Probably sugar content (the other major source of calories in milk). That could vary depending on the kinds of cows they use, or the kinds of pasture/feed. It’d probably vary seasonally, too.
Sorry to continue the hijack, but the serving size is the same. All the milk I have ever had is 1 cup is a serving.
You’re right. It sounds like you have a true milk allergy, an IgE-mediated anaphylactic response to the proteins in milk.
Milk allergy is one of the 8 most common adult food allergies along with peanuts, tree nuts, fish, shellfish, soy, eggs, and wheat.
I recommend that folks with Milk allergy go on a milk-free diet.
Foods that contain any of the following ingredients are excluded in a MILK-FREE DIET:
Artificial butter flavor
Butter, butter fat
Butter flavored oil
Buttermilk
Casein, Caseinates
Cheese, cottage cheese
Cream, whipping cream
Curds
Custard
Ghee
Half & half
Hydrolysates (milk protein, protein, whey,
whey protein)
Ice cream, ice milk, sherbet
Lactalbumin
Lactoglobulin
Lactulose
Nougat
Milk in all forms (derivative, powder, protein,solids, malted, condensed, evaporated, dry, whole low-fat, milk fat, nonfat, skimmed, & milk from all animals, including goats, sheep, etc.)
Pudding
Quark (European cheese)
Rennet casein
Sour cream, sour cream solids
Sour milk solids
Whey in all forms (sweet, delactosed, protein
concentrate)
Yogurt
The following MAY contain MILK:
Flavorings (natural and artificial)
Luncheon meat, hot dogs, sausages
High protein flour
Margarine
Simplesse®
“D” on a label next to a “K” or “U” indicates the presence of milk protein.
The following DO NOT indicate the presence of MILK:
Lactic acid, lactylate, and lactate
But I imagine you already know this, PK. And I’m sure you have an epi-pen nearby, just in case…
Same reason you have Classic Coke, and Caffeine-Free Coke, and Diet Coke, and Cherry Vanilla Coke, and all the other variations. Different people want different things. Even a single person may want different milks at different times for different purposes.
I haven’t noticed 2% being more common in restaurants, but at a guess it’s a compromise between the full fat milk that most people try to avoid these days - sales of whole milk have plummeted for the past couple of decades - and the nonfat milks which some people can’t stand. (1% milk may represent the minimum drinkable amount of fat for those people.)
As for the lactase pills. If they sometimes don’t work it may just be that you aren’t taking enough. Different meals have more or less lactose. If you are approaching a high-lactose meal, take an extra pill. Or two. There is no overdose amount, although there is a point of diminishing returns.
Not really. I can consume a small amount of dairy without having a reaction. So eating something that may have small amounts of milk in it usually doesn’t affect me.
Mashed potatos with milk in them, cream based soup, etc. I can have in small amounts.
But drinking a small glass of milk or eating even a bit of ice cream would trigger it.
I’ve been drinking 1% for years, and now 2% tastes too fatty to me. Skim’s fine for cooking, but for cereal or drinking? Blech. Although I’d probably get used to it in time, as my mother has.
Personally, I can’t taste the difference between 1% and 2%, so I just buy whichever is cheaper (usually the 1%). And if both are the same price, then I pick the 1%, because I know I could stand to lose a few pounds.
On the other hand, I can tell the difference by taste without any doubt. And I dislike 1% a little (not a lot, but a little), so if I buy milk to drink, I get 2%.
You have a chemical test for fat, and one for protein, and one for lactose. You can run all of those. Then you measure out samples of milk into crucibles, put them into the drying oven until there’s nothing but solids left, then put them into the MondoOven (not the correct technical term) and crank up the heat. The fat burns away and the protein burns away and the lactose and other carbs burn away.
Essentially, everything organic burns away and what’s left is the non-organic and non-refractory portion. It’s called ash because that’s what’s left in the crucible. What the ash is composed of is different for different materials. For milk, it’s what Fear Itself said.
I used to do the ash test for the feedstock and effluent of an experimental digester. We used the ash results to calculate the % of volatile solids and % total solids in our samples. Since the digester was digesting newspaper and office paper waste, among other things, we assumed that our ash contained a lot of silicates.
We’d get complaints when the pig manure was in the drying oven.
Because cows aren’t machines, man. The caloric content of milk varies not just from breed to breed, but from cow to cow. Since drinkable milk is pulled from a vast pool of cows, you have to expect fluctuations in the content – the numbers given for milkfat, lactose, etc. aren’t absolutes; they’re averages. So, for a given area, one breed might be more popular, so the milk produced there would more closely reflect the stats for that breed, or there might be a new trend for feeding/farming practices that changes the milk, or maybe the company is pushing for different standards or maybe a hundred different things.
But basically it all comes down to the fact that cows is cows and not machines. They don’t really do standardization, as much as we might like to think they do.
I think it’s partly a regional thing. I’d never heard of “whole milk” during my youth, and only later realized that it’s apparently what we call “homo milk” in Canada (don’t laugh; it’s short for homogenized.) Homo milk is not really popular and I think most people use it to add to coffee. We also have skim milk, but again, not a big seller. Most people use 1% and 2%, with 2% having the edge.
Believe it or not, but burning stuff is how we figure out how many calories it has. One calorie equals enough energy to heat one gram of water one degree Celsius. Of course, the calorie listings for food are actually kilocalories. So, one calorie of food actually equals 1000 calories, or one liter/kilogram of water heated one degree Celsius.
Which is why they burn the milk and get ash from the noncombustible minerals.
OK, I get it now. So they just define “ash” as “the stuff that doesn’t combust in the calorie tests,” and that makes up like 0.7% of the milk? It’s not like they have a bunch of smokers sitting around at the milk factory tapping their stogies into the vat?
Oh man, what Gary Larson would have done with THAT image!!! 
One can easily account for the variance in milk fat percentage in whole (“homo”) milk. (They did that in upstate New York, too, Matt; it was originally to distinguish it from un-homogenized pasteurized milk, which came in glass bottles with the cream floating on top.)
Different breeds of dairy cattle produce milk with different fat content. Jersey cows, for example, produce a very rich, high-fat milk; they probably account for the 4% outlier. Holsteins (and Frisians, a closely allied breed) produce significantly more milk than other breeds, but with a significantly lower milk-fat content. Growing up in Holstein-raising country, I learned “as a fact” that whole milk was 3.5% butterfat – no argument allowed. It’s possible to milk beef cattle (the females, of course), and that may account for the 3% figure.
In the real world, milk is never taken from one particular cow or cow farm. It is mixed with a variety of milks and then carefully measured to ensure that it meets the standard of whole milk or any other grade, even if that requires adding or removing fat.