Interesting Facts about Milk

Have you heard about these interesting facts about milk

Facts about Milk and the history of Humanity

Interestingly milk was highly regarded throughout many ancient cultures and was an important part of human history:

• People were herding cattle and drinking milk before they began engaging in agriculture over 10,000 years ago, making milk one of humanities first foods
• Milk is.. wait for it.. LegenDAIRY – Many different cultures including Greeks, Romans, Celts, Egyptians, Sumerians, Mongolians, and Indians all incorporated milk in their foundational myths and legends and valued it as the “food of the gods.”
• The gods and the kings of ancient Sumer would drink milk to become strong and immortal.
• The Greeks say the milky way was created by milk drops from Hera, the wife of Zeus
• The ancient Greeks regarded milk as medicine and their Olympic athletes fueled themselves with milk
• Both Nero’s wife and Cleopatra were known to bathe in milk on a regular basis to rejuvenate their skin. Nero’s wife kept 500 donkeys to keep her tub full of milk to “dispel all diseases and blights” (Source) (Source)
• When Spanish missionaries traveled to Peru in 1553, they noted that the local population in Cuzco was drinking llama milk (Source)
• By 3000 B.C., Ancient Egyptians were large dairy consumers, and recorded their dairy farming on temple walls.
• Julius Caesar believed the Celts and Germans were so large because they ate meat and drank milk
• In East Asia, Milk was consumed heavily in Mongolia, but in China milk consumption went in and out of style at different time periods. Japanese consumed dairy products from cows imported from S. Korea
• Most people today drink cow’s milk, but other mammals have provided milk to people in different parts of the world – sheep, goats, camels, donkeys, horses, yaks, water buffalo, reindeer, and even moose

Facts about Milk and Health

There are a number of facts that speak to milk’s positive effect on building and maintaining a healthy lifestyle. Few foods can compete:

• Drinking milk is perfectly natural (Source)
• Milk is the only food that you can survive on wholly on, having every nutrient your body needs to live (Source)
• Milk has purifying properties and a milk cleanse is a great way to detox your body (Source)
• Milk not only feeds you, but also feeds the bacteria in your gut and many nutrients in milk act as prebiotics to keep your gut bacteria healthy
• People who drink more milk during formative years, grow taller (Source)
• Countries that drink milk are smarter and win more Nobel prizes (Source)
• Milk is the best recovery drink after a workout or other physical activity. The combination of carbohydrates, fat, protein, and other micronutrients makes milk the premier recovery drink, possibly even more effective than commercially available sports drinks at promoting recovery from strength and endurance exercise (Source)
• Milk is the most hydrating beverage you can drink – researchers used water as a control and assigned a value of 1.0 on the Body Hydrating Index (BHI). Skim milk (1.58) and full-fat milk (1.50) were more hydrating than water itself (Source)
• Lactose Intolerance can be cured (Source)
• Milk is one of the most nutritionally dense food you can buy -At about 25 cents per serving, milk is a low-cost option with nine nutrients essential to our health including protein, calcium, potassium, phosphorous, riboflavin, niacin as well as vitamins A, D and B12.

Other Milk Facts

• The top milk drinking country is Finland drinking about 95 gallons of milk/ person/yr. The top 5 countries are Finland (361.19kg), Sweden (355.86kg), Netherlands (320.15kg), Switzerland (315kg), and Greece (314.69kg). The U.S. ranks 16^th (253.8kg) (Source – FAO Statistics Division)
• California is the top state in the United States for milk production and accounts for 1/5 of the U.S. milk production
• Milk today is still produced by family farms – 98% of dairy farms in the U.S. are family owned and operated (Source)