VALUE OF MILK

Wairarapa Times-Age, 24 December 1938, Page 3

VALUE OF MILK

EXPERIMENTS IN BRITAIN. A report has recently been issued by the Milk Nutrition Committee of Britain dealing with experiments carried out at the National Institute for Research in Dairying and at the Rowett Research Institute in order to investigate the effect of commercial pasteurisation on the nutritive value of milk by means of experiments on calves. Two sets of experiments were carried out. In each set of experiments two similar groups of calves were fed, from a few days after birth, one on commercial raw milk and the other on the same quantity of commercially pasteurised milk from the same bulk as the raw milk; solid supplements were also fed to the two groups in equal quantities after the first few weeks. Care was taken in the general management of the calves that .nothing was done which would assist or handicap one group more than another, the sole difference being that one group received pasteurised, and the other raw milk. Each set of experiments listed about six months. The experiments were not intended to serve as .any practical guide of calf rearing. In one experiment no difference even approaching statistical significence was found in live weight, in appearance, or in blood composition, as between animals fed on raw and those fed on pasteurised milk; there was a slight but still insignificant difference in favour of raw milk in certain body measurements. The combined results of the two experiments conducted at one of the research centres indicated a slight, statistically significant, advantage to the calves on raw milk, in growth rate but not in body measurements, general health, or blood composition. When the experiments were combined statistically, which the report suggests is a reasonable course, there is no statistical difference shown between the effect of raw and of pasteurised milk on growth. The conclusion reached, therefore, is that any deleterious effect of pasteurisation' as detectable by calf feeding experiments of this character, is only a minor kind.