me,
very easy.
And skim milk has no fat whatsoever,
and it's about 90 calories,
which means boom, there you go.
You wanna drink milk but you wanna lose some weight
or stay in shape or whatever,
drink skim milk.
But the problem is, remember this.
We said that milk is about 87% water, right?
So when you remove all the fat entirely,
you're removing a significant portion
of what makes milk, milk.
And you're actually removing the stuff that makes milk
look and seem and feel like milk.
Here's the thing.
We've recently begun to realize
that it's possible that milk fat and fats in general
have been kind of unfairly kicked around
the last several decades
and might not be as bad for us as we once thought.
A lot of studies, including some studies of older studies
have gone back and seen that there's not
the expected correlation between fat intake
and higher risk of cardiovascular disease.
So what's going on here?
Why is whole milk suddenly seeming a lot more attractive?
Well, it turns out, a lot of the vitamins found in milk,
especially A and D,
are fat soluble, which means that when they're ingested
in the presence of fat,
maybe even milk fat, I don't know, who knows?
Your body absorbs them a lot more readily,
and that's just one of many possible explanations.
The point is, whole milk has been possibly
unfairly, unjustly and even unhealthily
vilified for several decades.
Now there are plenty of other considerations
to take into account with milk
besides just general healthfulness.
You know, there's the whole lactose intolerance thing,
there's how dairy cattle are treated
during their lives on factory farms.
There's what they're fed.
There's the use of growth hormones and antibiotics.
Just buying, pouring and drinking a glass of milk
is almost like a political act,
and something that you should think about
and do on your own.
But can we all just get together and agree
that whole milk definitely is the variety of milk
that tastes best on cereals,
especially Cinnamon Toast Crunch.
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