Milk

• Milk is the lacteal secretion of any mammal, particularly cows in the United States. Milk drinkers have a wide range of choices depending on the amount of fat they wish to consume: whole, reduced fat, low-fat and fat-free. Milk can be sold as dry, evaporated, with lower lactose or lower sodium. One way to help children drink milk is adding a sweetened flavoring like chocolate, vanilla or strawberry. Sweetened condensed milk--whole milk with its water removed and sucrose added--is an important ingredient in making candies and desserts. Cultured buttermilk is low-fat milk with fat-free dry milk solids and a bacterial culture. It is used in cooking or can be consumed alone to aid digestion.

Cheese

• Cheese is a catch-all term used to describe curdled milk or cream. By using acid and rennet to curdle the milk, part solidifies as cheese and part remains liquid, called whey. There are a variety of cheeses that are categorized as fresh and mild, blue, stinky, soft and hard. Spreads like cream cheese or mascarpone are actually false cheeses because rennet is not used in the curdling process. Fresh and mild are young cheeses, like mozzarella or feta. Blue cheeses have blue veins of mold running through them and a strong taste. Stinky cheeses include Taleggio and Morbier and have tastes ranging from mushrooms to sour fruit due to the bacterium used in processing. Soft cheeses are spreadable, like Brie, and hard cheeses are usually grated over food, like Parmesan.

Butter

• Butter is made from milk, cream or both and contains 80% or more milk fat with or without added salt. It's made by separating the fat of the milk and churning it until the fats separate from the liquid. It is high in both saturated fat and cholesterol because it is essentially spreadable milk fat. There are generally three types of butter commercially available: unsalted is used for baking; lightly salted is used for general cooking; and whipped is whipped with air to make it spreadable as a table butter.

Yogurt

• Yogurt is made when the bacterium Lactobacillus bulgaricus and Streptococcus thermophilus are added to warm milk and allowed to ferment naturally. Lactic acid is produced during the fermentation process which gives plain yogurt its tangy taste. Yogurt comes in a variety of flavors and textures, the most common being the thinner, single-serving containers that have added sweetened flavors like berry or vanilla. Greek yogurt is gaining popularity but is more expensive because the thicker, creamier textures comes from the additional milk needed in the process. Other bacteria can be added like Lactobacillus acidophilus and Bifidobacterium, which aid in human digestion.