Raw Milk and some food logic

I've been reading the book The Untold Story of Milk by Ron Schmid. It's a long book and deals with many issues that tie into raw milk. If you read it, here are some chapters I recommend.


3. Bad Milk: The Distillery Dairies
Discusses the origin of bad milk and why pasteurization came into practice.

6. Good Medicine: The History of the Milk Cure
Many examples of doctors using raw milk for treatment of various illnesses with good results.

7. Enzymes: Essential to Organic Life
Francis Pottenger's ten year experiment with cats studying the effects of raw versus pasteurized milk. The length of the study and the number of cats involved is impressive.

The book is very thorough in the presenting the issues that are part of the raw milk debate. If you're willing to invest the time I recommend reading it. I would have preferred if it would have had some tables, charts, or graphical snapshots comparing raw milk to pasteurized. Something to synopsize the points being made. You're left to cover a lot of material.

There are many websites devoted to raw milk that will give you the main points more succinctly. RealMilk.com is one of them. The Weston A. Price Foundation website, which sponsors the first site, is another good ones. You'll get the basics, and then some, in a much briefer format.

Personally, I'd like to be at a level where I have a few talking points to debate/promote raw milk. I've been attempting come up with philosophy on raw milk and organics to anchor to when there's lots of commentary flying around from both the pro and con sides.

Here are my thoughts thus far:

• God made everything and it was good.
• God made food for our nourishment.
• The closer the food remains to God's original design the better it is.
• The more the original design is modified with man's limited knowledge, the more the opportunity presents itself for unintended consequences. Think kudzu, nutria.

Food Safety:

• Due to sin, there is disease and such in the world. Things die, moth and dust doth corrupt.
• Nothing is perfect, so the opportunity exists for food-borne illness to be present in any food.
• Food produced in a clean production environment is less likely to provide opportunities for food-borne illness.
• Food produced in a dirty production environment is more likely to provide opportunities for food-borne illness.

Many claims are made by raw milk and organics that I'd like to research and find some hard numbers that back those claims.

To investigate:

• Our ancestors died primarily due to poverty, non-food-related diseases (health-related factors only)
• Our recent generations die more due to lifestyle-related maladies - smoking, drinking, poor diet, lack of exercise
• That is, external causes of death have decreased, while internal causes have increased

Study these:

• obesity rates by decade
• heart-related disease rates by decade
• cancer rates by decade
• TV watching by decade
• diet changes by decade - sugar, flour, processed
• life expectancy by decade
• fertility rates, miscarriages
• compare US to other countries, developed and non-developed

Given what I've read so far, raw milk is safe. Not perfectly safe, but safe. Nothing is perfectly safe. Buy from a dairy that you trust. That's one of the benefits of buying local. You know where it comes from, you can see it being produced. That can't be said for milk from the store. Read the book above for stats on commercial/industrial dairying. You may wind up skipping the dairy case at the grocery store next time.

Numbers-wise, I've seen that raw milk has a lower incident rate of food-related illness that pasteurized milk, eggs, meat, and produce. I highly recommend the PowerPoint presentation at the RealMilk site. This gives the stats in a brief format.