SubscribeDebunking Common Wisdom on Milk, A Precursor Post
I have a post that I’ve left languishing for some time that I’ve just picked back up and started working on. It’s about dairy and the arguments for and against their inclusion in your diet. As luck would have it, I came across this article on CNN about why it is absolutely essential that you continue drinking milk, regardless of the rBGH debates: Fad-free advice: Hormones or no, keep drinking milk.
The four points in this article are the standard common wisdom that we hear constantly regarding dairy consumption. I want to take a look at them point-by-point as a precursor to what will be the much longer, more in-depth post in a couple weeks. So without further ado…
1. You probably aren’t getting enough
On average, American adults consume only half of the three daily servings of milk recommended by the Food Pyramid.
Food Pyramid…need I say more? It’s not wise to base recommendations for or against dairy on the highly flawed Food Pyramid.
2. Strong bones…and more
Milk is a top dietary source of calcium, a mineral that’s critical for helping prevent osteoporosis and keeping teeth strong.
What other nutrients are critical for bone strength? Magnesium and vitamin D are of the utmost importance as well, magnesium being at least as important as calcium. Isn’t it strikingly odd that the US has one of the highest intakes of dairy in the world, yet also have one of the highest rates of osteoporosis? Something doesn’t compute.
3. You need calcium all day
Your body can absorb only about 500 milligrams of calcium at a time.
Calcium is important to all kinds of processes in the body. But what if milk isn’t the best source of calcium available? While it’s true that dairy is very high in calcium, absorption is the key. Kale provides a more readily absorbed calcium than does milk, as do quite a few other foods.(1)
4. All milk is fortified with vitamins
Fortified milk is one of only a few dietary sources of vitamin D, a nutrient that helps your body better absorb calcium and one of the nutrients that women need most.
It seems to me to be a much wiser idea to consume foods that don’t need to be fortified to meet your nutrition needs. There are other dietary sources of vitamin D, which are much more natural than fortified milk, specifically liver, eggs, salmon and other fish, and cod liver oil. Furthermore, the body naturally makes vitamin D in the skin when exposed to UVB rays. But we couldn’t do something logical like have people get 10-15 minutes of sun on their arms and legs a day without sunscreen, now could we? That’s all it takes to get enough vitamin D.(2)
And then there is this gem:
Finally, be sure to choose low-fat milk and dairy products. Lowering your intake of saturated fat helps lower your risk of heart disease.
Once again, milk is not naturally a low-fat substance, so making it low-fat means that it is a processed food, by default. There is a reason that milk comes with the proportions of fat, protein, and carbohydrates that it does and that is because it is intended for the young of the species from which it comes, specifically to pass on perfectly-tuned nutrition and immunoglobulins. So recognize that if you decide to consume milk and other dairy products, low-fat or fat-free is a highly processed product. Which makes it all the more amusing when nutritionists preach consuming a diet of unprocessed foods and then include “low-fat dairy” in that prescription.
So in my upcoming article, I’ll expand on these ideas, plus introduce several more to add some fuel to the fire.
Sources:
(1) Kale Calcium Absorption
(2) Could Some Sun Be Good for Your Skin?
If you enjoyed this post, share it on StumbleUpon or Health Ranker (or both!)
- Other Stuff You'll Enjoy:
- Milk, Does It Do A Body Good? Part 1: Calcium and Osteoporosis
- Raw Milk and The Ethicurean
- The Old Folks Food Pyramid
- Milk, Does It Do A Body Good? Part 4: The Final Word*
- Full-fat Dairy vs. Low-fat Dairy
Print This Post
Filed in Dairy and Grains 18 Comments so far
Debs on 23 Apr 2008 at 1:58 pm #
I’m a fan of good-quality, grass-fed, full-fat, raw or fermented dairy, but I’m interested to hear what you have to say. How do we know about the calcium absorbability? I’m especially curious about that.
Here’s an interesting tidbit about low-fat dairy: a study showed an interesting correlation between low-fat dairy and infertility. Women consuming low-fat dairy had increased anovular fertility problems whereas women consuming high-fat dairy had decreased problems with fertility. The association was stronger in those consuming low-fat dairy.
Food Is Love
Anna on 23 Apr 2008 at 5:28 pm #
I accept the argument that conventional milk, which is highly processed and adulterated, is unnecessary for good health, and may even be harmful. But the biggest problem with milk and dairy issue is the pasteurization and processing, which renders it a very different food than dairy as humans have consumed it for thousands of years, until the last 150 years or so and particularly in the past 50-60 years.
But, if one is going to consume milk and dairy, I would argue that the best way is with raw dairy, with the full complement of nutrients intact. Pasteurization denatures (destroys) the very enzymes that enable full utilization of milk’s protein, minerals, immunoglobulins, and lactose (milk sugar).
Most of the scientific studies on dairy are done with conventionally pasteurized dairy products, and therefore aren’t valid when compared to raw dairy because raw and pasteurized are essentially very different foods. Raw dairy has a long history of nourishing humans (I’ll accept that the thousands of years is still quite short in evolutionary terms). One often hears the argument that cow milk is for calves, not human babies, etc. and there are differences between the various mammalian milks, but still, at some point (the timeline is debated) humans found natural milk from other mammals to be quite useful, nutritious, especially from the more tame animals that eventually became domesticated. Around the world, milk is used by humans from a lot more mammals than cows - camels, mares, sheep, goats, yaks, and more. The recent messing with the cow’s milk seems to be what causes trouble for humans.
Properly tended herds (not too big), on pasture, not fed very much grain, and with modern clean hygiene practices of “stainless from teat to bottle” yields a very safe nourishing food with all the components intact to fully utilized the milk nutrients.
Most of the food poisoning outbreaks associated with raw dairy are either from stressful and unnatural herd conditions (unnatural feed, such as grain and rations made of the food chain waste, and close confinement rather than pasture feeding) or sloppy handling and processing of the milk (”bathtub cheese”) and industrial contamination of post-pasteurized milk (which no longer has natural defenses against pathogens). In modern times, with a good pastured based dairy, one is far more likely to get food poisoning from fresh produce, cold cuts, undercooked hamburgers (from conventional CAFO livestock), and restaurant workers than from raw dairy.
Manveet on 23 Apr 2008 at 10:15 pm #
Does anybody have any hard data showing that raw milk is significantly more nutritious than pasteurized? I understand that *some* of the nutrients in milk are destroyed during pasteurization, but my understanding is that it isn’t a whole lot.
I wouldn’t mind drinking raw milk if I knew where it was coming from and what the sanitary conditions there where like. Because there is no chance in hell that I would drink raw milk that was processed at some factory several thousands of miles away.
Troy on 24 Apr 2008 at 3:04 am #
From what i have read…pasteurization denatures the protiens, degrades vitamin and mineral absortion and bio availablity, destroys the enzymes and bacteria, but does not alter the fats. So, if you can’t find Raw milk, you should still seek out grass-fed cultured organic butter, and cream(un-homogenized). Never consume anything that has been ultra pasteurized!
Anna on 24 Apr 2008 at 11:39 am #
One of the reasons that so many people find conventional milk intolerable is that pasteurization destroys the enzymes that make digestability and absorption of nutrients possible.
For instance, many lactose intolerant people can enjoy raw milk (I know several former milk teetotaler converts), because it still contains the natural, viable lactase enzyme that their own bodies don’t make. Phosphatase is the enzyme in milk that makes the phosphorus bioavailable (good for bones). One of the processing tests to see if pasteurization is “successful” is to test for phosphatase levels (they shouldn’t still be in pasteurized milk).
Like all mammalian milks, nature has provided within milk, a complete food with the full complement of enzymes necessary for the nutrients, but it isn’t complete after pasteurization. Pasteurized milk will not support the growth of a calf anymore.
Kelly the Kitchen Kop on 25 Apr 2008 at 12:05 am #
Manveet, to find a local source of raw milk, scroll down at this site: http://www.realmilk.com/where3.html.
Regarding the absorption of calcium - when we eat grains, nuts, etc. that are not soaked/sprouted/fermented (to break down the phytic acid), the minerals cannot be absorbed. I enourage people to try to properly prepare their grains and nuts a little more all the time (we’re not there yet, but getting closer!), and then all the minerals from a big glass of raw milk that you’re drinking with your meal can be assimilated in our bodies.
Anna said everything else I wanted to, only much better than I would have!
Dan on 25 Apr 2008 at 3:04 am #
“But the biggest problem with milk and dairy issue is the pasteurization and processing, which renders it a very different food than dairy as humans have consumed it for thousands of years, until the last 150 years or so and particularly in the past 50-60 years.”
Anna, I would agree with that. Although one has to consider how to prevent zoonotic disease transmission through milk which - as I understand it - was a significant problem in the UK in the early 20th century. Saying, as we both have, that pasteurisation is not ideal is one thing, but I for one have no idea what we could use instead of pasteurisation. We can’t really go back to the days of the 19th century when cows were kept in enormous byres dotted round the outskirts of major cities like London! Or can we?
Dan
Kelly the Kitchen Kop on 25 Apr 2008 at 7:02 am #
Hi Dan,
But that’s where the beauty of local food comes in. If you know your farmer and know what to look for (clean farming practices, making sure you know what he feeds his cows and how they’re treated - all which equal healthier cows and healthier milk), then the chances of getting ill from drinking raw milk are lower than the chances of drinking pasteurized milk (see http://www.realmilk.com/safety-raw-milk.html.) Also, the healthy bacteria overtake any pathogens in raw milk - there was a study on this - read about that at the same link.
Think of how many centuries people have been drinking their own milk from their own cows on their family farms.
Also, I’ve heard over and over that we should include more raw foods into our diets, and since I’m not likely to eat my meat raw anytime soon, this is a good way to get healthy enzymes and many other nutrients that we couldn’t get any other way. All this builds up our immune system and fights off anything we might ever come across in the milk.
Scott, I hope this doesn’t come off spammy, but I did a 4 part series on raw milk if you want to take a look at my blog: http://www.kellythekitchenkop.com/2008/01/raw-milk-benefits-1-in-raw-milk-series.html.
Kelly
Dan on 25 Apr 2008 at 8:10 am #
“But that’s where the beauty of local food comes in. If you know your farmer and know what to look for (clean farming practices, making sure you know what he feeds his cows and how they’re treated - all which equal healthier cows and healthier milk), then the chances of getting ill from drinking raw milk are lower than the chances of drinking pasteurized milk.”
I dunno Kelly, I can agree only in part. At the time we are discussing effectively all staple foods in Britain WERE local as refrigeration did not exist. People still became ill or caught diseases through drinking this local milk.
Buying locally is better than buying at Wal Mart, but it is not in itself enough - every farmer is local to somebody after all, including the bad ones. I don’t think that people can easily tell which local farmers are trustworthy and which are not. Developing an eye for livestock takes years and in any case medicines and hormones are invisible. Even if consumers knew what to look for (which they won’t) most farmers would not be able support regular farm tours - if every potential customer wanted to see the farm and the cows the farmers would never get anything done.
And what’s to stop farmers from simply lying? Just to give a real-life perspective on this, I grew up on a small dairy farm with about 30 head of cattle, as I may have mentioned before. Every day for decades my family drank “raw” (not that we ever thought of it as raw) milk that came straight from the milk bucket. All the processing we did was strain the milk through muslin cloths into a bowl and put the bowl in the fridge. We had more milk and cream than we knew what to do with.
Now, when a cow had mastitis or was on antibiotics we used to pour the milk away. This was required by the buyer, which in the 1980s in the UK was the Milk Marketing Board. One of our neighbours saw us pouring away milk and was dumbfounded. As he pointed out, the odds were very good that if we just threw the tainted milk in the tank with the good milk we would never be caught. Given that we were paid by the gallon, we were pouring money away, he said. I think from this we can infer that he sold contaminated milk to the MMB. And he was a “local” supplier. If you met him you might think he was a typical Land Rover-driving, salt-of-the-earth farmer, an inherently trustworthy person - but you’d be wrong.
Raw milk needs careful handling and sours rapidly in my experience so if you don’t pasteurise you will have a shorter shelf life, which means higher costs. If you want thorough testing to catch the cheats, you will have higher costs. Raw milk is not homogenised so it quickly separates in the bowl into a thick layer of cream and a rather icky blue-ish thin milk. This is a cosmetic issue that people may find difficult to deal with. Educating them to accept this characteristic of real milk, a characteristic that I personally still dislike, will increase costs.
None of these problems are insoluble but they all require money. How many consumers will accept dramatically more expensive milk if they have a choice? This is the issue that concerns me.
Dan
Kelly the Kitchen Kop on 25 Apr 2008 at 8:40 am #
Dan,
I understand what you’re saying, and I don’t deny that there IS always a risk when eating raw foods, similar to the e-coli in the raw spinach that was in the news a while back. But I’d rather take that small chance for the 100% chance of getting better nutrition - I’m also not going to stop eating salads because of a risk with that, too. Better nutrition (in all areas of eating) equals stronger immune systems to fight anything off anyway.
Also, our milk is good for a week before it sours, but it’s always gone by then anyway. I’ve never seen an icky blue color to our milk at all.
Good discussion!
Kelly
Dan on 25 Apr 2008 at 9:13 am #
“But I’d rather take that small chance for the 100% chance of getting better nutrition”
Kelly, I feel that way about milk and I feel the same about eggs - I’m not going to stop making mayonnaise, for example, because of the tiny risk of salmonella. However, we have to consider that most people are likely to be more nervous and thus that raw milk is unlikely to ever become the popular food it once was. Especially if those squeamish people work in the FDA.
The blue-ish (not blue!) colour came about as a result of skimming the thick layer of cream off the top of the milk. This “carpet” of cream would set solid enough to support small objects (like a penny) so it could be removed with a ladle into a small bowl, leaving - tada! - blue-ish skimmed milk. I hated skimmed milk so I used to use cream whenever I could, such as on my weetabix, either straight or in conjunction with skim milk.
The amount and thickness of the cream (and the degree to which it migrates from the milk to a clearly distinct layer, I guess) depends of course on the butter-fat content. We kept a couple of Jerseys in the herd to improve butter-fat ratios and we generally used milk from one of these for the house. At one point we had an infernally complex hand-cranked “separator” that took milk and neatly split it into cream and milk but it had dozens of chrome or steel parts that needed to be washed afterwards. For a couple of gallons it was much easier just to leave the milk for a few hours then skim it by hand.
Dan
Kelly the Kitchen Kop on 25 Apr 2008 at 10:13 am #
Dan,
Wow, you were so blessed to be raised on something so nutritious - I’ll bet you’re quite healthy today because of it…? I hope it is making a difference for our kids!
Kelly
Anna on 25 Apr 2008 at 11:34 am #
Dan,
It’s clear you know your way around a farm and dairy cows, which is a lot more than most dairy consumers know. And you certainly have more hands-on experience with dairy cows than I have. My uncle in Ohio, who grew up on a dairy farm, had similar thoughts to yours (their cows produced milk that tasted like onions because of the wild onions in the pastures - Joel Salatin would have a cow - get the onions out!). Many, if not most of those zoonosis diseases are now well-controlled for with vaccines and careful herd management.
But something to think about is that those who produce raw dairy these days are doing it specifically for the raw dairy market, not for the co-mingled bulk tank that is destined for pasteurization. That’s very different in significant ways. The raw milk customers are quite different; they know more about the product and the production methods, and there often is a face-to-face relationship with the supplier. Folks who are seeking out raw milk, either through direct from the farm sales, farmer’s markets, co-ops or herd shares, or as here, in CA, buying milk in the store from one of the two pastured raw only Grade A dairies in the state (only grade A dairies can sell in grocery stores), are people who want the *whole* milk, not skimmed milk. We are seeking whole foods that are *better* than the milk that is produced for the centralized processing plant.
Since I live in an area in So California, where land and irrigation costs are now too high to make a local pasture-based dairy viable (not to mention increasing urbanization and suburbanization created pressures for the few livestock farms that remain), I buy my raw dairy (milk, cream, butter) from a local store, but it comes from a farm about 300 miles up north in the Central Valley area of CA, a productive agricultural region. Even there, the pastures must be irrigated, though. The bottled raw dairy deliveries come on delivery trucks owned and operated by the dairy farm, not through a distributor. I have visited the dairy farm, toured the creamery, and met the owner (he conducted the tour). He is not your typical farmer in any way. He even developed a mobile milking barn that goes to the cows, so they can stay on pasture!
In contrast, I tried to find out more about the pasteurized milk I used to buy, a private label milk from a chain of stores. They not only wouldn’t tell me which dairy supplies their private label products, they wouldn’t tell me if the herd were on pasture or in grain-fed CAFOS. Knowing that the vast majority of So California’s dairy farms are seriously huge CAFOS, and the cows never see a blade of grass and stand in muck all day eating grain rations (imagine moving 5000 head in and out twice a day to milk!), what conclusion am I left with, with such a non-transparent situation?
And my college roommate is married to a former dairy farmer in upstate NY, where pasture is abundant. But the bulk rate he was paid was too low to keep it going so he left farming. He told me that he fed old bread and bakery products to the cows and it increased the milk yield. Yield was all that was important, not quality. He also fed them snacks and candy bars that were past their sell-by date. But I think one can more easily to that if selling their milk to the co-op. I think honest people have a harder time doing that when they invite their customers to tour the farm, when they hand them the bottle of milk, when their is a relationship with each other.
Joel Salatin, a biodynamic farmer and writer in Virginia (Scott has written about his books before), has a lot to say about how honesty stays in the transaction when it is personal. Take out the personal relationship, add distance, and layers of barriers, and people lose sight of what they are doing and why.
The thing to think about is that dairying changed a lot in the past 150 years or so, especially as urbanization and technology grew in the century, not to mention companies and dairies. Dairies that had been rural became surrounded by suburbs and cities. Direct-to consumer dairying waned as dairy co-ops and centralized processing increased. The worst of the raw milk problems in the US were from urban distillery dairies in the late 19th and early 20th century, where leftover grain mash was fed to dairy herds adjacent to the distilleries. This was an industry specifically to make money off the distillery waste (guess what waste product from ethanol production is being fed to CAFO dairy herds now?). The problem with the milk was the perversion of the production method, with sick herds, unhealthy feed, and little thought to quality. In some cases, the milk was so awful looking that chalk was added to to make it look better (I guess that makes the modern practice of adding dried milk solids to skimmed milk look pretty tame in comparison).
The cheap, dirty substandard milk was sold to the burgeoning urban poor - primarily immigrant populations, who fed their babies cow’s milk (many of the mothers worked and couldn’t breastfeed). With lack of sanitation, a population of dairy workers who probably transmitted the TB to the milk, and a motivation of only profit, raw milk began to get a bad name, as the technology for pasteurization advanced. Ironically, the more well-off people could still get wholesome raw milk from the countryside - it came in on trains. Many physicians took part in a certified raw dairy program around the turn of the century to ensure that their patients had access to good few milk from honest dairies. Fresh raw milk from pastured herds in the country was actually used as a TB cure for many years - the world famous Mayo Clinic in in the US was a raw milk TB sanitarium in its early days.
There’s a lot more on how the dairies changed over the years and we came to have a system of dairy production and processing like we do. A very good book on milk throughout the ages is The Untold Story of Milk, by Ron Schmidt. It’s a rather long book, but it details all sorts of historical aspects of milk and dairy as well as modern trends and issues and is quite thorough and complete. I know of no other book with nearly the depth of info.
Dan on 25 Apr 2008 at 11:55 am #
Anna - some excellent points there and I didn’t know about the TB connection. Nor was I aware that skimmed milk might have solids added, but it would explain why the stuff I see people buy from the supermarket doesn’t resemble the skimmed milk I knew as a kid. I will definitely take a look at the book you mention.
What with you, Kelly and myself, I think I detect a burgeoning pro-(unadulterated)milk flavour to this forum. Scott will have to tread carefully!
Dan
Anna on 25 Apr 2008 at 1:04 pm #
Dan,
My husband is English and I have in-laws in London. If we ever moved there (isn’t likely- my husband feels like he escaped England) I would seek out a dairy farm. I *love* the cream in the UK. I never knew what real cream could be like until I had a piece of apple pie (prior to knowing I had blood sugar problems) served with a pitcher of cream. I dripped some on teh table cloth as I poured the thickest fluid cream I had ever seen over the pie (feeling so guilty as I did it because I had the low fat mantra going through my head then).
I tried to wipe up the dripped cream and it was butter! The liquid had soaked into the table cloth and left a layer of butterfat on the top! Whoo-hoo!
I realize that those who go more “paleo” in their food choices probably eschew dairy and I can understand the rational behind that on paleo and evolutionary grounds.
But for those who do include dairy, I know there are good sources in the UK for high quality, safe raw dairy products. Nina Planck, the author of Real Food: What to Eat and Why, is an American who grew up on an organic farm in Virginia before organic was a household word, later lived in London for many years and started a farmer’s market in London. She is back in the US now, in NYC, but she would have connections to good dairy producers in the UK if you were interested. Her partner is a cheese guy in NYC’s Greenwich Village :-). (www.ninaplanck.com)
Sasquatch on 26 Apr 2008 at 12:36 pm #
I’d just like to address the “cow’s milk isn’t made for humans” argument. That’s true, but vegetables, nuts, meat and eggs aren’t made for humans either. It’s not a question of what’s made for us, but of what we’re adapted to. We aren’t adapted specifically to cow’s milk, but we do drink milk as infants. It’s not exactly the same milk, but it’s pretty similar. It contains the same macronutrients (in different ratios) in the same forms. It has different immunoglobulins, but I’m not sure that’s a problem, especially if it’s fermented.
Scott Kustes on 28 Apr 2008 at 6:37 pm #
Great discussion all. Not much for me to add other than to say that I’ll be addressing the issues of pasteurization, homogenization, and fitness for human consumption in that article coming out next week.
Cheers
Scott
Ann on 07 May 2008 at 5:33 pm #
I try not to fall into “fad diets” either but, I also feel it is important for us as individual to evaluate conventional diets and ideas on how to eat. I try to do what makes me feel good, even if it the tough choice (raw veggies, no sugar, etc.) I have found a great resource call the Dietary Supplement Information Bureau, that is an authoritative source on this subject. I seek out supplements and alternate food sources for essential minerals and vitamins.
Here’s the link:
http://www.dsib.org/calcium
Enjoy!