Yesterday, I asked:
Here’s a question, O Internet:
If I buy full-fat milk and dilute it 50/50 with water, do I effectively have semi-skimmed milk, or is there something more sophisticated about the skimming process?
And if I then dilute it again, do I get skimmed milk… for one quarter of the price?
Now, the quick answer, as I understand it, is ‘no’: milk contains a variety of nutrients, and several of these are water-soluble. So the process of ‘skimming’ to reduce the fat content doesn’t dilute these nutrients in the way that you would by just adding water: you still get them at approximately the same concentration when you buy semi-skimmed or skimmed milk.
But I learned a couple of interesting different things from asking!
The first thing is this wonderful diagram, found and posted in the comments by Spencer:
(click for full size)
It looks like something explaining the petrochemical industry, but much, much more yummy.
His comment: “I wonder how many of these I can have with my breakfast today?”
And the second thing is that, as well as beginning “Here’s a question, O Internet”, I could have asked “Here’s a question, O Artificial Intelligence”.
My friend Keshav did that, submitting my question verbatim to Perplexity, a system I hadn’t previously tried. Here’s the rather good result (and here as a screenshot in case that live link goes away).
I then went on to ask “Which nutrients in milk are water-soluble?”, and it told me, with good citations, with the comment that “maintaining adequate levels of these water-soluble vitamins in breast milk is important for the health and development of the breastfed infant”. So I asked a follow-up question: “Is this different in cows’ milk?”, and again, got a useful, detailed response with references for all the facts.
This stuff really is getting better… at least until the Internet is completely overrun by AI spam and the AIs have to start citing themselves. But for now, I think Perplexity is worth exploring further.
Thanks to Spencer, Keshav and other respondents!
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