Donkey or cow? and we aren’t talking meat

By 7. Juli 2014Blog, Quality, Risk Management

Have you ever wondered while sipping on your donkey milk if maybe someone has adulterated it cow milk? Surprising, me neither, but this could be a serious problem for people with allergies to cow milk who have opted for donkey milk instead. Using Isoelectric Focusing and ELISA two Italian scientists can now tell if this is the case.

The scientists talk about the health benefits of donkey milk in their paper published in the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry, especially for children with cow milk allergies. There are current methods for identifying the origin of milk but they say these methods are either expensive or can be disrupted by adding, for instance, defatted milk.

Using isoelectric focusing they were able to identify up to 5% adulteration of donkey milk with cow milk. Using ELISA they were able to identify adulteration at the 0.5% level.

Would be donkey milk adulterers beware…

Click here to see the paper yourself on the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry website.