Changing milk composition could cut saturated fat intakes

Comprehensive changes to cattle feed could boost milk’s nutritional profile and help Britons meet Food Standards Agency (FSA) targets for reducing saturated fat intakes, according to scientists working on Lipgene.

Lipgene is an EU-funded project exploring how altering the fatty acid composition of the diet could help tackle metabolic syndrome, associated with potentially life threatening conditions, from obesity to heart disease.

The project has several strands, including plant biotechnology (developing transgenic plants with long chain omega-3 fatty acids currently only found in fish and algae), animal nutrition and human nutrition.

Professor Ian Givens, Reading University’s animal sciences research group director and a key Lipgene researcher, said the saturated fat in milk and butter fat could be reduced from 65-70% to 54-55%. This could be done by developing cattle feed containing rapeseed oil high in oleic acid.

This would go a long way to meeting the FSA’s ambition of reducing saturated fat intakes from 13.4% to below 11% of food energy by 2010, he said. “Just altering the fat composition of milk in this way could get women’s energy intakes from saturated fats down to about 12.2% and men to about 12.6%.”

This was preferable to simply cutting back on dairy consumption, he said. “There is evidence that milk products contain compounds that actively promote cardiovascular health as well as containing key nutrients [such as calcium]. They may also play a particular role in the diet of older people. This strongly suggests that simply reducing consumption of milk and dairy is not a sensible way to reducing saturated fatty acid intakes.”

‘Fat consultant’ Geoff Talbot, who wrote a report assessing the feasibility of the FSA targets late last year, said that dairy was a major area of opportunity for saturated fat reduction: “About 3% of daily energy comes from the saturated fat in milk and milk products such as cheese and ice cream, and 64% of the fat we ingest from milk and milk products is saturated.

“If we could achieve a 25% reduction in saturates in milk, then this would give a reduction of about 0.75% in dietary energy from saturates. If some consumers also change to skimmed milk or semi-skimmed milk then the reduction could be even greater.”

However, more research was needed to ascertain what effects this might have on products made with milk with the new fatty acid profile, he said: “Reducing the saturates in the milk can have functional implications for products containing milk. For example, the less saturated fat there is in butter, the lower will be its melting point.

“This could be considered a functional advantage making it potentially easier to spread the butter directly from the fridge. Reducing the saturates level could, however, give a functional disadvantage to cream making it more difficult to whip and aerate.”

Significant technical and regulatory challenges also needed to be overcome if manufacturers were to achieve FSA targets, he added. For many bakery products, it was impossible to replace a solid fat high in saturates with a liquid oil that was lower in saturates, which meant that the focus had to be on identifying healthier solid fats, he argued.

However, this was constrained by several factors. They included development and material costs and the need to use technology now considered ‘unacceptable’ to consumers such as complete hydrogenation. A further influencing factor was the use of fatty acids and glyceride structures not normally found in nature, which could be subject to the European Novel Food Regulation.