I'm staying on a friend's farm for two weeks to help her around the house while she's on pregnancy bed rest. I'm learning a lot, and some of it is rather shocking.
There are so many controversies and strong opinions regarding food. What foods are good for you, bad for you, healthy, unhealthy.
Most everyone I know, myself included, says they try to eat healthy. But what does that mean? That the package says "Lowfat"? "Gluten-free"? "No trans fats"? That we include fresh fruits and vegetables at each meal? That we avoid sugar? Limit carbs? That everything we eat has to be labeled "organic"? That we raise chickens in our backyard?
The whole thing is so overwhelming and hard to navigate. And whoever the experts are that "know" seem to be changing their minds all the time.
"Eggs have too much cholesterol - stop eating them!"
"Eggs are the good cholesterol that helps fight the bad cholesterol!"
"Soy is chock full of protein and super good for you."
"Soy is loaded with phyto-estrogens that hurt the natural hormone balance in your body."
And on and on it goes.
And worst of all, it seems the things I decide would be best, such as shopping for organic, locally-grown produce, or organic, free-range meats, are financially out of reach. So I close my eyes and try not to learn too much, so I don't know how truly bad the "good" things are that I eat. When I face the reality of the toxins and pesticides and antibiotics and steroids that are in my food, and how trapped I am into eating that way because of our finances, I feel like I'm slowly killing myself with every meal and I can't stop.
I have experienced amazing success in seeing my body healed of several chronic (10-15 yr) issues under the care of my naturopathic doctor, a PhD in clinical nutrition. Issues I tried unsuccessfully to treat for years with traditional medicine and doctors. That story is for another post. But because I've experienced such amazing results using the vitamins, supplements, and dietary changes he has recommended, I trust his opinion.
He told me I should never eat commercial pork, because it too often has parasites that will not be killed by cooking, and will go undetected in my body. He told me not to eat commercial chicken and turkey, because the amount of hormones in them is a major cause of serious female hormone-based problems like uterine fybroids, ovarian cysts, breast cancer, uterine cancer and more. He believes it should be illegal what is done to our meat. Even if you're not an animal-lover who protests the treatment of our food animals, you might be inclined to protest what it's doing to your own body. To your children's bodies.
On this farm they have two milk cows. They are treated how you picture an old-timey farm cow: tied by a long rope to a stake in the ground, out in the grassy fields. The stake gets moved once a day, and the cows get brought in twice a day to be fed alfalfa while they are machine-milked. Each cow gives about one-fourth gallon per udder, or "quarter" as they are called. A good milk cow with all four quarters working well gives 2-3 gallons per day. She needs to have a baby calf to start lactating, and can have one baby per year. She can go up to three years between calves and still lactate. She can get mastitis (plugged milk ducts leading to infected udders) just like a lactating woman. She will live 15-20 years and can be milked that entire time as long as she has calves periodically.
Cow manure has a three-day life cycle of bacteria growth. So here on the farm, they let the cows graze all day in one area, then drive them into a new area each afternoon. It moves them away from their own feces while it passes through the bacteria cycle and dries out sufficiently the cows can be brought back to the same area without breeding disease and ingesting their own manure (which in turn affects their health, and the safety of their milk).
This isn't even remotely close to the situation for the milk we buy and drink from the grocery store. Those cows are continually kept in concrete stalls where they cannot move around. They stand in their own feces until the stalls are hosed down with strong chemicals. They eat the cheapest feed possible, which reduces the nutritional quality of their milk. They are given hormones to stimulate milk supply, and milked multiple times per day. Instead of two to three gallons per day, they produce ten or more. Because they stand all day long in feces and are depleted from steroids and over-milking, they get sick frequently. So they are given a constant stream or daily dose of antibiotics to keep them alive in spite of the sickly sitution. Finally, this takes such a toll on their bodies that their life expectancy, despite constant antibiotics, is only three to four years, one-fifth of what it should be.
So then I asked the next question, what about pasteurization? Here on the farm, they drink raw milk from their cows. This means the milk is drawn by pumping machines into sanitary, covered containers, to keep out flies or other contaminants. Then it is strained to be extra sure nothing has gone into it like a stray hair from the cow.
It is refrigerated immediately, and left in its original form. The cream naturally rises to the top and can be spooned off to make whipped cream, or mixed back in to drink whole. Keep in mind that your body desperately needs good fats to function properly, so fat is not the enemy of your waistline (sugar and empty carbs are, but that's a story for another day).
So Daniel, Kristin's husband, gave me the scoop on pasteurization, and it is an interesting one.
People used to live in the country, and either milk their own cows, or get milk from a close neighbor. The milk would be consumed before it spoiled enough to cause illness.
Cities started to form, moving people further from the country, and thus the milk source. The milk started spoiling before drinking. Since refrigeration was still not common in every day homes, the solution was simple: move the milk source close to the people again.
Who capitalizes on this need? The beer and alcohol breweries, already located in the cities. The mushy leftover from processing grain into beer was going to waste. The beer factory owners discovered that cows could eat the mush, called swill, without it killing them. Soon, hundreds of cows were being kept in close, confined quarters in diaries right next to the breweries. They were called "swill dairies."
In those filthy, cramped dairies, cows were no longer naturally kept from disease by grazing (and moving away from their feces) on open farmland. The swill dairies became breeding grounds for disease, which slowly infiltrated the milk. Simultaneously, the nutritional quality of the milk plummeted, because of the residue the cows were being fed.
The situation worsened. The demand for milk in the cities was increasing, and the swill dairies couldn't keep up. They found if you diluted the milk with water, it still had a milky-looking color, and customers couldn't tell the difference. Then they found, if you diluted it further, and it began losing its color, you could add chalk dust to make it white again. People were used to shaking up their milk to mix the cream back in, so perhaps they wouldn't notice the slight separation caused by the chalk, once they shook it up.
Prior to this, milk was considered one of the best things to feed babies, because if its high nutritional value, and ease to which babies adapted to it from mom's milk. So when babies went from drinking whole, creamy, high-protein milk from grass-fed, free-range country cows, to drinking half-chalk, watered-down milk from swill-fed, bacteria-ridden, sickly city cows, babies stated dying. By the thousands.
It took a while to trace down the reason for the epidemic-level deaths of infants. Because of the tie to milk, swill dairies were investigated, and forced to close or clean up the filthy conditions. Most were eventually outlawed.
At the same time, Louis Pasteur and others working on this problem (and other problems of disease), invented pasteurization. If you boil the milk hot enough, they found, it kills disease and becomes safe to consume.
And finally, refrigeration showed up not long after and solved the milk spoilage problem as well.
Daniel, my friend here, said, "You can take a huge vat of milk, chuck some manure patties in, boil it up, and drink it without it making you noticeably sick. That's basically what was happening then, and it's still not far from what's happening now. Does that make pasteurized milk safer or better for you than raw milk? Instead, you can raise your cows and handle your milk in such a way that it prevents disease from the beginning, AND retains all it's nutritional value, instead of losing a lot of it by boiling."
He also told me that milk lactose (present in all forms of milk, including human milk), requires lactase in order for the body to digest it. When the milk is pasteurized, it destroys the lactase, leaving behind only the lactose, which is indigestible to the human body. And hence, the lactose intolerant dilemma for many people (who can often drink raw milk with no issues, since it still has lactase).
It's the same reason why there's strict guidelines for handling of human breast milk. Sterilize the bottles and the pump.
Breast milk is safe on the counter for four hours. It is safe in the refrigerator for four days. To reheat it, either hold the bottle underneath warm (not hot) running water, or put the bottle in a pan of warm (not boiling) water away from the stove top. Too much heat, and the milk loses its most important nutrients necessary for the baby. Additionally, the lactase could be destroyed, making the baby's body unable to digest or tolerate the milk.
I'm sure there's a lot more than the bit I've learned and described. This is probably just scraping the surface. Daniel recommended the book, "The Untold Story of Milk", for a thorough history and biology lesson that steers clear from some of the abrasive opinions of some raw milk advocates.
My body doesn't handle milk well, so I switched to almond milk and hemp milk for drinking and cooking. I can tolerate dairy in small amounts, like cheese or butter, but avoid large quantities like milk or ice cream. Yogurt I adore and can eat because the yogurt bacteria must make it digestible for me.
I drank a glass of the raw milk here, hoping I could handle it, but no. I still had lots of stomach cramping a few hours later. So my issue with dairy must be something other than the lactose/lactase problem. I've also noticed Jax spits up within 24hrs of me having a lot of dairy. It runs in my family, so it's not unexpected, just disappointing.
But that cold glass of milk was so, so delicious. And I've met the cow it came from. Her name is Flo.
