Got Milk? Only if Straight from the Cow

Since I was little I never liked the taste of milk and its products. After my mom stopped breastfeeding me, I stopped drinking it. Years went by and I started to try some dairy products and baked goods made with milk. But today I rarely cook with milk and I only like a few kinds of cheese which I am able to get them raw. I thank to my childhood's aversion to milk (at that time the milk was already pasteurized) because today I can see why my brothers developed many allergies and I did not. 

Despite of my aversion to milk, I've always been interested on milk as a subject to be studied. After months researching about raw milk I found an article from a Brazilian doctor called Dr. Alexandre Felman that pointed out the benefits of raw milk and the harms of pasteurized milk.The milk we buy from the grocery store is far away to be something like real milk. That milk is pasteurized, homogenized, centrifuged and clarified. After all this process, what remains is simply a white liquid with all its enzymes inactivated, its sugar altered and its proteins denatured.

The milk is composed of the four macro nutrients water, fat, carbohydrates and proteins, which can designate the milk as a complete food. The milk sugar, lactose, needs the enzyme lactase to be digested. People usually have this enzyme available until the age of 7 or so.  After that, people cannot digest milk well enough not to cause them any harm. However, if we talk about the real, raw milk, straight form the cow, things are assimilated differently in our bodies. Because there are some bacterias in the raw milk that predigest the lactose for us, similarly to what happens in the yogurt process, the digestibility of milk does not become a issue anymore.

Enzymes:

Most people when think about a source of calcium, think of milk. That is true for raw milk, but not true for industrialized milk. When the milk is pasteurized the enzyme phosphatase, which helps in the absorption of calcium is destroyed. Therefore industrialized milk indeed contain calcium but it cannot be absorbed by the body, potentially leading to diseases such as: kidney stones and osteoporosis. Nowadays, more young people are getting affected with osteoporosis, which was viewed as a post menopause disease. In conclusion pasteurized milk does not prevent osteoporosis but it can also worsen the condition. There is a study that was made by the Harvard University in the 90's where the group of women who drank 2 cups of industrialized milk per day had a higher incidence of osteoporosis than the group who had 1 cup per week.

Sugars:

Beside the milk enzymes becoming inactivated, some other substances are altered when the milk is pasteurized. The lactose when heated up under high temperatures is transformed into beta-lactose which is a type of sugar that is absorbed by the body much faster than the lactose. The beta-lactose in this case, works similarly to sucrose (refined sugar) increasing blood glucose, as well as insulin levels, and finally overloading the pancreas with work (note that when the pancreas become fatigued diabetes takes place). Because the pancreas had to overwork to produce too much insulin in order to take the sugar into the cells and out of the blood, some insulin remains in the blood taking now the necessary sugar for vital functions, leading to hypoglycemia or low blood sugar. To revert the hypoglycemia, people will seek more sugar, or perhaps more milk, creating a cycle of high blood sugar to low blood sugar, which can eventually lead to depression, anxiety, panic attacks, hormonal disturbance, and obesity.

Not only the industrialized milk sugar is bad for your internal organs, but it is also bad for the teeth. In a study done with mice, the mice which had milk in a daily basis had more tooth cavities (9.4 per mice) than the mice which had a diet loaded with sugar (5,6 per mice).

Proteins:

The some proteins in the milk when heated up get denatured (change its original structure) and turn out as foreign substances to the body. Therefore, the immune system recognize them as foreign substances and develop an allergic reaction against these proteins. Some people develop a mild or an intense allergic reaction, but even for those who have a mild allergy to milk, when drinking it frequently, can get a series of reaction such as migraines, colds, ear infections, etc. The disadvantage of the mild allergic reaction is that it can take a long time for the person to acknowledge that is the milk that is provoking this allergy. On the other hand, if the person has an intense allergic reaction to milk, he or she will find out much sooner that the milk is the problem.

The immune system (our defense mechanism) is very important for a optimal body function. However, if we attack the immune system on a daily basis with a cup of industrialized milk in the morning for example, the body will not be able to heal itself. Furthermore, the denatured milk proteins can predispose the body to autoimmune diseases. The antibodies made to attack the foreign milk substances, can instead, attack its own organs. Therefore leading to autoimmune diseases. 

If you suffer from migraines, recurrent colds, asthma, diarrhea, eczema, etc, try to stay away from milk and see if you get better. You probably WILL! After this test, if you really love milk and can't stay a long time without it, choose from natural whole yogurt in the place of milk. 

So now the question is: why did we do this to our milk? Because of MONEY. But I'll leave this subject to another day...