Ellipsis

I have come across the following sentence in a write-up on Health in the STAR of January 23, 2008. It is a statement made by Sonja Laemmel, a food economist with the German Allergy and Asthma Association.
It is reproduced here not because of its nutritional value but for the grammatical value of the sentence which says, "Fresh milk has a lot of lactose, yoghurt less, cheese even less, and butter hardly any at all."
Some words are purposely left out but many will understand the sentence perfectly. However, how many can know the reason behind their understanding?
This is the effect of ellipsis at work.
Ellipsis is defined in Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary as the omission of one or more words that are obviously understood but that must be supplied to make a construction grammatically complete.