Milk and Ice Cream Processing

This chapter focuses on fresh milk products including fluid milks and ice cream. Frozen desserts can be packed in innumerable types and configurations of packages. The US dairy industry is a pioneer in milk and milk product production and export in the world, with a bright future to look upon. Milk is a highly nutritious addition to the diet, which contains carbohydrates, proteins, fats, minerals, and vitamins. There are a number of processing technologies involved in the production of fluid milk and milk products, including pasteurization, homogenization, freezing and packaging, that have enabled these products to be distributed worldwide for decades. All the milk products and processing technologies are regulated by a number of federal and state agencies to ensure a good quality product for the consumer

The Economics of Health and Vitamin Consumption

We estimate the impact of vitamin supplement intake, lifestyle, health indicators, food culture, and demographics on diet quality outcomes as measured by the Healthy Eating Index–2005 (HEI). Our data consists of U.S. adults who participated in the 2003–2004 National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey. Alternative instrumental variable estimators explicitly address issues of endogeneity and complex sample design. Our empirical analysis demonstrates that diet quality is strongly interrelated with food culture. We suggest that vitamin consumption serves as another marker for healthy eating. This finding emphasizes the need to employ economic modeling when developing public policy to reduce obesity