DailyDirt: Common Sense Ain't So Common

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

Mammals drink milk when they're young. Maybe there are some exceptions to that, but the examples of milk-drinking mammals are pretty easy to find. People are mammals, and so the cow milk industry is sizable: the US alone produced over 200,000,000,000 pounds of cow milk in 2013. In other parts of the world, goat milk is more popular (and there are a lot of other kinds of milk that people drink, too). Okay, so why doesn't anyone drink pig milk?

• The Illinois Pork Producers' Association has an answer. Basically, it's harder to milk a pig, and cows are so much better at it now that it would be hard for the pork industry to enter that market even if there was demand for pig milk. [url]
• Chef Edward Lee is actually trying to milk a pig. And if he succeeds, he's going to make some pig milk cheese with it. [url]
• An April Fool's joke claimed that a pig milking machine was ready to go and patented. No commercial pig milking machinery seems to exist, but there's at least one patent that covers a device for milking a miniature pig. [url]

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Filed Under: cheese, dairy, food, mammals, milk, pigs

DailyDirt: Drinking Healthy Stuff...

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

If you look closely enough at anything, you're bound to find more complexity and unanswered questions than you'd imagine. Especially when it comes to health recommendations, it seems like the consensus for what's "bad" for you flips every few decades. That's not exactly true, but as we learn more of the details about how substances we eat are metabolized, we have to change the simple recommendations that are broadcast to everyone. Here are just a few links on what you might want to drink (or not drink) to stay healthy.

• Hydropathy started in the early 1800s promoting all kinds of health benefits from water. The lasting legacy of the hydropathy movement is the recommendation to drink 8 glasses of water per day -- even though there's no scientific evidence to support that specific amount of water for everyone to consume daily. [url]
• Orange juice used to be considered the standard healthy beverage for breakfast, able to cure ailments from scurvy to acidosis. Nowadays, though, OJ isn't viewed as favorably due to its high sugar content and its sometimes heavily-processed varieties. [url]
• The health benefits of skim milk versus whole milk aren't as clear cut as you might have thought. Some recent studies find that consuming whole-fat dairy correlates with lower rates of obesity, but adults with high cholesterol may still want to limit full-fat dairy in their diets. [url]

If you'd like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post via StumbleUpon.

Filed Under: acidosis, beverages, dairy, drinks, fat, health, hydropathy, milk, obesity, oj, orange juice, scurvy, skim milk, water