By T. W. Gullickson, F. C. Fountaine, and J. B. Fitch
Summary: Cream, which is used to make butter, is a much more valuable product than a refined vegetable oil. As a result, farmers of the mid twentieth century got in the bad habit of skimming the cream off their milk to make butter for consumers and then combining the skimmed milk with a vegetable oil to feed to their calves. Gullickson and his colleagues report on an experiment in which they fed calves skim milk homogenized with butter, lard, corn oil, cottonseed oil, and soybean oil. Their findings were what one would expect in replacing a natural, whole food with a refined, processed one: "The results as measured in terms of rate of gain in weight, physical appearance and general well-being of calves indicated clearly the superior nutritive value of butterfat over all the other fats and oils tested." Practices like the one described here, so longstanding in American food manufacturing that they're taken as "normal," go a long way to explain the rampant rates of degenerative disease in the United States. From the Journal of Dairy Science. Reprint 138, 1942.
View PDF: Various Oils and Fats as Substitutes for Butterfat in Ration of Young Calves
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