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Bladder cancer is a difficult condition to treat. It can hit anyone at any age but is more likely to afflict men than women, and smokers more than non-smokers. It is certainly costly for individuals. For health-system managers, tasked with trying to save as many years of life as possible with finite resources, it has the notorious title of the most expensive malignancy to treat from diagnosis to death. Identifying preventative measures, especially cheap ones, can therefore bring benefits beyond reducing bladder cancer rates, as they may free up resources for treatments of other diseases. Over the years, whether dairy products are preventative of bladder cancer has been debated.

The saying “you are what you eat” may be especially true for newborns. For instance, breastfeeding is known to have long-term impacts on health and immunity, and several components present in breast milk are known to influence both infant immunity and their gut microbiome.

Researchers have long been interested in understanding the effects of different types of dairy products on cardiometabolic health. Studies have looked at the effects of consuming different types of dairy on metabolic markers such as body weight, body fat, lean mass, or cholesterol. Although some studies have found that dairy products are associated with lower cardiometabolic disease incidence, other study results have been mixed or inconclusive. As a result, there’s still a lot researchers don’t know about the effects of long-term habitual dairy consumption on cardiometabolic risk, or the potential pathways linking the two.

As 3D printers have become more affordable and accessible over the past 10 years, their potential applications have also increased. One emerging application of 3D printing is food printing, which could enable the creation of aesthetically pleasing food products with customized nutrients and internal structures.

The pace of scientific research is usually quite slow; the time frame between applying for financial support to publishing results in scientific journals is measured in years, not months. But that was before SARS-CoV-2. The urgency to understand the who, what, why, when, and how of this novel coronavirus has accelerated the way grant money is distributed, increased scientific collaboration, and loosened requirements on when scientific papers are published online. This change of pace can clearly be seen in human milk research, resulting in a “liquid gold rush” of studies focused on human milk composition and SARS-CoV-2.

This year’s IMGC Symposium was held virtually from October 13-16. Like many academic and professional conferences in this year of global pandemic, “IMGC Virtual Symposium 2020” sought to bring its content to as many people as possible via Zoom and digital platforms. Yet unlike many conferences, it created a true virtual space for networking and collaboration via a robust and dynamic virtual portal.

The idea of using probiotics in place of antibiotics was born in the dairy industry. In recent years, however, as multidrug resistance has become more commonplace among strains of bacteria that cause mastitis in breastfeeding women, probiotics have become known as a potential treatment alternative. Evidence that they work has been gathering. But until recently no study had evaluated one easily available source of probiotics—fermented foods such as kefir—alongside mastitis’ common risk factors. Based on interviews about fermented food-product consumption with more than 600 Turkish women, a new study finds that both the frequency with which mothers consume these foodstuffs, and the diversity of the products that they consume, are associated with

Recommendations from both the World Health Organization (WHO) and the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) to breastfeed exclusively for the first 6 months of life were developed to optimize infant health. But new research suggests the mother’s health may benefit from following these breastfeeding guidelines as well.

Milk is big business in California. It’s the agricultural product that brings in more farm revenue than any other in the state. It employs about 190,000 workers, and involves 1.78 million cows. Indeed, dairy has been important to California’s economy for decades, and over time innovations in animal husbandry, feeding and in growing crops that dairy cows eat have led to substantial changes in greenhouse gas emissions. Recently, Ermias Kebreab and his colleagues at the University of California, Davis, calculated exactly how much these emissions have changed in the 50 years from 1964 to 2014. Although the total emissions from the state’s dairy industry increased over that period, the state also produced

The International Milk Genomics Consortium (IMGC) is the world’s signature organization that for 20 years has been linking scientific research on lactation and milk to the applications of that research to the health of babies to adults. IMGC will hold its 17th annual conference from October–13-16, 2020 in a lively, engaging, and interactive virtual format. The conference will bring together a multidisciplinary field of experts from all over the world to discuss their scientific research on milk and human health.

The nearly 100 trillion bacteria that live in our gastrointestinal tract aren’t just involved in food digestion; they influence the health and function of the entire body. Mounting evidence suggests gut microbes may even influence the brain, including behavior. This connection between the gut and the brain is called the gut-brain axis and is a complex network of signaling pathways linking the central nervous system with the enteric (or gastrointestinal) nervous system.

Cows are one of our major domestic animals, with about 1.4 billion domesticated cattle being raised for meat and dairy all over the world. Humans have long drawn from the existing genetic variation in cattle populations to select a variety of breeds with useful traits. The sequencing of the cattle genome enhanced the selection of cattle by allowing the use of genomic tools to select traits.

The human gut microbiome is known to contain a large number of both bacteria and viruses. Viruses are absent from the infant gut at birth but colonize shortly after and can sometimes lead to gastrointestinal disorder. By one month of age, infants can have about a billion viruses per gram of stool, which is similar to the number of viruses present in older children and adults. But there is still a lot researchers don’t know about how viruses colonize the early infant gut to form the virus microbiome, known as the virome.

Over the last six months, scientists all over the world have put their planned research programs on hold and pivoted to study SARS-CoV-2 (severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2). Milk researchers are no exception. Milk from mothers that have COVID-19, the illness caused by SARS-CoV-2, could be a source of antibodies directed against the virus. Like convalescent plasma (i.e., blood from recovered COVID-19 patients), these maternally-derived antibodies offer potential as a therapeutic to help severely ill patients. But human milk could also contain RNA from SARS-CoV-2, and possibly even infectious viral material. Telling infected mothers to stop nursing “just in case” is not an option, particularly in populations without access to