Hi, we're here from Curiosity.com to help you get smarter in just a few minutes.

I'm Cody Gough.

And I'm Ashley Hamer.

Today, you learn about why people around the world keep their milk at different temperatures,

a diet that's good for your health and for the health of the planet,

and a cognitive bias that might make you think that everyone agrees with you.

Let's satisfy some curiosity.

If you've traveled around the world, you may have noticed that we refrigerate milk here in the US,

but people in most of the rest of the world buy their milk at room temperature.

If you've ever wondered why, then you've come to the right podcast. The answer comes down to the way the milk is processed.

Most milk is pasteurized, which means it's heated to a temperature high enough to kill bacteria

that might make you sick. In the 1920s, a company in the United Kingdom came up with a way to pasteurize milk continuously

instead of an individual batches, which made for a cheaper and more efficient process.

High temperature short time pasteurization, or HTST,

is what the US and Canada still used today.

Other than bagged milk, which I'm not going to get into.

But in the 1960s, the packaging company Tetrapag

came up with a new technique.

Ultra high temperature or ultra heat treated pasteurization heats the milk to an even higher temperature than

HTST.

The result is milk that stays fresh and shelf stable outside of the fridge for about three months,

way beyond the 7 to 10 refrigerated days of

...