Hello and welcome to the Nutrition Depot podcast. I'm your host Monica Rinegal. And this

week we're talking about homogenized milk. How does the homogenization process affect

the health properties or the nutritional properties of milk? Is it better for you?

Where's for you? We're going to get to the bottom of the glass.

Most commercial cow's milk, including most organic milk, goes through a few stages of processing

before it reaches the store shelf. It's usually pasteurized in order to kill any pathogenic

bacteria that it may contain. And you can read more about the pros and cons of un-pasteurized

or raw milk in my two-part series on that. I'll put links in the show notes.

Most commercially sold milk is also fortified with vitamins A and D. And this is in an effort to

ensure adequate intake of these nutrients in the general population. And commercial milk is

also usually homogenized. This is a mechanical process that breaks the fat globules into smaller

droplets so that they stay suspended in the milk rather than separating out and floating to the

top of the jug. Before milk is homogenized, some of that fat may be skimmed off to reduce the

amount of fat in the end product. Homogenization was invented around the turn of the 20th century and

it quickly became the industry standard because people preferred the convenience of milk that didn't

have to be vigorously shaken to distribute the fat every time you wanted to use it.

These days, of course, we tend to see food processing as something that reduces the

nutritive value of foods, whether or not that is true. And some have suggested that homogenization

might have a negative impact on how milk affects your body. In fact, it's getting more common

to find milk that's pasteurized but not homogenized. Sometimes it's labeled cream line.

So let's take a closer look at whether or not unhomogenized milk might be a better choice.

When you homogenize milk, you not only change the size of the fat globules,

...