Got some milk? That's a good body, isn't it? Milk is likened to super foods. In fact, it is considered to be a nearly perfect food because of its advantages in protein (which contains all the essential amino acids), carbohydrates, fats and various vitamins.
Tribes in Africa take up to 7 times a day and have almost no heart disease, diabetes, arthritis or atherosclerosis. The French eat many cheeses, creams and other dairy products and have one of the lowest coronary heart rates in industrialized countries.
So what's the fun?
Raw milk is almost a perfect food: not pasteurized. In fact, milk paste has been linked to osteoporosis, heart disease, allergies, arthritis and other disorders caused by calcium deficiency.
That's not a message you hear from the FDA. Sales of raw milk have been banned in 23 states. It is illegal to cross the state line, in some states it can only be sold off the farm as pet food and 17 states prohibit its sale in any way.
A Maryland state health official told Thomas Bartlett, author of The Raw Deal, that selling raw milk is as bad as selling marijuana and comparing raw milk producers to heroin dealers.
How can this happen? How can we go, for generations, from milk that is believed to be a healthy source of nutrition to consider health risks?
Melanie DuPuis, author of Perfect Foods in the World: How Milk Becomes American Drinks says "Americans care more about milk than anything they eat, precisely because it is all represented."
The milk of what it represents is two-fold: both dangerous and important. We have been indoctrinated into believing that milk is essential, nutritious: a national source. We have also been led to believe that it is safe only if it is boiled, distributed, documented and made improper.
John Robbins, author of May All Be Fed, writes: "Modern Bessie is now being brewed, fed, drug-treated, sown, and manipulated for a one-time maximum milk production at a minimum cost."
The truth of the matter is that corporate power is behind what we believe in milk. Health is not a matter of their profit. They have done their best to make a profit by spreading false information and lobbying government agencies to do the same.
The three biggest milk myths are:
Milk is safe while raw milk is dangerous.
There is no nutritional difference between milk paste and raw milk.
Pasteurization is in everyone's best interest
Myth 1: Pastor milk is safer than raw milk.
Fear is a marketing tool you like. There is a reason to fear milk safety.
In the last decades of the 19th and early 20th centuries, when people moved from farms to industrial cities, they were sick and killed by contaminated milk.
As milk production becomes factory and not agricultural produce, little hygiene regulations exist. Milk is not cooled, equipment is not sterile, factory owners are depleting their milk with filthy water and adding things like animal brains to feed their bodies. Cows are fed leftovers from distillery (creating "swill milk" or "white poison"). These urban milk centers are often filled with insects and rats and hygienic workers.
Tuberculosis is spread through cow's milk, and brucella outbreaks, botulism and cholera kill many.
The growing use of technology creates pasteurization equipment. People no longer need to boil their milk at home, smallholders are forced out of the industry or absorbed by growing conglomerates that can afford machinery.
The use of pasteurization improves unnecessary sanitation and increases milk production through solid livestock, inexpensive and unhealthy foods and widespread use of antibiotics and growth hormones.
Today, it is E. Coli, Listeria and Cryptosporidium which are the most common foodborne pathogens and have only appeared in the last 25 years, after pasteurization has been established.
The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the New Disease Control Center recently issued a public warning of the dangers of raw milk. Siding with corporate dairy and trying to revive the public with fear (especially as consumer interest in raw milk has increased 40% in recent decades), the agencies have issued a "warning" that between 1998 and 2005, raw milk was involved in 45 outbreaks of foodborne illness, 1007 individual cases, 104 hospitalizations and 2 deaths.
When raw milk champions Sally Fallon and Thomas Bartlett searched for data supporting this claim, they couldn't. The reference that the FDA and the CDC referred to, the Morbidity and Death Weekly Report, did not provide such information. No supporting data is available in any other FDA or CDC documents and requests for clarification are not addressed.
Bartlett later asked FDA dairy safety director John Sheehan about evidence linking raw milk to the outbreak. Sheehan admits that in the last 20 years, he has not known each other.
Sally Fallon, author of the Nutritional Tradition and president of the Weston A. Price Foundation, acknowledged that there were cases of illnesses due to raw milk but that the number of outbreaks of foodborne illness due to milk paste was certainly far greater.
There have been 239,884 outbreaks documented because of milk paste over the past decade and 620 deaths. The largest ever Salmonella outbreak in the country, which occurred from June 1984 to April 1985, killed 18 people and killed more than 200,000.
Fallon compiled a list of government-documented disease outbreaks for the Maryland Deputy Director of the Office of Food Protection and Consumer Health Services.
1945: 1,492 cases of foodborne illness resulting from pasteurized milk in the United States
1976: 36 children are infected with Yersinia enterocolitica from milk chocolate paste
1978: 68 cases of disease
1982: 17,000 cases of disease
1983: 49 cases of disease
1985: 16,284 typhimurium S. cases.
1985: 197,000 Salmonella cases in California
1985: 1,500 Salmonella cases in Illinois
1987: 16,000 Salmonella cases in Georgia
1993: 28 cases of Salmonella
1994: 105 cases of E. coli and Listeria
1995: 10 children are infected with Yersina enterocolitica
1996: 48 cases of Campylobactor and Salmonella
1997: 28 cases of Salmonella
Seeing just a few more recent figures reveals:
2000: 98 cases of typhimurim S.
2004: 100 cases of Salmonella in California and outbreaks in Pennsylvania and New Jersey
2005: 200 cases of C. jejuni
2006: 1,559 cases of C. jejuni
2007: 5 cases of L. monocytogenes
Again, this outbreak has been traced back to milk paste. The larger the farm plant is, the more space there is for error after pasteurized milk.
Fallon said, "The FDA and the CDC definitely have double standards when it comes to raw milk."
He claimed that the agency did not report an outbreak of foodborne illness due to milk paste in its Morbidity and Death Weekly Report. Fallon found his figures from other publications such as the Journal of the American Medical Association.
Quick to connect raw milk to the outbreak, agencies, Fallon claims, then ignore "the next test that shows milk is clean."
His research found that:
A 1983 outbreak associated with raw milk later found that no culture exposed any Campylobacter bacteria
The listeriosis epidemic that occurred during 2000 and 2001 in North Carolina was blamed on cheese made from raw milk, cheese that was later tested negative for bacteria
An E. coli outbreak in 2006 linked to raw milk was later found to be caused by spinach
A 2007 Salmonella report on raw milk milk in Pennsylvania revealed that no milk contained any pathogens
Although more outbreaks have occurred due to pasteurized and non-raw milk in recent times, the FDA or CDC has never issued a public warning about it.
Factory-raised cows have 300 times more pathogens in their digestive tract than cows fed on small dairy farms.
Pasteurization destroys good and bad bacteria. Probiotics that occur naturally in milk are destroyed by heat although it is the presence of those that can naturally kill many violent pathogens. Probiotics in raw milk prevent this bacterial multiplication, which grows rapidly in milk after pasteurization. This is why pasteurized milk goes sour after a week while raw milk is just sour.
Due to the widespread use of antibiotics in industrial farms, these pathogens are resistant to current drugs.
In 2003, the USDA reported that milk paste produced 29 times more Listeria than raw milk.
Robert Tauxe, chairman of the CDC & # 39; The Foodborne and Diarrheal Branch said globalization of food supply, use of antibiotics, corn and soybeans and congestion in industrial agriculture had created new foodborne pathogens and, he warned, many more were on the way.
A 2004 study by the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI) found that dairy products, pasteurized or raw, make up less than 1% of all outbreaks of foodborne illness. Production now accounts for 38% of outbreaks, 20% chicken and 16% beef. Eggs and seafood are 13% and 12% respectively.
Dairy farms that produce raw milk are usually smaller, cleaner and more responsible to their customers for the quality of their livestock, food, practices and milk.
There is no evidence that pasteurized milk is safer than raw: it is the opposite.
Raw Milk Myths Part 1 of 3
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