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The Indy 500 is perhaps the most famous car race in the United States. Unlike every other sporting competition in the world, the legendary 500 mile car race is celebrated with the victor drinking not Champagne, but rather a bottle of fresh milk! The latest research suggests that the term “500” may have more to do with the milk, than with the miles.

What if the saying “you are what you eat” became “you are what you and your parents ate”? The written slate of life’s experiences may not be completely wiped clean between generations. How would this knowledge influence our behavior as humans? How would it change livestock production systems?

Milk makes a baby grow, including the baby’s brain. Scientists have recently discovered two proteins in human milk that help a baby’s brain grow and develop.

Brie cheese lovers everywhere have reason to rejoice. Researchers from the University Catholique de Louvain in Belgium have found that eating ripened cheese decreases blood sugar levels and fat tissue in obese/diabetic mice.

Fresh out of the womb, a newborn baby is challenged with armies of disease-causing microbes. How does he survive this onslaught? In some parts of the world, he doesn’t. Millions of babies die each year in the first few months of life from common infections. A recent publication by Barboza and colleagues unfolds how a major milk protein, lactoferrin, displays different “faces”, depending on which pathogens are present.

Imagine if you spent every minute of every day reading scientific articles that have the keyword “milk” associated with them. Suppose you read one article per hour, 24 hours a day. Even with this impossible regimen, you could not cover even half of the milk-related articles published each year. In 2011, there were over 20,000 journal articles published with the keyword “milk” in the PubMed, CAB Abstracts, Agricola, and FSTA databases.

The purpose of “SPLASH! milk science update”, IMGC’s innovative newsletter, is to make it easier for you to stay up-to-date with the scientific literature. Much easier.