Sufferin’ succotash! What in blazes tarnation does this mean??? It’s just bull, isn’t it? 2% butterfat; 43% other fats…isn’t that closer to the truth?
Having a cow,
- Jinx
What are these other fats that you are consuming in your 2% milk?
Most of milk is water.
Bob T is right - milk is about 87% water. As has been discussed on another post today, milk straight from the cow is between 3.6% and 4.7% fat (depending on the breed of cow). Another constituent of milk is what is known as SNF, i.e. solids not fat, the name of which tells you about their fat content. 2% milk has had about half its fat reduced in the factory.
Of course, there are plenty of people (vegans especially) who point to health problems that can arise from milk consumption, but those fat figures on the bottles are essentially correct.
Hmm, the truth to this may be questioned because the American Dairy Assc. was forced to stop those ads claiming “milk has less than 4% fat”. They were basing it on volume, and if you water the contents down enough, any fattening food could be 4% fat!
What’s that expression? Stats lie and liars use stats?
- Jinx
So what you’re saying is, you don’t want an answer to your question, you want to defame milk/dairy companies?
I have some Monterey Jack Cheese here and the label says it is about 32% fat of which half saturated and half not saturated. 25% protein, 4% carbohydrates and, I suppose the rest is water.
Maybe French cows produce super-rich -43% fat- cheese directly?
Well if cheese was just solidified milk then I suppose, there would have to be cows giving out 43% fat milk.
But since the milk has been treated and cultured and water has been removed, the percentage of fat increases.
Wow. Milk is 45% fat? I don’t care where the fat comes from, I just want to be able to whip it to a fine froth. Since I can’t do that with milk I need to see a cite for that percentage. Thanks.
Um, there’s a difference between saying that a substance is 43% fat and saying that 43% of its calories come from fat.
Whole milk is ~4% fat by volume. Deal with it.
By the way, Jinx, it’s not just bull, it’s just cow. 
I’ve always thought that the fat percentage in milk is determined by weight, not by volume.
Milk’s fat content is indeed calculated by its weight. Since the fat is less dense than water, a gallon of milk weighs less than a gallon of water.
You were quoting funneefarmer’s numbers from that other thread, which was a list of averages by breed, showing Jersey as the highest, at 4.7% average fat content. Individual cows can vary a lot more than this, but “about 4” is a good ballpark.
Here’s a link on the composition of milk:
http://www.disknet.com/indiana_biolab/b120a.htm
Jersey milk from well fed animals is VERY rich. When I was a kid, our neighbor was running a pure jersey dairy operation, and bottling / selling it himself. What he sold as “light cream” would practically whip if you stirred it with a spoon. Of course, in those days, having a high butterfat content in your milk was considered a GOOD thing.
Very little milk sold commercially in America comes from Jerseys. My father, a former dairy farmer, finds Jerseys so rare that he will stop his car and look at a herd when he sees them.
Holsteins seem to be the cow of choice now. I believe Guernseys are second in popularity.
All of this hinges upon how much I was paying attention to my father’s stories about dairy farming, which he hasn’t participated in since 1960.
Uh, you sure that’s what it says? Or is it that a serving of chees containst 32% of the fat recommended by the FDA for a 2000 calorie per day diet?
They were rare then, too. My neighbor made a big point of it in his business. Actually, a lot of the “farm bottling” operations in that part of the country (Northwest PA) ran Guernseys at that time, which they would also tout as “higher quality” milk. Most of the farmers who sold to the commercial dairies ran Holsteins. Thing is, Jerseys have a low yield, and aren’t exactly economical.
A fair percentage of milk’s weight comes from the non-fat milk solids, i.e. the sugars and proteins, both of which are far denser than water. As a result milk is actually slightly denser than water, with a specific gravity of about 1.04. A gallon of milk weighs about 4% more than a gallon of water.
This goes to show that I didn’t listen as closely to my father as I thought.