When you ask the average person what single food will give them the best nutrition, a majority will say a nice big glass of milk. The nutritional properties of milk have been carefully promoted for decades. The milk advisory board’s advertising campaigns have been some of the most successful in history. Who doesn’t love the milk mustache? The truth about milk is a little less stellar however.
Twenty years ago the advertised tag lines were, “Milk, it does a body good” and “Milk has something for every body.” Unfortunately these lines were lies and they were challenged in court for false advertising. The lines were dropped and the milk mustache campaign was born. What is the lie?
Milk has a long history of being a healthy food – what happened? Research done almost 100 years ago looking at the healthiest cultures in the world showed that these healthy cultures all used milk as a basic food, either as fluid milk, cultured milk, or cheese products. This original cross-cultural research is what launched milk as a health food. This fit well with the early health food craze from a few years earlier started by the Kellogg sanitarium promoting corn flakes as the new health food. Again, what happened?
Well, back then milk was a very different food than what we have today. Back then milk was a raw food product and dairy cows were primarily of the Guernsey and Jersey breeds as these produced the best tasting milk. Milk came fresh from your local farmer. It was a wholesome food product worthy of its reputation. What happened to milk is industrialization. Mass production changed the product we think of as milk into something that has become downright dangerous to our health. What changed is pasteurization, homogenization, lack of freshness, and breed selection. Lets look at each…
In rural America the dairy farmer got up way before dawn and milked the cows before the market opened and delivered that fresh milk only hours old to be sold that day. When city dwellers started demanding milk, a means had to be found to package the milk for shipping to the cities. To prevent spoilage, milk packagers would add formaldehyde to the milk, giving it a slight blue tinge. My grandmother remembered the blue milk. Then it was discovered that the milk could be pasteurized with short bursts of high steam heat. This would allow it to be shipped and kept “fresh” for a week or more. Milk distribution in cities involved delivery right to your door. The milk was packaged in glass bottles and many houses had a little door in the wall by the back door that allowed the delivery man to set the milk right into the house. Pasteurization destroyed most of the valuable immunoglobulins that gave the milk many of its healthful properties, but it was still a fairly good food. This bottled milk was famous for the cream rising to the top, which could be skimmed off for using in very rich treats or mixed back into the milk for a really creamy drink.
Gradually the small local dairy processors were absorbed into larger mass producers. Small dairies formed milk cooperatives and sold their milk each day to the big processor. The milk was collected in big tanker trucks and carried to central milk processors where the milk might sit as long as two weeks before being pasteurized. This naturally allowed massive amounts of bacterial growth, but no one cared because the bacteria were killed by the pasteurization. The problem everyone has ignored is that the bacteria cell walls are still there. The lypopolysaccharides they are made of are toxic, even if they can’t grow anymore.
The next loss of health came with the invention of homogenization. The idea is that by super whipping the milk, the fat globules would get broken up and stay blended into the milk. This keeps the cream from separating, producing a more regular consistency in the milk. The problem is that the fat globules trap a toxic substance called xanthine oxidase and release it into the milk and make it easily absorbed by our body. Xanthine oxidase is a major cause of heart disease and hardening of the arteries. It literally burns holes in the lining of our arteries.
The last step in the destruction of healthy milk was when the dairy industry switched from using Guernsey and Jersey cows to Holstein cows. Although Guernsey and Jersey milk tastes better, Holstein cows produce almost twice as much milk per day, so industrial herds switched to the better producers. The really big problem however is that the two milks are different chemically. Guernsey and Jersey milk is called A2 milk chemically while Holstein milk is called A1. The chemical structure of the Holstein milk is weaker and allows the release of a part of the milk protein (casein) called caseomorphin. Caseomorphin is extremely irritating to the lining of the gut – as much as 27 times as damaging as gluten. Caseomorphins get into the blood stream and to the brain where it can cause a large number of damaging changes to brain functioning. It has been found to be a primary cause of ADD, and significantly contributes to schizophrenia. Unfortunately it is the caseomorphin that makes us love milk so much. Caseomorphin is an opiate and stimulates the morphine receptors in our brains. This makes us addicted in exactly the same way morphine and heroin are addictive, just less intensely.
We also have the whole lactose issue. Lactose is the type of sugar found in milk naturally. Babies have the enzymes for digesting lactose, but most people ion the world lose that enzyme as they grow older. Without that enzyme the sugar can’t be digested and it causes problems with gas and diarrhea as a result. Folks of European descent can usually keep the enzyme active if they keep using milk regularly as they age, but most people from other cultures lose that ability.
So there you have it. Modern milk is old and rotten with its healthful properties destroyed and both toxic and addictive elements released instead. Even the belief that milk is a good source of calcium is a lie. When the milk is pasteurized the calcium binds to casein to form calcium caseinate, an indigestible salt that carries the calcium right out of the system. Top that off with the fact that milk is one of the top five most allergic foods – the number one most associated with asthma – makes modern milk a pretty terrible food for humans.
What can you do if you love milk? Getting hooked up to a source of old fashion raw milk from A2 type milk cows is the best answer, but hard to do if you don’t live on a farm. Second best choice is to switch to goat or sheep milk, as it is the A2 variety. If I use milk cheese, it is sheep or goat milk cheese. Third is to switch to non-dairy alternatives like coconut milk, almond milk, cashew milk, and hemp seed milk. You can even use soy milk or rice milk as a last choice, though they have hormone and sugar issues. Many alternative source cheeses and ice creams also exist, although be careful to read the ingredients carefully as I often find casein or calcium caseinate in the product ingredients. I don’t understand that one. Why make a dairy alternative cheese and then put dairy in it?
That’s the dirt on our favorite health food – milk.