Scientists are tackling a new kind of nutrition problem: how to make healthy foods even better for you. They want foods that go beyond preventing nutrient deficiencies by boosting immune function, reducing chronic disease risk, or protecting against stressors and toxins.

So they're studying nature's original "health food": milk.

"The things milk does are pretty impressive," says Bruce German, a UC Davis food science professor. "For example, the ability to cure bacterial disease with antibiotics is one of the greatest boons to the human condition in history. Milk inhibits the growth of bad bacteria but also encourages the growth of beneficial bacteria. Milk thus works in innovative ways that scientists have not traditionally considered, but we still don't know how."

Milk can also improve immune function, lower blood pressure and speed the uptake of hard-to-absorb nutrients, like iron. It may even be helpful in weight control.

Once we learn how milk works, German thinks we'll be able to transfer its benefits to other foods, making them healthier. So he's organizing an international research consortium to study the "milk genome," the genes that encode instructions for making milk.

"Milk evolved to be nourishing," German said. "And the footprints of evolution are in the genes, so the [milk] genome is a real obvious place to look" for ways to improve foods.

The new research consortium will be supported by funding from Australia, Canada, the Netherlands, New Zealand and Switzerland. Its work will compare genes telling how to make milk in many species, with an emphasis on human genes.

And when the benefits of milk are understood, they will theoretically be transferable to any type of food. For example, lactoferrin, a milk protein that improves iron absorption, is already added to non-dairy foods in Japan. "Just because a specific benefit originates in milk, that doesn't mean that milk is the only way you could get it," German says.