The Health Benefits of Raw
Milk
“It
is very difficult to get a man to understand something
when his salary depends on not understanding it.”
– Upton Sinclair
During the early days of pasteurization, researchers
showed that scurvy often resulted when pasteurized
milk replaced raw milk in the diet of infants.
“Pasteurized milk gradually induces infantile
scurvy, unless antiscorbutic diet is given in
addition,” Alfred Hess wrote in the American
Journal of Diseases of Children in 1916.
“This disorder quickly yielded to the substitution
of raw for pasteurized milk.”[x]
Thus from the earliest days of pasteurization
scientists demonstrated that heat treatment had
a profound effect on the health-giving properties
of milk. A loss of nutrients other than vitamin
C was demonstrated in subsequent studies. One
article, “The effect of heat on the solubility
of the calcium and phosphorus compounds in milk,”
was published in 1925 in the Journal
of Biological Chemistry. The author’s
conclusion was unequivocal: “There is a
loss in the soluble calcium and phosphorus contents
of the milk due to heat and the amount of the
loss depends upon the temperature to which the
milk has been heated.”[xi]
Other studies showed that pasteurization caused
the loss of significant percentages of many of
the B vitamins and nearly all of the enzymes in
milk.[xii]
Further compelling evidence of the
superiority of raw milk appeared in The
Lancet in 1937, in a report on the work
of the medical officer to a group of orphanages.
The physician gave pasteurized milk for five years
to one group of 750 boys, while giving raw milk
to another group of 750. All other conditions
were alike except for this one item. During that
period, 14 cases of tuberculosis occurred in the
boys fed pasteurized milk, while only one occurred
in those fed raw milk. The article also discusses
the dental health of the children brought up on
raw milk: “Dr. Evelyn Sprawson of the London
Hospital has recently stated that in certain institutions
children who were brought up on raw milk (as opposed
to pasteurized milk) had perfect teeth and no
decay. The result is so striking and unusual that
it will undoubtedly be made the subject of further
inquiry.”[xiii]
[xiv]
Instead, the report has been conveniently forgotten.
Very little research was done after
about 1950 on the relative nutrient content of
raw versus pasteurized milk. The move toward universal
pasteurization was in full swing and interest
in raw milk was waning in agricultural colleges
increasingly supported by dairy industry and agribusiness
funding. One study, however, published in the
Journal of Dairy
Research in 1967, confirms much of the
earlier research. The authors were interested
in finding ways to preserve more of the vitamin
content of milk during processing and they made
a number of interesting comments.
“On leaving the udder, milk
quickly takes up oxygen from the air,” they
wrote. “During subsequent processing and
distribution, this dissolved oxygen promotes oxidative
changes that degrade several important nutrients
in the milk. Thus, though potentially milk could
supply an important fraction of the daily dietary
requirement for vitamin C, average market milk
supplies relatively little. Similarly with vitamin
B12, much of which may be destroyed during heat
processing. Fresh milk is also in fact a rich
source of a form of folic acid. Like vitamin B12
and ascorbic acid, the folic acid in milk is unstable
to heating.” How ironic to see these statements
in an industry publication some 50 years after
pasteurization had been presented by the milk
industry as a purely beneficial process that did
not substantially alter the nutritional value
of milk.
In the second part of her three-part
series “Why Milk Pasteurization” in
The Rural New
Yorker in 1947, Jean Darlington documented
the destruction by pasteurization of a number
of other nutrients in raw milk, including:
- The “anti-stiffness”
factor in raw cream, described in a 1941 American
Journal of Physiology article by Rosland
Wulzun.[xv]
- The “anti-anemia”
factor present in milk from specially fed cows,
whose milk was sufficient to prevent anemia in
infants, whereas commercially pasteurized milk
was insufficient. This was detailed in a
bulletin of the Ohio Agricultural Experimental
Station.[xvi]
- “Factor X,” described
in a report from the chief of the Bureau of Dairy
Industry to the U.S. Secretary of Agriculture
in 1942 as an “important unidentified growth-promoting
material in milk.”[xvii]
- The factors responsible for the
germicidal property of raw milk, as described
in the 1935 textbook Fundamentals
of Dairy Science.[xviii]
The published reports Darlington
refers to represent only a fraction of the many
scientific studies that demonstrated the superior
nutritional value of raw versus pasteurized milk.
As she points out, the industry has found nothing
that challenges these findings. The US Public
Health Service and the medical, veterinary, pharmaceutical
and processed food establishments have brushed
aside this evidence, admitting only to a small
loss of vitamin C from pasteurization. Even this
is said to be unimportant because other foods
provide vitamin C.
Many researchers have reported on
the actual effects of raw versus pasteurized milk
in both human beings and animals. A study of the
growth of Scottish school children was published
in Nutrition
Abstracts and Reviews in 1931. [xix]
Children drinking raw milk had a significantly
greater increase in height and weight compared
to those drinking pasteurized milk. “ .
. . pasteurized milk was only 66 percent as effective
as the raw milk in the case of boys and 91 percent
as effective in the case of girls in inducing
increases in weight; and 50 percent as effective
in boys and 70 percent as effective in girls
in bringing about increases in height.”
The authors gave the following explanation for
the results, referring to another study that had
recently appeared in the Journal
of Biological Chemistry:
“Kramer, Latzke and Shaw obtained
less favorable calcium balances in adults with
pasteurized milk than with ‘fresh milk’
and made the further observation that milk from
cows kept in the barn for five months gave less
favorable calcium balances that did ‘fresh
milk’ (herd milk from a college dairy).”[xx]
To this evidence I will add that
for over 25 years I have prescribed raw milk from
grassfed animals to hundreds of my patients, with
outstanding results and never a problem. Raw milk
may be the mainstay of a diet that reverses chronic
diseases of every nature.
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