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The Effect of Cocoa Upon the Digestibility of Milk Proteins

1941; Elsevier BV; Volume: 24; Issue: 5 Linguagem: Inglês

10.3168/jds.s0022-0302(41)95423-1

1529-9066

L.D. Lipman, W.S. Mueller,

Proteins in Food Systems

Before any substance is added to milk, one should be certain that it will not destroy some of the well-known nutritive properties of plain milk.No doubt the increase in milk consumption, especially by children, as a result of adding chocolate flavoring would be desirable, provided it did not injure the nutritional properties of the milk.Muetler and Ritchie (1) found that the addition of 4per cent by weight of cocoa to plain milk, lowered the gain in weight of rats by approximately 17 per cent, even though the amount of milk consumed was the same as when a plain whole milk diet was fed.It was thought that this observed decrease in rate of growth might be due in part to a decrease in the digestibility of the milk proteins as a result of adding cocoa.Ulrich (2) found that cacao beans may contain approximately 8 per.cent by weight of cacao red.In its reactions with proteins, cacao red much resembles tannin.Whymper (3) states that tannin decreases the solubility of milk solids.Neumann (4, 5) studied the digestibility of cocoa, using himself as a subject for 86 days, and reported that the addition of cocoa to other articles of food seemed to reduce the total amount of nitrogen absorbed.He also found that the amount of fat present in cocoa affected the absorption of nitrogen, a reduction in fat lowering the assimilation of nitrogen.Aplin and Ellenberger (6), working with cows, found that the addition of two pounds of cocoa meal (a by-product of the chocolate industry) to the daily amount of food consumed by the cows reduced the coefficient of digestibility of the crude protein from 55 per cent for the cocoa-free food to 50 per cent for the diet containing cocoa.Mitchell et al. (7), studying the digestibility of cocoa and milk proteins, concluded that no marked supplementary relation exists between the nitrogenous compounds of milk and of cocoa.In their studies 50 per cent of the nitrogen in the food used came from the cocoa and the other 50 per cent from the milk.