Milk products in the dietary management of childhood undernutrition - a historical review.

The present narrative review outlines the use of milk products in infant and young child feeding from early history until today and illustrates how research findings and technical innovations contributed to the evolution of milk-based strategies to combat undernutrition in children below the age of 5 years. From the onset of social welfare initiatives, dairy products were provided by maternal and child health services to improve nutrition. During the last century, a number of aetiological theories on oedematous forms of undernutrition were developed and until the 1970s the dogma of protein deficiency was dominant. Thereafter, a multifactorial concept gained acceptance and protein quality was emphasised. During the last decades, research findings demonstrated that the inclusion of dairy products in the management of severe acute malnutrition is most effective. For children suffering from moderate acute malnutrition the evidence for the superiority of milk-based diets is less clear. There is an unmet need for evaluating locally produced milk-free alternatives at lower cost, especially in countries that rely on imported dairy products. New strategies for the dietary management of childhood undernutrition need to be developed on the basis of research findings, current child feeding practices, socio-cultural conditions and local resources. Exclusive and continued breast-feeding supported by community-based nutrition programmes using optimal combinations of locally available complementary foods should be compared with milk product-based interventions.

Weaning practices among pastoralists: New evidence of infant feeding patterns from Bronze Age Eurasia.

OBJECTIVES: This paper investigates infant feeding practices through stable carbon (δ13 C) and nitrogen (δ15 N) isotopic analyses of human bone collagen from Kamennyi Ambar 5, a Middle Bronze Age cemetery located in central Eurasia. The results presented are unique for the time period and region, as few cemeteries have been excavated to reveal a demographic cross-section of the population. Studies of weaning among pastoral societies are infrequent and this research adds to our knowledge of the timing, potential supplementary foods, and cessation of breastfeeding practices. MATERIALS AND METHODS: Samples were collected from 41 subadults (<15 years) and 27 adults (15+ years). Isotopic reference sets from adult humans as well as faunal remains were utilized as these form the primary and complementary foods fed to infants. RESULTS: Slight shifts in δ13 C and δ15 N values revealed that weaning was a multi-stage process (breastfeeding, weaning, and complete cessation of nursing) that began at 6 months of age, occurred over several years of early childhood, and was completed by 4 years of age. DISCUSSION: Our results indicate that weaning was a multi-stage process that was unique among late prehistoric pastoralist groups in Eurasia that were dependent on milk products as a supplementary food. Our discussion centers on supporting this hypothesis with modern information on central and east Eurasian herding societies including the age at which complementary foods are introduced, the types of complementary foods, and the timing of the cessation of breastfeeding. Integral to this work is the nature of pastoral economies and their dependence on animal products, the impact of complementary foods on nutrition and health, and how milk processing may have affected nutrition content and digestibility of foods. This research on Eurasian pastoralists provides insights into the complexities of weaning among prehistoric pastoral societies as well as the potential for different complementary foods to be incorporated into infant diets in the past.

The Interrelationships between Lactose Intolerance and the Modern Dairy Industry: Global Perspectives in Evolutional and Historical Backgrounds.

Humans learned to exploit ruminants as a source of milk about 10,000 years ago. Since then, the use of domesticated ruminants as a source of milk and dairy products has expanded until today when the dairy industry has become one of the largest sectors in the modern food industry, including the spread at the present time to countries such as China and Japan. This review analyzes the reasons for this expansion and flourishing. As reviewed in detail, milk has numerous nutritional advantages, most important being almost an irreplaceable source of dietary calcium, hence justifying the effort required to increase its consumption. On the other hand, widespread lactose intolerance among the adult population is a considerable drawback to dairy-based foods consumption. Over the centuries, three factors allowed humans to overcome limitations imposed by lactose intolerance: (i) mutations, which occurred in particular populations, most notably in the north European Celtic societies and African nomads, in which carriers of the lactose intolerance gene converted from being lactose intolerant to lactose tolerant; (ii) the ability to develop low-lactose products such as cheese and yogurt; and (iii) colon microbiome adaptation, which allow lactose intolerant individuals to overcome its intolerance. However, in a few examples in the last decade, modern dairy products, such as the popular and widespread bio-cultured yogurts, were suspected to be unsuitable for lactose intolerant peoples. In addition, the use of lactose and milk-derived products containing lactose in non-dairy products has become widespread. For these reasons, it is concluded that it might be important and helpful to label food that may contain lactose because such information will allow lactose intolerant groups to control lactose intake within the physiological limitations of ~12 g per a single meal.

Leite e modernidade: ideologia e políticas de alimentação na era Vargas / Milk and modernity: ideology and nutrition policies during the Vargas era

Nos anos 1930 difundiu-se no Brasil a nova ciência da nutrição, que introduziu também a convicção de que o leite de vaca constituía o mais importante dos alimentos básicos. Apesar da campanha levada a cabo pelo Ministério de Educação e Saúde Pública em meados dos anos 1930, o consumo de leite no Rio de Janeiro se manteve muito aquém das recomendações dos experts devido à má qualidade do produto e a seu elevado preço. Este trabalho analisa os esforços do Estado Novo para melhorar o sistema de abastecimento de leite da capital brasileira assim como para atenuar causas e efeitos de seu fracasso final.

In the 1930s the new science of nutrition was disseminated in Brazil, which also introduced the conviction that cow’s milk was the most important of staple foods. Despite the campaign promoted by the Ministério de Educação e Saúde Pública (Ministry of Education and Public Health) in the mid-1930s, the consumption of milk in Rio de Janeiro remained far short of the recommendations of experts due to the poor quality of the product and its high price. This paper analyzes the efforts of the Estado Novo to improve the milk supply system of the Brazilian capital as well as to mitigate the causes and effects of its ultimate failure.

[Milk and modernity: ideology and nutrition policies during the Vargas era]. / Leite e modernidade: ideologia e políticas de alimentação na era Vargas.

In the 1930s the new science of nutrition was disseminated in Brazil, which also introduced the conviction that cow's milk was the most important of staple foods. Despite the campaign promoted by the Ministério de Educação e Saúde Pública (Ministry of Education and Public Health) in the mid-1930s, the consumption of milk in Rio de Janeiro remained far short of the recommendations of experts due to the poor quality of the product and its high price. This paper analyzes the efforts of the Estado Novo to improve the milk supply system of the Brazilian capital as well as to mitigate the causes and effects of its ultimate failure.

"In bacteria land": the battle over raw milk.

Beginning at around 1893, America's initial raw milk wars pitted proponents of pasteurized milk against advocates of a complex scheme for "certifying" clean, uncontaminated raw milk. The certification program, unsuited to modern commercial economies of scale, soon faded into obscurity. When a new version of the raw milk movement began gathering strength in the 1970s, scarcely anyone remembered the terms on which a certain amount of rational debate had once taken place. Part of the reason is that over the course of the twentieth century, the scale and structure of the fluid milk industry had undergone drastic changes that turned a highly variable, fragile product into a nearly featureless one poorly understood by consumers, regulators, or polemicists. Meanwhile, new dairying and processing practices had begun creating hospitable conditions for pathogens that were unknown during the first controversies but that urgently need to be considered today. Unfortunately, discussion of the raw milk question is now almost wholly dictated by intolerant ideologues on both sides, in an atmosphere of profound historical amnesia. Given the great complexity of the issues involved and the serious implications for public health, the general tone of debate is at best counterproductive.

Biofuel, dairy production and beef in Brazil: competing claims on land use in São Paulo state.

This paper examines the competing claims on land use resulting from the expansion of biofuel production. Sugarcane for biofuel drives agrarian change in So Paulo state, which has become the major ethanol-producing region in Brazil. We analyse how the expansion of sugarcane-based ethanol in So Paulo state has impacted dairy and beef production. Historical changes in land use, production technologies, and product and land prices are described, as well as how these are linked to changing policies in Brazil. We argue that sugarcane/biofuel expansion should be understood in the context of the dynamics of other agricultural sectors and the long-term national political economy rather than as solely due to recent global demand for biofuel. This argument is based on a meticulous analysis of changes in three important sectors - sugarcane, dairy farming, and beef production - and the mutual interactions between these sectors.

Milking the Plains: movement of large dairy operations into southwestern Kansas.

Western Kansas has an historical identification with cattle, with a focus on cattle ranching and more specifically since the 1950s, beef-cattle feedlots. Since the mid-1990s large dairy operations have moved into southwestern Kansas. Today more than twenty large dairies house more than 70,000 milk cows. These operate as confined feeding operations similar to beef-cattle feedlots. Regional advantages for the dairy industry include affordable land with wide-open space, local residents' cattle- and dairy-friendly attitudes, and other factors. Regional promoters have actively recruited dairies, and a dairy-business support system has emerged. The prospects for continued expansion of dairies in southwestern Kansas are unclear; despite the locational advantages and the possibility that the industry may continue to relocate here, as did the cattle-feeding industry several decades ago, further moves into the area may depend on continued resources availability and additional infrastructure development.

Labeling the good: alternative visions and organic branding in Sweden in the late twentieth century.

The past decade's rapid expansion of a global market for organic food has set powerful economic and political forces in motion. The most important dividing line is whether organic food production should be an alternative to or a niche within a capitalist mode of production. To explore this conflict the article analyzes the formation of a market for eco-labeled milk in Sweden. The analysis draws on three aspects: the strategy of agri-business, the role of eco-labeling, and the importance of inter-organizational dynamics. Based on archival studies, daily press, and interviews, three processes are emphasized: the formative years of the alternative movement in the 1970s, the founding of an independent eco-label (KRAV) in the 1980s, and a discursive shift from alternative visions to organic branding in the early 1990s following the entry of agri-business.

Cheese cultures: transforming American tastes and traditions.

Although the history of cheesemaking in the United States tells largely a tale of industrialization, there is a submerged yet continuous history of small-batch, hands-on, artisan cheese manufacture. This tradition, carried on in artisan cheese factories across the country, although concentrated in Wisconsin, is often overlooked by a new generation of artisan cheesemakers. Continuities in fabrication methods shared by preindustrial and post-industrial artisan creameries have been obscured by changes in the organization and significance of artisan production over the last one hundred years. Making cheese by hand has morphed from chore to occupation to vocation; from economic trade to expressive endeavor; from a craft to an art. American artisan cheesemaking tradition was invented and reinvented as a tradition of innovation. Indeed, ideological commitment to innovation as modern, progressive, American­and thus a marketable value­further obscures continuities between past and present, artisan factories, and new farmstead production. The social disconnect between the current artisan movement and American's enduring cheesemaking tradition reproduces class hierarchies even as it reflects growing equity in gendered occupational opportunities.

A tale of two dairies.

Milk has always been susceptible to price fluctuations. Farmers are used to putting away money during good times to see themselves through lean times. Recently, however, the cycles have become more violent, with lows falling lower and highs rising not quite so high and the intervals between peaks and valleys shrinking. In 1970, when milk was bringing farmers the same amount that it is today, there were nearly 650,000 dairy farms in the United States. Now there are fewer than one tenth as many, only about 54,000. The largest 1 percent of dairy farms (a figure than includes only enormous factory farms with over 2,000 cows) produced nearly one quarter of the milk we consume. Recently, dairy farmers banded together to propose a radical solution to the dairy crisis. In order to survive, they concluded, American dairy farmers would have to join together to control the supply of milk, an approach along lines similar to the one taken in Canada.

"Not to intrude": a Danish perspective on gender and class in nineteenth-century dairying.

This study follows the thread of gender divisions in dairying in Denmark and the American Midwest in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Gender organization of dairying shifted at this time in diverse European and North American contexts. As agriculture mechanized and production scale increased, access to advanced education and international markets became critical. Women, who had been in the forefront of the development of dairying, ceded their leadership to men as these changes occurred. While some scholars see this shift as a strategic loss for women, this study finds that variables of class, marital status, rural demographics, and alternative occupations mediated the rural women's experience of change. Not all women experienced the change as a loss. The question of which women were invested in dairying is critical to understanding the course of change. Increasingly, middle-class farm women were turning away from the hard work of dairying and investing themselves in new ways in the upward mobility of their family farms. Rural life shaped distinct gender patterns in European and American history, and the rural experience shaped the larger trajectory of women's economic and political evolution, even though few rural women were involved in the organized women's movement.

Dairy innovations over the past 100 Years.

The dairy industry in the United States has undergone many changes over the past century. Adulteration and contamination of milk were rampant before the passage and enforcement of the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906, and the introduction and eventual acceptance of certified and pasteurized milk have provided consumers with a consistently safe product. Homogenization and advances in the packaging and transport of milk gradually took hold, improving the milk supply. Other developments included the concentration of milk and whey, lactose-reduced milk, and the popularization of yogurt. Consumers have benefited from advances in butter packaging, low-fat ice cream, cheese manufacture, and yogurt technology, which has helped create the large demand for dairy products in the United States. Current trends and issues, including the increasing popularity of organic and artisanal products and the use of rBST, will shape the future of the dairy industry.

Landlords and tenants in the wake of abolition and ecological devastation in Brazil's Middle Paraíba Valley.

This article uses Barra do Piraí as a case study of rural land tenure, production, consumption, and labor in Brazil's Middle Paraíba Valley during the half century following abolition of slavery in 1888. Dairy farming and railroad development distinguished Barra do Piraí from other coffee-producing areas that suffered from ecological devastation. By 1900 the land's loss of fertility precluded further plantation agriculture in Barra do Piraí, leading to the transition from lucrative coffee cultivation to dairy farming based on meager capital inputs. Compared to the earlier coffee culture, dairy farms produced only modest wealth for landlords and required fewer laborers, compelling impoverished tenants to migrate in search of employment. Since Barra do Piraí was an important railroad junction, many rural laborers ended up in the locale after using the railroad as a migratory path. At the same time, the railroad and proto-industries that it stimulated provided alternative employment for rural laborers, thereby partially mitigating the leverage landlords had over the abundant labor force. The availability of industrial and proto-industrial employment created occupational diversity among rural tenants and introduced them to work routines that would become commonplace when the region more fully industrialized after 1940.

Protein supply and nutritional status in nineteenth century Bavaria, Prussia and France.

What determined regional height differences in the 19th century? We compare anthropometric evidence with production estimates of different food products and other economic variables. To this end, we concentrate on 179 rural regions and 29 towns in Bavaria (Southeast Germany). This regionally disaggregated level of analysis enables us to study the influence of the local supply of different food products on the nutritional status of the population, among which milk turned out particularly important. This result is tested and confirmed with regional data from Prussia and France.

The economics of sheep and goat husbandry in Norse Greenland.

Insight into the relative importance of sheep and goat herding and of the economic significance of each species (i.e., milk vs. meat vs. wool) in Medieval Greenland is obtained through the application of Halstead et al.'s (2002) criteria for the identification of adult ovicaprine mandibles to faunal assemblages from three Norse farmsteads: Sandnes, V52a, and Ø71S. The economic strategies identified are broadly comparable between the two species and the Eastern and Western Settlement sites examined, and are suggestive of the subsistence production of meat and milk. Comparison with farmsteads elsewhere in Greenland indicates that socio-economic status and/or farmstead size interacted with geographical location in determining the economic strategies employed by the Norse farmers. A broader use of resources and a more varied diet are evident at larger farmsteads in Greenland and this paper suggests that such sites would have been better able than their smaller counterparts to withstand environmental deterioration during the early Middle Ages. These analyses have also confirmed that goats were relatively more common in Norse sites in Greenland than in Norse sites in Iceland, Orkney, or Shetland.