I grew up on this stuff. Loved it. I put it in my cereal, dipped my Oreos in it, drank a glass of it with every spaghetti dinner (trust me, that’s the way to go), I consumed a lot of it. I also had a lot of health problems as a child, with chronic ear infections and digestive issues. Had I gone to a naturopathic doctor as a kid, milk is likely the first thing that would’ve been taken out of my diet. My parents were never informed of the dangers of the industrialized milk that we find in our local grocery stores. I’d like to follow the path that this sort of milk takes from feedlot to your shopping cart. It will explain why milk is a heavily allergenic food, and not the super food we are led to believe it is by the dairy industry.
Brace yourself, because this is about to get icky. Milk originates not on a farm, but in feedlots that are termed Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations a.k.a. “CAFO’s”. These are large industrial feedlots that are designed to create massive amounts of milk at the lowest cost. By now, you’ve probably noticed on some dairy products either or both of the phrases “rBGH free” or “antibiotic free”. This is because a common method of milk production is to inject the cows with a genetically engineered bovine growth hormone. The subsequent engorgement of the cow’s utters that ensues after injection causes mastitis to occur because the utters literally begin to rip at the seems. With any infection comes pus, and that pus cannot be kept completely out of your milk. Since this has posed a new health problem, the FDA has an allowable amount of pus cells in your milk. This is termed the Somatic Cell Count, and it should not exceed 1 million pus cells/ milliliter. But, to keep the levels below this new standard, it is necessary to use antibiotics. These drugs can easily end up in your milk as well.
By now we have:
- Put the cow that produces your milk in unhealthy and confined conditions,
- Fed it an unnatural diet full of grains that skews the omega 3:6 ratio in the omega 6 direction, causing increased inflammation both in the cow and you,
- Injected it with “rBGH”, which not only gets into your milk and can increase your risk of diseases like breast cancer, but also there is overwhelming evidence that the genetically engineered hormone causes physical harm to the cows, including increases in infection and mastitis.
- Injected it with antibiotics to dilute the amount of pus cells down to 1 million cells per droplet of milk. These antibiotics work in your gut as well, killing any good bacteria your gut or the milk may have had.
Before we go on, raw milk can definitely be considered a “super food”. It contains an abundance of fat, protein, and carbohydrate… along with plenty of vitamins, enzymes, and nutrients. Milk “does the body good” in other words. But, not after the dairy industry is done with it, because next comes pasteurization.
5. Milk is pasteurized at high heat for an extended period of time to “kill anything that moves”, so to speak. If it was alive and nutritious, or alive and harmful… it’s not anymore. Vitamins and enzymes are killed, while proteins and fats are denatured. Nothing healthy is left in tact.
6. Milk is also homogenized. Your gallon of milk is not one gallon of milk from one cow. It is mixed in with hundreds of other cow’s milk from different CAFO’s with different processes and medicating types. If that doesn’t sound dangerous enough, research has linked the homogenization of milk to heart disease.
At the end of the day, milk can be very nutritious or it can be extremely detrimental to our overall health. It all depends on the source. It is also helpful to know where to find raw milk. You can visit www.Carltonfarm.com to learn more about where you can find healthy living raw milk in the local area.