Your money or your health?

For thousands of years raw milk nourished our ancestors producing generations of strong, healthy humans. For well over a century it has been illegal to sell nature’s real milk, the raw product. Instead we have all been fed the inferior pasteurised product. But although raw milk is illegal it is sold under pseudonyms such as Aphrodite's bath milk which is becoming popular in various health food stores across the country.

Why was milk pasteurised? What is the history of pasteurisation?

Early 19th century USA saw a rapid growth in the population with immigrants making their way to the cities. These newly settled people wanted to access milk but with the cities a long way from the farms and lacking the transport and refrigeration of today this was no easy task.

At this time the whisky industry was booming and the waste product of the distillery was swill or slop which was fed to cows that were conveniently housed next to the whisky distilleries. This waste product of the distilleries was obviously not a food that cows generally ate but it made the cows produce a lot of milk. These cows were sick, crowded, dirty, poorly nourished and forced to spend their short lives chained in one place, handled and milked by, often, very unwell people who poured the milk into dirty containers and sold it to the unsuspecting public.

Very soon and not surprisingly the death rates of infants and children soared and it was generally recognised that there was a “milk problem”.

Many people recognised the correct source of the problem and sought to make milk safe from healthy cows; however, there was at the time the emergence of the new science of microbiology that recognised germs and microbes as the cause of all illnesses. This led to the call for pasteurisation, or heating, of all milk to make it free of any potentially harmful bacteria, regardless of how it changed the quality of the milk.

Pasteurisation destroys enzymes, diminishes vitamin content, denatures fragile milk proteins, destroys vitamin B12, and vitamin B6, kills beneficial bacteria, promotes pathogens and is associated with allergies, increased tooth decay, colic in infants, growth problems in children, osteoporosis, arthritis, heart disease and cancer.

As the media and governmental spin continued, dairies found it easier to go with pasteurisation than to clean up their acts. Many people now have milk allergies and other allergies and ailments, and some pediatricians are now advising against giving it to children.

This is tragic history of milk has led to the practice of giving our children a grossly inferior product that is not even organically produced, let alone raw and unpasteurised as nature intended.