Dive Brief:
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Sheep's milk nutritional characteristics include both pre- and probiotics, and it is described as “an excellent source of nutrients” — potentially an up-and-coming functional food, according to a paper published this month in the journal Comprehensive Reviews in Food Science and Food Safety.
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While many people best know it sheep's milk as a component of of fine cheeses due to its high total solids content, “the functional benefits of this food matrix remain unexplored by the dairy industry,” the paper says.
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Unlike cow's milk, sheep's milk contains no agglutinin, a substance that causes particles to coagulate to form a thickened mass. This makes sheep's milk more digestible than that from a cow.
Dive Insight:
While people today don't often think much about sheep as food or companions, they were one of the very first domesticated animals some 10,000 years ago in central Asia. Columbus's original trip to the New World was, in fact, financed by the wool earnings of Spain's Queen Isabella.
They've been eaten nearly as long, but their potential powerful future as a food source — for items other than Spain's signature Manchego cheese — seems to have been sparked by recent scientific studies.
Like cows, sheep are forage animals, quite happy grazing in open pasture or, in colder weather, being fed hay and similar grasses in barns. Sheep also enjoy weeds, often choosing to eat them instead of grass. This can, of course, be an economic advantage to sheep farmers.
While the diet of sheep has some effect on the casein and whey protein in their milk, they generally do a more efficient job of converting forage into protein than cows. However, in order to get significant volumes of cheese or milk, a farmer needs more of them — thus more housing space.
But there may be more sheep farmers soon. The high nutrient quality of sheep's milk makes it a sufficiently valuable product for more farmers to invest in herds of this particularly sturdy animal. And production of more sheep's milk means that more manufacturers can experiment with the nutrient-rich and tasty milk to create healthy product innovations.