Tuesday, March 18, 2008

What?! Why Do You Drink Raw Milk??!


Why?! Why would I?! Why in the world would I drink raw milk? Why wouldn't I drink pasteurized milk? Doesn't the pasteurization protect us? Isn't raw milk filthy with germs and microbes and disease? Didn't Pasteur have something there? Well, maybe. Maybe sometimes for some things, but not for milk that is obtained from grass fed cows who graze out in the sunshine and eat their natural food--grass. Those cows are healthy and produce healthy milk just as they have for the thousands of years that people have consumed raw milk all over the world from various animals. Cows, goats, sheep, horses, llamas, camels, yaks, water buffalo all have provided humans with quality protein, minerals, and vitamins for millennia; especially in places where you can't really grow crops, but you can graze animals.

Besides, towards the end of his life Louis Pasteur said, The germ is nothing; the terrain is everything.” He sort of turned around on that one, didn't he? If the organism is strong, and supported, and bolstered up, the germ doesn't have much of a chance. The object for good health then is not in destroying every germ that comes, or trying to create fields of sterility in our homes, but in bolstering up all of our immune systems through natural means that don't compromise our strength. Raw milk does this.

In Ron Schmid's book, The Untold Story of Milk: The History, Politics and Science of Nature's Perfect Food: Rw Milk From Pasture Fed Cows, he explains why pasteurization came to be the mandate here in America and why it has made milk less nutritious and detrimental to good health. What otherwise, when raw, would be a cure for asthma and allergies is recognized by some as a cause of heart disease, when pasteurized and homogenized.

Some questions to ponder: Are people dying from consuming raw milk around the world? Are salmonella outbreaks occurring in raw milk supplies or pasteurized? Why would that be? How is it that mankind has survived and thrived living on raw dairy for generation after generation after generation? How can that be if raw milk is dangerous and bad for us?

Why do I drink raw milk? Because I know that I am getting good nutrition and my family is and that we are getting: vitamin c, minerals
and dozens of bacteria fighting components such as Lactoferrin, Polysaccharides, Medium-Chain Fatty Acids, Enzymes, White blood cells, B-lymphocytes, Macrophages, Neutophils, T-lymphocyes, Lysosyme, Mucins, Oligosaccharides, B12 Binding Protein, Bifidus and Fibronectin. All of these components are actively fighting bacteria when consumed raw but are destroyed when milk is pasteurized. Pasteurization removes the pathogen destroying property of raw milk. Raw milk helps protect me and my family from illness. Except for a bout of flu, which only lasted three days for each of us (three days and then one day a week later for my daughter), my kids have not had any colds this whole winter. No sniffles. No cough. No sore throat. No malaise. No fever, which would be good any way for burning away whatever the sickness is--it being the body's natural mechanism for killing the invaders. We have missed very little of any class or field trips or gym days for a very long time.

Generally, my kids are very healthy. I think drinking raw milk contributes to that.

That is why I drink raw milk.



2 comments:

Mrs. R said...

I agree totally. Yet it's very hard to find any raw milk here. I've just recently put out the word that we have cash-in-hand to buy a milk goat, though, so hopefully that problem will be remedied in the near future!

Laura said...

If you could keep your own goat, that would be fantastic.

I would also really like to keep chickens, but my suburb won't allow it.

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