Milk It Does a Body Good – Doesn’t It?

Everyone knows that “Milk does a body good”.  It has been idolized for decades.  And, history has shown that the peoples who have subsisted on diets containing a large proportion of milk and its products were unusually healthy, vigorous, and well developed.  Milk users were reported as stronger and longer-lived.

Milk and its products are a daily requirement for the populations in most parts of the world.  From the equator, where the Arabs still use camel’s milk, to the far North where the Eskimos and Laplanders use reindeer and caribou milk, this product is the number one food in the human diet.

Human consumption of animal milk is usually linked to the beginnings of grain farming some 6,000 years ago.  Most treatises on the history of the human diet assume that animal husbandry began with the dawn of agriculture, making dairy products a relatively recent human food.  But archeological evidence indicates that there were many cultures that used milk long before the beginnings of agriculture.

In the whole range of organic matter, milk is the only thing purposely designed and prepared by nature as food.  Early humans did not hesitate to appropriate this gift of nature for their own use.

No state of civilization has ever been attained without the subjugation of animals and the subsequent use of their milk; from the infancy of human society, distinction has been assigned to the bovine species in history.

An old saying refers to the fact that the cow had a pervasive influence on America’s history and culture, and no one has written of this more eloquently than Joann S. Grohman in her wonderful book The Family Cow.

The cow is a primary producer of wealth.  She can support a family.  She not only turns grass into milk in quantities sufficient to feed a family but also provides extra to sell and she contributes a yearly caf to rear or fatten.  The family that takes good care of its cow is well off.

Although as the Minister of Agriculture recently stated, “the human race existed long before Pasteur was heard of” many grossly distorted statements are current regarding our milk supply.

There is no substitute for clean, raw milk as a food, so far as children are concerned. Science has not yet succeeded in providing, in the pasteurized variety, those essential qualities that are the only real foundation for a healthy child.

If we are to be compelled to drink pasteurized milk, we should at least understand what pasteurization means. It set out to accomplish two things: Destruction of certain disease-carrying germs and the prevention of souring milk. These results are obtained by keeping the milk at a temperature of 145 degrees to 150 degrees F. for half an hour, at least, and then reducing the temperature to not more than 55 degrees F.

It is undoubtedly beneficial to destroy dangerous germs, but pasteurization does more than this-it kills off harmless and useful germs alike, and by subjecting the milk to high temperatures, destroys some nutritious constituents.

Pasteurization’s great claim to popularity is the widespread belief, fostered by its supporters, that tuberculosis in children is caused by the harmful germs found in raw milk.

Scientists have examined and tested thousands of milk samples, and experiments have been carried out on hundreds of animals in regard to this problem of disease-carrying by milk. But the one vital fact that seems to have been completely missed is that it is CLEAN, raw milk that is wanted. If this can be guaranteed, no other form of food for children can, or should, be allowed to take its place.

Modern medicine is built on the theory that germs cause disease. They don’t take into account the resistance that the individual has. If kids walk into a room coughing and sneezing, why do half the people in the room get sick the next week while the other half doesn’t?

Modern medicine doesn’t really have any conception of the tremendous strength of the immune system, or of how the immune system becomes strong to resist disease. It’s all seen in black and white: germs cause disease.

The flip side of that, which I adhere to, is that you’ve got to have a swamp to breed a lot of mosquitos. The mosquitos can come, but they’ll just leave and not breed if you don’t have a swamp. The swamp is the person who is deficient to begin with.

When you are strong and resistant — immune — you are not troubled by pathogens. Now, that’s not to say there have to be pathogens in raw milk. Whether or not raw milk carries pathogens depends totally on the way the milk is produced — how the animals are fed and the care that’s taken to keep the milk clean during production.

Probably pasteurization’s worst offence is that it makes insoluable the major part of the calcium contained in raw milk. This frequently leads to rickets, bad teeth, and nervous troubles, for sufficient calcium content is vital to children; and with the loss of phosphorus also associated with calcium, bone and brain formation suffer serious setbacks.

Raw milk cure many diseases – J.E. Crewe, MD.  The Mayo Foundation

Ask a typical adult why he or she has stopped drinking milk, and you’ll probably hear about a sour feeling in the stomach, the watery taste of low-fat varieties, and the gummy aftertaste that lasts for hours. If it’s someone who is fond of invoking medicine and science, you might hear something about people becoming more lactose intolerant as they age, or familiar talk about allergens and cholesterol.

The true reason so many people can’t stand the stuff is abundantly clear from reading Ron Schmid’s chapters on the modern milk industry in his terrific new book, The Untold Story of Milk — because it’s junk.

Fifty years ago animal foods were considered complete foods and important for human health. In most developed countries substantial dairy cattle and milk production industries existed which made major contributions to human welfare including the provision of cow milk to infants and young children.

Then, over the last forty years, hypotheses have been developed largely by the medical profession and associated fields of research on the unfavourable roles of dietary cholesterol (DC), animal fats and serum cholesterol (SC) in coronary heart diseases (CHD).

These postulates resulted in new and strange equalities.  These hypotheses were followed by simplistic dietary recommendations with warnings against animal fats. These warnings have been heeded by the medical profession in many developed countries and under medical authority large sections of the public have made dietary changes resulting in a decline of milk consumption per capita.

It is considered inadequate to base general recommendations in the field of human health and well-being solely or mainly upon postulations about the relationship between milk and CHD without taking into account the larger and more complex issues. In addition to the general field of human health, the consequences of these hypotheses include the responses of the dairy production and processing industries.

For example, if the hypotheses are reliable, tested and to become basic components of human nutrition, then the milk production industry has to reshape its system to produce a product more suited to the changes in consumption.

If however, the assumptions are not substantiated permanently the re-tooling of milk production is futile. Milk production represents a major component in global food production and the implications of change are enormous.

We’re talking about life and death here. We’re talking about survival, the ability to stay healthy and have a healthy child. That’s what the corporations and the bureaucrats are attempting to take away from people.

Issues to be considered include the efficiency of dairy cow in converting plant material, inedible to humans, to a human food of high nutritional value, the economic and nutritional contribution of dairy cattle production systems to beef production, the strong genetic correlations between the fat content, the protein content and the yield of milk per cow, the slowness of achieving changes in milk composition in bovine species with low reproductive rates and long generation intervals, and interactions between nutrients.

Further, there are other broader issues including the incidence of other human conditions and diseases besides CHD, which can be affected by the presence or absence of milk in the diet, the genetic differences between individuals and human races, the need to address the hunger of the world’s human population and further economic, social and psychological factors.

Many questions need research to find sustainable breeding goals and milk production systems which are related to the reality of how milk contributes to human development and welfare.

Many people today find it surprising that support of raw milk among physicians was wider spread in the first half of the twentieth century.  The use of raw milk as a treatment of chronic disease has a rich and well-documented history.

If we are to believe the protagonists of the Pasteurization-of-all-milk-at-all costs Party, raw milk is as good, or rather as bad, as rat poison.

But how can the public make informed decisions about genetically modified (GM) foods when there is so little information about its safety?

In a highly controversial move, the dairy industry wants to market artificially sweetened milk—without any special label to alert consumers.

In a petition filed with the FDA, the International Dairy Foods Association (IDFA) and the National Milk Producers Federation (NMPF) seek to change the definition of “milk” so that chemical sweeteners like aspartame and sucralose can be used as optional ingredients not listed on the product label.

If the petition—originally filed in 2009 and now under consideration by the FDA—is successful, these hidden additives could also be included in 17 other dairy products—including whipping cream, low-fat and non-fat yogurt, eggnog, sweetened condensed milk, sour cream, and half-and-half—without requiring any special labeling.

The long term effects of artificial sweeteners on your health can be lethal.

The dairy industry contends that using artificial sweeteners like aspartame as optional ingredients in milk and other dairy foods without any special labeling would “promote more healthy eating” and boost kid appeal.

“It is very difficult to get a man to understand something when his slaray depends on not understanding it”

There is a vacuum of knowledge here which cannot be filled simply by expertise in the medical field alone.

Currently, toxicity in food is tested by chemical analysis of macro/micro nutrients and known toxins. To rely solely on this method is at best inadequate and, at worst, dangerous.

Raw milk sales had been outlawed or severely restricted in virtually every state, and the total number of farms has shrunk to less than 2 million; less than 100,000 have milk cows.  Most of those cows spend most of their time in confinement facilities.  According to the textbook Dairy Cattle Science “ Nearly 40 percent of all dairy cows have mastitis.  (These are not healthy cows).

The story of what’s happened to quality milk is the same as the story of what’s happened to America’s farmers.  Both have been mostly eliminated, marginalized by a culture that has allowed corporations to promote the big lie that the processing of natural foods has nothing to do with the epidemic of disease that cripples our society.

Instead of compelling dealers to set up expensive machinery for turning raw milk into something that is definitely not what it sets out to be — a nutritious, health giving food — let them pass legislation making the dairy-farmers produce clean, raw milk — that is milk pure to drink with all its constituents unaltered.

As Schmid explains the liquid sold as milk in supermarkets bears only a passing resemblance to milk produced by a cow. Schmid, a naturopathic physician and author of Traditional Foods Are Your Best Medicine, has written something close to an epic history of milk, explaining how humans came to depend on it, and how they ultimately destroyed it.

Trying to keep all the bad germs away from the body is an attempt to find a technical solution where none exists.The premise is wrong. It starts from the wrong place. The ancient healers had more understanding of that, until we got to Louis Pasteur and the mechanistic notion of disease that we have today.

Even Pasteur, according to one biography, said on his deathbed that his rival Antoine Beauchamp was right, that the milieu was everything and the germ was nothing. The irony is that it’s foods such as raw milk that build the strength and the immunity we need to resist the pathogens. That’s very clear from the pre-1950 research.

Milk and its products are a “must” in the daily diet.

The Untold Story of Milk can only contribute to widespread awareness of the savage abuse cows endure at the hands of industrial agriculture, and how this system amounts to an assault on the world outside as well as inside our bodies.

Live and Learn. We All Do.

Thanks for reading. Please pass this on to someone who means something to you.

Please don’t forget to leave a comment.