Anyone For Horse Milk Ice Cream? It Could Be Good For Your Gut

A new study has explored the possible health benefits of using the milk of female horses in ice cream. The frozen treat is more traditionally made up of cow's milk and cream, but by swapping in the milk of mares, they discovered it was possible to get more good bacteria swirled into the mix.

If you’ve been with IFLScience for a while, you’ll know we’re not afraid to ask weird questions about food. From boiled penguin eggs (with invisible albumen), to 50,000-year-old bison stew , and the feasibility of whale-milk cheese , we’ve seen it all. So, you can imagine our eyes went up on stalks when we saw a study about horse milk ice cream.

If you’re going to milk animals and churn the liquid into delicious desserts, it makes sense to look for wiggle room where we can make things a bit healthier. One way you can do that is with something called inulin, a type of prebiotic that doesn’t get digested in the stomach, but feeds the good bacteria in the gut.

It’s made up of naturally occurring polysaccharides and is a common type of dietary fiber that’s added to food. Combined with probiotics that introduce good bacteria in things like yogurts, it can guide us on the way to a happy gut microbiome .

Mare's milk itself may be a way to introduce more nutritional value to ice cream as it contains proteins and enzymes not found in cow's milk, and is lower in fat. The team behind the delicious study formulated different mixtures of ice cream using mare's milk, inulin, and yogurt bacteria to see how it influenced the composition of the final product compared to cow's milk ice cream.

The horse ice cream combos revealed that inulin could reduce acidity, and that ice cream with the prebiotic added had more beneficial bacteria than the varieties without. While acidity varied, the mare's milk ice cream mixtures had similar amounts of protein, fat, and total solids, and made for suitably ice creamy ice cream. It's also been suggested that the texture could be further improved by blending with cow's milk, creating an alternative that's still lower in fat and higher in nutritional value.

“Mare’s milk is much more similar to human’s milk than cow’s milk. It also causes fewer allergies than cow’s milk," explained lead author Dr Katarzyne Skolnicka to The Telegraph . “Moreover mare’s milk is a good source of polyunsaturated fatty acids and other bioactive substances like lactoferrin and lysozyme."

“ Milk is proven to have therapeutic effects. It may be useful for treatment or prevention of gastrointestinal tract and respiratory system disorders. In addition, mare’s milk exhibits immunomodulating properties and positively influences intestinal microbiota composition.”

So, who’s for a scoop?

The study is published in PLoS ONE .