Hello and

this week we're talking about a newtration diva podcast. I'm your host Monica Reinagal and this week we're talking about a new product that you might have seen at the grocery store.

It's called A2 Milk.

There are some pretty big claims being made around this new designer milk,

and we're going to see which ones hold water.

The topic for this week's show was suggested by

nutrition diva listener Leslie Gerengeli who wrote I was recently at my local

health food store and I overheard a salesperson from a company that sells A2 milk touting its superiority over regular milk.

She was saying that the protein that's in regular milk but not in A2 milk causes everything from diabetes to autism to

auto immune disease. As a registered nurse and science-minded person I was

immediately skeptical. Could you do a show on this topic? Well I have to applaud

Leslie's skepticism. A2 Milk is about twice as expensive as regular milk,

but is it really better for us? Or perhaps the more pressing question is whether

regular milk is actually linked to all those scary diseases. A1 and A2 are both types of casing and that's one of the major kinds of protein in milk.

Now proteins as you probably remember are made up of individual amino acids strung together into long, long strings.

There are only a couple of dozen different amino acids, but they can be combined in different

sequences to form thousands of different proteins. It's sort of like the different The only difference between the A1 and the A2 milk protein is that the 67th amino acid in the chain is different.

Now your body digests Kin and all proteins by snipping these long

strings of amino acids into shorter segments called peptides and some of those may have biological activity in the body.

Collagen and insulin are both peptides for example.

The slight difference in the amino acid sequence of A1 and A2 casein results in the creation of slightly different peptides when these milk proteins are digested.

So when we digest the A1 form of casing, it produces a peptide called

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