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Discover the Cream of the Crop: Top 5 Fun Facts About Milk You Never Knew!

illustration of milk
Get ready to raise your glass as we dive into the intriguing and udder-ly fascinating world of milk through these delightful fun facts.

1. Milky Way's Ancient Egg Connection

Got milk? More like got ancient eggs! Turns out the Milky Way isn't just a galaxy far, far away but also a sign that milk has some seriously deep roots: Milk proteins actually evolved before the emergence of mammals, with calcium-transporting proteins inherited from pre-mammalian ancestors and even providing calcium to dino-era eggs – plus, the antimicrobial alpha-lactalbumin evolved from lysozyme to help protect cute baby critters before they roamed with their mammal mamas.
Source => sercblog.si.edu

2. Lactose Tolerance's Evolutionary Sprint

Milk: the ultimate sneaky cheese agent, infiltrating stomachs even when many couldn't handle its lactose disguises: In fact, only about 35 percent of the global population, primarily those with European ancestry, can digest lactose in adulthood, with this lactose tolerance shockingly developing in just 20,000 years–a blink of an eye in evolutionary timelines!
Source => npr.org

3. Cow's Colorful Diet Creates Yellow Milk

Feeling a bit yellow, cow? Well, it must be in the mooood: Cows that consume fresh forage abundant in carotenoids, like lutein and Ξ²-carotene, produce milk with an elevated carotenoid concentration, resulting in a yellowish hue – although its color varies depending on the breed and milk processing methods.
Source => ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

4. Lactose-Free Milk Saves the Dairy Day

Moove over, lactose intolerance – there's a new dairy in town that's got your back, and it's udderly unstoppable: Lactose-free milk offers the same essential nutrients as its lactose-rich siblings, such as calcium, protein, and vitamin D – with lactose, the natural milk sugar, cleverly broken down to make it an A-list option for the lactose intolerant crowd, all while meeting the high milk safety standards set by government regulations.
Source => gonnaneedmilk.com

Moo-sical Cows Produce More Milk

5. Moo-sical Cows Produce More Milk

It's a moo-sical phenomenon that's making these milk maestros utter-lly content: Researchers at the University of Leicester discovered that cows exposed to slow music, like Beethoven's "Pastoral Symphony" or Simon and Garfunkel's "Bridge Over Troubled Water", produced 3% more milk compared to their music-less counterparts. However, blasting a little Bananarama's "Venus" led to a small decrease in milk production, proving the power of a sweet symphony on our bovine friends.
Source => science.org

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