I’ve tried a sdmb and a google search but I mostly find conflicting opinions on casein. Does it cause harm? Is it perfectly fine to consume? What’s the straight dope on this?
do you consume milk products? if so, you’re already getting plenty of it.
Don’t eat casein paint, and don’t paint it onto a flexible surface.
(Sorry, that’s all I got.)
If you’re allergic to milk you need to avoid it.
If you have trouble digesting milk protein - not uncommon in adult humans - you might also want to avoid it, or at least avoid large amounts.
If you aren’t allergic and you retain the ability to digest milk protein then it’s harmless.
The conflicting comes into play because there are, in fact, some people who need to avoid it for health reasons. For everyone else, though, it’s not a problem.
Don’t the caseins go rolling along?
I thought intolerance was the inability to break down lactose, not casein.
It’s milk sugar (lactose) that commonly causes trouble for adult humans, not milk protein.
There is a huge “milk is poison” crowd on the internet. Their “proof” is that a few percent of people are allergic to milk proteins. Why this doesn’t carry over to “nuts are poison” and “eggs are poison” nobody knows, but they’re like Birthers: facts and logic are beyond their capabilities.
Casein salts like sodium caseinate and potassium caseinate are found in thousands of commercial food products. They are cheap by-products of milk processing and they lend some flavor and texture of milk to the food. That makes them part of the “chemicals” that every food purist hates in non-home made food, which is another strike against them for some.
I still don’t know of any reason to avoid them if you don’t have a milk allergy. And the odds are at least 20 to 1 that you don’t. There’s another fad - especially in England for unknown reasons - to assume that any reaction at any time is a food allergy, but there’s no scientific evidence to show that cow’s milk protein allergy exists other than in that small percent.
I say cow’s milk protein allergy deliberately. A different nutty internet crowd shouts that people who are allergic can drink milk from goats or sheep or camels or whatever they’re trying to push. This may or may not be true. Casein is the name for a whole family of proteins. Cow’s milk has a mixture of certain of these proteins and other mammal milks contain slightly different mixes and percentages of each. Some people who are allergic may be able to tolerate these other milks, but absolutely not all of them. And anyone with an anaphylactic allergic would be crazy to try.
The allergy is linked to milk proteins (such as caseine), but intollerance to lactose, which is common in adult humans, is linked to milk’s sugar.
True, however, what makes you think casein as a food addictive is 100% purely casein? Lactose “contamination” is probably pretty common, not because it’s “contaminated” but because if a company doesn’t see a need to remove 100% of the lactose from a milk product why would they bother to do so? “Close is good enough” is a common enough idea.
“Intolerance” also covers “we aren’t sure why this disagrees with you, but since you feel better when you avoid it, don’t eat it”.
So, people who can’t digest lactose might want to avoid all milk products if their problem is severe enough, and if doing so makes them feel better than doing otherwise. Needless to say, mileage varies greatly on this.
I remember that guy. Used to DJ a Top 40 show on the radio years ago. Yup, good ol’ Casey Casein - I’ll never forget him. 
Additive and sorry but “if you’re lactose intolerant you should avoid all milk products” is hugely wrong. For starters, yoghurt and aged cheeses shouldn’t contain any lactose, as it’s what’s fermented.
A few decades back, it might have been true that small amounts of lactose could be found in added casein. With better processing and modern food labeling laws that shouldn’t be true today. Lactose residue is probably below what testing can pick up. There was never any evidence that anybody was ever affected by having lactose be 1% of an caseinate. Literally never. Anybody who claims symptoms of lactose intolerance from a food containing caseinate today is having psychosomatic symptoms.
That may be a reason to avoid added dairy: psychosomatic symptoms can make you as miserable as physiological ones. But that’s not an intolerance, it’s not the food processing industry being “close enough,” and it’s not science.
BTW, under modern law any company who puts the claim “lactose free” on a package must be able to prove that the product is indeed lactose free. Not lower than some rounded off percentage, but below testing capability.
I’m not sure about yoghurt, other than what Americans call yoghurt and what other people call yoghurt may not be quite the same thing, but UNaged cheese is hardly unknown, and unless you read the fine print on US foods a lot of stuff with “cheese” is actually an artificially flavored “dairy product” which is derived from milk but may or may not contain any actual cheese, and may indeed still contain lactose unless clearly labeled “lactose free”.
Pardon me - I question if food processing today is actually any better than “decades ago” and frankly, given the number of food borne illnesses and recalls due to either contamination or improper labeling I’m not overly confident in the efficacy of our food laws.
Sure - IF they’re claiming “lactose-free”, but if they don’t want to make the claim they don’t have to do so. So adding “milk solids and casein” that just happens to contain significant percentages of lactose is perfectly legal as long as they don’t claim lactose-free and do label “contains milk”. That’s why I said someone with a severe lactose intolerance problem MIGHT want to avoid all milk products. Some items containing dairy derivatives might, in fact, contain lactose without being required to put it on the label. Something containing “milk solids” may, in fact, have up to 50% of those “milk solids” in the form of lactose and not be required to mention, explicitly, that it contains lactose.
To reiterate, under current US labeling laws:
- If it contains anything dairy, it must state that (for benefit of the allergic, mostly)
- If it claims “lactose-free” then it must, indeed, be lactose-free.
- There is no obligation to label lactose-free foods as being lactose-free
- As long as a food containing something from dairy is labeled as containing a dairy ingredients there is NO obligation to list whether or not it contains lactose. None. So anything containing dairy products can NOT be assumed “lactose-free” unless explicitly so labeled.
Thus, what I said - people who have problems digesting milk MIGHT want to avoid all dairy products. I’ll amend that with “unless explicitly labeled lactose-free” because unless that label is on it, it could well contain plenty of lactose with no obligation on the part of the manufacturer to ever mention that.
Yogurt and cheese that is not specifically processed to remove all lactose are not lactose free. The cheese and yogurt making processes do not break down all the lactose in the milk.
You missed the peanut gallery.
You’re moving the goalposts. Casein and caseinates will not contain lactose in modern food processing in the U.S. Are there other dairy products which will contain lactose? Certainly. Milk solids and indeed any variation on solids (there are several) do contain lactose, of almost any percentage since there are so many suppliers. But all of them will obviously be a milk product, unlike caseinates, which fewer people know the derivation of.
There is a second family of milk proteins, the whey family. Everything I said about the casein family applies to the whey family as well. However, there is an increasingly common ingredient called whey protein isolate. That can contain small amounts of lactose, but today it is normally lactose-free. It’s a marketing thing. So many people look for lactose free that there is an advantage to being able to label a product that way. You can be cynical about the food processing industry, but they’re in the business of making money and today lactose free is a money maker. That’s why I believe that products are more lactose free than two decades ago. It’s the cynical way to bet.
Here is a good page for lactose contents of dairy products.
This is correct.
Well, they might want to do anything. They might not want to have any dairy product at all. There are people who do that. However, for the specific products we’ve been talking about with low to negligible lactose there is no physiological reason to do so.
Yes, just completely ignore that in so many ways it’s easier to just not eat something that disagrees with you rather than waste time and energy wondering if there is an acceptable amount in something, or too much. Your repeating of “usually lactose-free” is of no consolation to the person who happened upon the exception. Ditto for mislabeling, shady suppliers, and so forth. Maybe you have complete confidence in the food industry, but I don’t. Then again, I’m one of those folks who have to deal with this sort of issue in real life, so I’ve learned from hard experience to not trust industry on these matters.
Back to the (and several years old) op - some of the casein is evil meme comes not from the small number of individuals who are milk protein allergic (a very small number outside of early childhood), but from Thomas Campbell’s claims in The China Study, discussed and made fun of in this previous thread. Militant vegans jumped onto his bullshit twisting of data as it was parsimonious with the “animal protein bad” way of seeing the world.
How did I miss the “casein/milk is poison” meme?
I guess I was distracted by the aspartame/Splenda/soy/BHA/BHT/MSG-the-toxins-are-everywhere poison memes.