Cream in Greek Yogurt?
July 21, 2018 8:36 AM Subscribe
The ingredients list on all the full fat Greek Yogurt containers (including Fage) I read at the supermarket yesterday said 1. Cultured non-fat/skim milk 2. Cream. I was shocked.
Is regular Greek Yogurt non-fat Greek Yogurt with (unhealthy) cream added to it? What have I been eating this whole time?
Or are they just breaking down the separate milk v. cream portions of cultured full fat milk (i.e. greek yogurt) so I know the nutritional breakdown?
Is regular Greek Yogurt non-fat Greek Yogurt with (unhealthy) cream added to it? What have I been eating this whole time?
Or are they just breaking down the separate milk v. cream portions of cultured full fat milk (i.e. greek yogurt) so I know the nutritional breakdown?
Best answer: I’d assume that they use both skim milk and cream in the making of full fat yogurt. Cream isn’t unhealthy; it just has a higher milk fat percentage. The resulting yogurt will have the same percentage of milk fat whether they use skim milk + cream or full fat milk. (Assuming they use the right proportions of milk/cream, which they presumably do.)
posted by Weeping_angel at 8:43 AM on July 21, 2018 [15 favorites]
posted by Weeping_angel at 8:43 AM on July 21, 2018 [15 favorites]
Full fat yogurt is made with whole milk. Whole milk is about 4% cream (butterfat). Cream is chock full of delicious animal fat, which does have health implications. I don't know why they are making is with non-fat or skim milk that has cream added back to it, as opposed to making it from whole milk. There isn't any nutritional difference. Either way, I don't see it as an issue. If you have high cholesterol, you're probably advised to limit saturated fat, maybe all fat, in your diet.
FYI, when I was in England, they served cream so thick you could stand a spoon in it. Cornish clotted cream is fabulously delicious on a scone with jam. I cant really eat dairy any more, and I miss it.
posted by theora55 at 8:50 AM on July 21, 2018 [3 favorites]
FYI, when I was in England, they served cream so thick you could stand a spoon in it. Cornish clotted cream is fabulously delicious on a scone with jam. I cant really eat dairy any more, and I miss it.
posted by theora55 at 8:50 AM on July 21, 2018 [3 favorites]
Best answer: If they added the cream afterwards, I believe the FDA wouldn’t class it as yoghurt.
TITLE 21--FOOD AND DRUGS
CHAPTER I--FOOD AND DRUG ADMINISTRATION
DEPARTMENT OF HEALTH AND HUMAN SERVICES
SUBCHAPTER B--FOOD FOR HUMAN CONSUMPTION
PART 131 -- MILK AND CREAM
Subpart B--Requirements for Specific Standardized Milk and Cream
Sec. 131.200 Yogurt.
TITLE 21--FOOD AND DRUGS
CHAPTER I--FOOD AND DRUG ADMINISTRATION
DEPARTMENT OF HEALTH AND HUMAN SERVICES
SUBCHAPTER B--FOOD FOR HUMAN CONSUMPTION
PART 131 -- MILK AND CREAM
Subpart B--Requirements for Specific Standardized Milk and Cream
Sec. 131.200 Yogurt.
(a) Description. yogurt is the food produced by culturing one or more of the optional dairy ingredients specified in paragraph (c) of this section with a characterizing bacterial culture that contains the lactic acid-producing bacteria, Lactobacillus bulgaricus and Streptococcus thermophilus.posted by zamboni at 8:51 AM on July 21, 2018
...
(c) Optional dairy ingredients. Cream, milk, partially skimmed milk, or skim milk, used alone or in combination.
Best answer: Fresh out of the cow, the fat content of milk will vary depending on breed, time of year, etc. Milk is processed to remove the fat, yielding cream and skim milk. Then a controlled amount of cream is added back to milk destined to be sold as 1%, 2%, or whole milk. The cream is no more or less "unhealthy" whether it's in its original straight-from-the-cow form or if it's added back in after processing. Fage Total yogurt appears to have 5% milkfat, which is a little higher than most whole milk (at least 3.25%) so it's a bit more fortified with extra cream but it's not like a huge difference.
posted by drlith at 8:53 AM on July 21, 2018 [10 favorites]
posted by drlith at 8:53 AM on July 21, 2018 [10 favorites]
Best answer: It's significantly easier for the yogurt manufacturer to only stock two types of milk (non-fat and cream) and mix to whatever fat percentage is desired than to have multiple batches of milk for all product ratios needed.
Seconding that a 5% yogurt made from 5/6 non fat milk and 1/6 cream (30% milk fat example) is nutritionally identical to 5% whole milk from the cow.
posted by saeculorum at 9:14 AM on July 21, 2018 [4 favorites]
Seconding that a 5% yogurt made from 5/6 non fat milk and 1/6 cream (30% milk fat example) is nutritionally identical to 5% whole milk from the cow.
posted by saeculorum at 9:14 AM on July 21, 2018 [4 favorites]
This allows consistency in the amount of fat contained.
posted by uncaken at 9:16 AM on July 21, 2018
posted by uncaken at 9:16 AM on July 21, 2018
Response by poster: I see. So, the non-fat milk and the cream are separately turned into yogurt then combined into one product. I thought that cream might be added as a thickener to non-fat yogurt to resemble full-fat greek yogurt, which I thought was deceptive.
Thanks!
posted by thesockpuppet at 9:38 AM on July 21, 2018
Thanks!
posted by thesockpuppet at 9:38 AM on July 21, 2018
the non-fat milk and the cream are separately turned into yogurt then combined into one product.
No. They mix the non-fat milk and cream to get the fat ratio they want in the milk, then make yogurt out of that.
posted by SaltySalticid at 9:49 AM on July 21, 2018 [16 favorites]
No. They mix the non-fat milk and cream to get the fat ratio they want in the milk, then make yogurt out of that.
posted by SaltySalticid at 9:49 AM on July 21, 2018 [16 favorites]
So, the non-fat milk and the cream are separately turned into yogurt then combined into one product.
Almost--the non-fat milk and cream are mixed together (to get the right percentage of milk fat), and then that mixture goes through the yogurt making process.
posted by damayanti at 9:49 AM on July 21, 2018 [1 favorite]
Almost--the non-fat milk and cream are mixed together (to get the right percentage of milk fat), and then that mixture goes through the yogurt making process.
posted by damayanti at 9:49 AM on July 21, 2018 [1 favorite]
Response by poster: So, they separate regular milk into non-fat milk and cream, then recombine them back into regular milk and then turn it into yogurt.
You would think they'd call it 'reconstituted X% fat milk'...
posted by thesockpuppet at 10:11 AM on July 21, 2018
You would think they'd call it 'reconstituted X% fat milk'...
posted by thesockpuppet at 10:11 AM on July 21, 2018
You would think they'd call it 'reconstituted X% fat milk’…
“Reconstituted” has a particular meaning when it comes to dairy ingredients, so they would definitely not say that unless they were using milk powder.
posted by bcwinters at 10:24 AM on July 21, 2018 [10 favorites]
“Reconstituted” has a particular meaning when it comes to dairy ingredients, so they would definitely not say that unless they were using milk powder.
posted by bcwinters at 10:24 AM on July 21, 2018 [10 favorites]
The yogurt makers are not generally milk processors, so they don't skim, they just buy nonfat milk and cream. But otherwise yeah that's pretty much it.
You would think they'd call it...
That's true for lots of stuff, you'll see strangeness in many ingredient lists if you keep reading them. Food labeling is weird; it's science, law, and advertising all jumbled together!
“Reconstituted” has a particular meaning when it comes to dairy ingredients,
Also why e.g. 2% milk is called 2% milk, not non-fat milk blended with cream to reach 2%.
posted by SaltySalticid at 10:24 AM on July 21, 2018 [1 favorite]
You would think they'd call it...
That's true for lots of stuff, you'll see strangeness in many ingredient lists if you keep reading them. Food labeling is weird; it's science, law, and advertising all jumbled together!
“Reconstituted” has a particular meaning when it comes to dairy ingredients,
Also why e.g. 2% milk is called 2% milk, not non-fat milk blended with cream to reach 2%.
posted by SaltySalticid at 10:24 AM on July 21, 2018 [1 favorite]
Public perceptions about the "healthiness" of foods and food components are all over the place, and most of them are just wrong. Hell, your own description of the cream that's an ingredient of your full-fat yoghurt as "unhealthy" is a perfect example.
Sure, there are arguments to be made that the complex industrial processes dominating the bulk of food production in 2018 are perhaps not the best things ever invented for our health. But for you to be actually shocked by an ingredients list of "1. Cultured non-fat/skim milk; 2. Cream", for something sold as a full-fat yoghurt? That's weird to me.
The only "unhealthy" aspect of cream is that at around 35% fat, it has about ten times the fat concentration of whole milk. But your yoghurt has only just enough cream in it to make it end up at 5% fat. So what's the problem? There's no fat in cream that didn't originate in milk in the first place.
If you're buying an industrially produced food, then presumably one of the things you value about that food is its predictability: if you liked it last time, you can be pretty sure that what you buy this time is the same. And in a reasonably well-regulated market, you can also be pretty sure that the nutritional breakdown on the info panel will be reasonably accurate. That panel will tell you explicitly what the fat content of the end product is. Why should you care, then, if your preferred yoghurt's manufacturer has found that the lowest-cost way to achieve the fat content that both you and they want in the end product is by combining skim milk and cream?
You would think they'd call it 'reconstituted X% fat milk'...
But if they did that, the word "reconstituted" would work its negative perceptual magic and cost them sales.
It's the same kind of marketing bullshit that allows Australian milk producers to get a sales bump from offering milk that's "permeate-free", permeate being simply those components of milk that pass through filters fine enough to leave both fats and protein behind on the upstream side. So in fact all milk inherently contains everything that's in permeate as soon as it comes out of the cow, just as it also contains everything that's in cream; but vendors can market retail milk as "permeate-free" if they just avoid taking it apart and putting it back together again.
The only way to standardise the fat and protein content of "permeate-free" milk, then - to give it that predictable repeatability that consumers of industrial foods value - is to start with milk where the concentrations of both these things fall naturally within a range that's always below those of standardised milk - i.e. to start with milk that would traditionally have been considered lower-quality - and augment that with fat and protein filtered out from higher-quality feedstock.
But the market has spoken, and the market has reacted with predictable negativity to a scare campaign that characterised permeate as "a watery, greenish waste product from the production of cheese" and made such a fuss about it you'd think Australians had all been poisoned with melamine. And you will now find the words "permeate free" on most milk labels in this country, and this has made milk more expensive to standardise and thereby sliced the already very thin margins for this country's dairy farmers even thinner.
Now, it's perfectly true that the production of some kinds of cheese requires a milk feedstock with higher fat and protein content than is standard for milk supplied to consumers, and that a suitably rich cheesemaking milk can be got from ordinary milk via running some part of it through ultra-filtration, and that some cheesemakers used to do that in-house and run the resulting permeate to waste rather than buy pre-filtered milk from their suppliers. And it's perfectly true that the permeate that emerges downstream of the filters does look watery because everything that usually makes milk mostly opaque has been filtered out of it, and greenish because the cows have loaded it up with vitamin B.
But just because some cheese producer somewhere has wasted some of a substance doesn't make it reasonable to describe the substance itself as "waste" regardless of where it occurs in a production process, thereby frightening people into believing their milk is being regularly adulterated.
And the same logic applies to the cream in your yoghurt. Just because some people somewhere might be drinking cream by the gallon and overloading their livers and arteries with fat, that doesn't make cream itself unhealthy. It makes that pattern of cream consumption unhealthy. But that pattern of consumption does not resemble in any way what you get from buying and eating full-fat Greek yoghurt for which one of the ingredients happens to be cream.
posted by flabdablet at 11:47 AM on July 21, 2018 [34 favorites]
Sure, there are arguments to be made that the complex industrial processes dominating the bulk of food production in 2018 are perhaps not the best things ever invented for our health. But for you to be actually shocked by an ingredients list of "1. Cultured non-fat/skim milk; 2. Cream", for something sold as a full-fat yoghurt? That's weird to me.
The only "unhealthy" aspect of cream is that at around 35% fat, it has about ten times the fat concentration of whole milk. But your yoghurt has only just enough cream in it to make it end up at 5% fat. So what's the problem? There's no fat in cream that didn't originate in milk in the first place.
If you're buying an industrially produced food, then presumably one of the things you value about that food is its predictability: if you liked it last time, you can be pretty sure that what you buy this time is the same. And in a reasonably well-regulated market, you can also be pretty sure that the nutritional breakdown on the info panel will be reasonably accurate. That panel will tell you explicitly what the fat content of the end product is. Why should you care, then, if your preferred yoghurt's manufacturer has found that the lowest-cost way to achieve the fat content that both you and they want in the end product is by combining skim milk and cream?
You would think they'd call it 'reconstituted X% fat milk'...
But if they did that, the word "reconstituted" would work its negative perceptual magic and cost them sales.
It's the same kind of marketing bullshit that allows Australian milk producers to get a sales bump from offering milk that's "permeate-free", permeate being simply those components of milk that pass through filters fine enough to leave both fats and protein behind on the upstream side. So in fact all milk inherently contains everything that's in permeate as soon as it comes out of the cow, just as it also contains everything that's in cream; but vendors can market retail milk as "permeate-free" if they just avoid taking it apart and putting it back together again.
The only way to standardise the fat and protein content of "permeate-free" milk, then - to give it that predictable repeatability that consumers of industrial foods value - is to start with milk where the concentrations of both these things fall naturally within a range that's always below those of standardised milk - i.e. to start with milk that would traditionally have been considered lower-quality - and augment that with fat and protein filtered out from higher-quality feedstock.
But the market has spoken, and the market has reacted with predictable negativity to a scare campaign that characterised permeate as "a watery, greenish waste product from the production of cheese" and made such a fuss about it you'd think Australians had all been poisoned with melamine. And you will now find the words "permeate free" on most milk labels in this country, and this has made milk more expensive to standardise and thereby sliced the already very thin margins for this country's dairy farmers even thinner.
Now, it's perfectly true that the production of some kinds of cheese requires a milk feedstock with higher fat and protein content than is standard for milk supplied to consumers, and that a suitably rich cheesemaking milk can be got from ordinary milk via running some part of it through ultra-filtration, and that some cheesemakers used to do that in-house and run the resulting permeate to waste rather than buy pre-filtered milk from their suppliers. And it's perfectly true that the permeate that emerges downstream of the filters does look watery because everything that usually makes milk mostly opaque has been filtered out of it, and greenish because the cows have loaded it up with vitamin B.
But just because some cheese producer somewhere has wasted some of a substance doesn't make it reasonable to describe the substance itself as "waste" regardless of where it occurs in a production process, thereby frightening people into believing their milk is being regularly adulterated.
And the same logic applies to the cream in your yoghurt. Just because some people somewhere might be drinking cream by the gallon and overloading their livers and arteries with fat, that doesn't make cream itself unhealthy. It makes that pattern of cream consumption unhealthy. But that pattern of consumption does not resemble in any way what you get from buying and eating full-fat Greek yoghurt for which one of the ingredients happens to be cream.
posted by flabdablet at 11:47 AM on July 21, 2018 [34 favorites]
Hang on, does that mean permeate is what used to be called whey?
posted by glasseyes at 2:25 PM on July 21, 2018
posted by glasseyes at 2:25 PM on July 21, 2018
They do this because milk as it comes out of a cow has inconsistent fat percentage, because cows aren't machines, they're animals. What they eat, the time of year and their breed/genetics all change what percentage of their milk is fat. In order to guarantee consumers that the milk they are drinking is X% fat, they have to remove all the fat, then add it back in until it gets to X%.
If you really want a wild ride, find a small dairy farm that keeps a breed other than Holstein--like, say Jersey or Guernsey. They have a much higher fat content in the milk, such that the milk itself is yellow. (Also it is fucking delicious.)
posted by soren_lorensen at 5:07 PM on July 21, 2018 [6 favorites]
If you really want a wild ride, find a small dairy farm that keeps a breed other than Holstein--like, say Jersey or Guernsey. They have a much higher fat content in the milk, such that the milk itself is yellow. (Also it is fucking delicious.)
posted by soren_lorensen at 5:07 PM on July 21, 2018 [6 favorites]
does that mean permeate is what used to be called whey?
No. Even though the Wikipedia page on permeate just redirects to the page for whey, they're not at all the same thing.
Permeate is water with dissolved lactose and vitamins but almost no protein or fat; it's what passes through the membrane filters used in the production of UF milk.
Whey is what's left over after milk has been treated chemically to make the casein curdle and clump, allowing it to be strained out with a much coarser filter. Whey contains much more protein than permeate, as well as some of the acid or rennet that was added to curdle the milk.
Permeate is made by a purely mechanical separation process rather than a chemical one. If you take UF milk and mix the permeate that was wrung out of it back in again, what you get is indistinguishable from the original feedstock milk. You can't do that with whey because whey is made by adding something to the milk to alter its protein chemistry.
Whey is a byproduct of cheesemaking; permeate is a component of milk. Mechanically separating milk into components such as skim milk and cream, or UF skim milk and permeate and cream, and then blending those components in order to produce milk with a predictable and/or standardised protein and milk fat content, doesn't make something other than milk. All it does is reduce milk's naturally occurring variability in protein and fat content in order to achieve a more consistent milk. And that, in turn, leads to less wastage.
Mechanical filtration and re-blending does much less violence to the complex chemistry of milk than pasteurization does.
posted by flabdablet at 12:48 AM on July 22, 2018 [1 favorite]
No. Even though the Wikipedia page on permeate just redirects to the page for whey, they're not at all the same thing.
Permeate is water with dissolved lactose and vitamins but almost no protein or fat; it's what passes through the membrane filters used in the production of UF milk.
Whey is what's left over after milk has been treated chemically to make the casein curdle and clump, allowing it to be strained out with a much coarser filter. Whey contains much more protein than permeate, as well as some of the acid or rennet that was added to curdle the milk.
Permeate is made by a purely mechanical separation process rather than a chemical one. If you take UF milk and mix the permeate that was wrung out of it back in again, what you get is indistinguishable from the original feedstock milk. You can't do that with whey because whey is made by adding something to the milk to alter its protein chemistry.
Whey is a byproduct of cheesemaking; permeate is a component of milk. Mechanically separating milk into components such as skim milk and cream, or UF skim milk and permeate and cream, and then blending those components in order to produce milk with a predictable and/or standardised protein and milk fat content, doesn't make something other than milk. All it does is reduce milk's naturally occurring variability in protein and fat content in order to achieve a more consistent milk. And that, in turn, leads to less wastage.
Mechanical filtration and re-blending does much less violence to the complex chemistry of milk than pasteurization does.
posted by flabdablet at 12:48 AM on July 22, 2018 [1 favorite]
And according to a very recent article in the Atlantic (based on a very study in The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition), high-fat cream isn't bad for you at all....
The Vindication of Cheese, Butter, and Full-Fat Milk
A new study exonerates dairy fats as a cause of early death, even as low-fat products continue to be misperceived as healthier.
A new study this week in The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition is relevant to an ongoing vindication process for saturated fats, which turned many people away from dairy products such as whole milk, cheese, and butter in the 1980s and ’90s. An analysis of 2,907 adults found that people with higher and lower levels of dairy fats in their blood had the same rate of death during a 22-year period.
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2018/07/cheese-butter-not-necessarily-linked-to-death/565253/
posted by Umami Dearest at 4:26 AM on July 22, 2018 [2 favorites]
The Vindication of Cheese, Butter, and Full-Fat Milk
A new study exonerates dairy fats as a cause of early death, even as low-fat products continue to be misperceived as healthier.
A new study this week in The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition is relevant to an ongoing vindication process for saturated fats, which turned many people away from dairy products such as whole milk, cheese, and butter in the 1980s and ’90s. An analysis of 2,907 adults found that people with higher and lower levels of dairy fats in their blood had the same rate of death during a 22-year period.
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2018/07/cheese-butter-not-necessarily-linked-to-death/565253/
posted by Umami Dearest at 4:26 AM on July 22, 2018 [2 favorites]
First of all, cream is in no way unhealthy, so your premise is off. Second: this is just the way dairy products are often manufactured, mix skim with some higher-fat dairy.
Take a look at some recent studies comparing those who consume full fat dairy with low-fat dairy, and then go ahead and get appropriately pissed off about the incredibly wrong and irresponsible nutrition info that's been pushed for the last 30 years.
posted by thegreatfleecircus at 11:28 AM on July 22, 2018 [2 favorites]
Take a look at some recent studies comparing those who consume full fat dairy with low-fat dairy, and then go ahead and get appropriately pissed off about the incredibly wrong and irresponsible nutrition info that's been pushed for the last 30 years.
posted by thegreatfleecircus at 11:28 AM on July 22, 2018 [2 favorites]
This thread is closed to new comments.
posted by damayanti at 8:42 AM on July 21, 2018 [1 favorite]