Real/Raw Milk

Most of this information is coming from the book I'm reading: Real Food: What to Eat and Why by Nina Planck (when I give page numbers I'm referring to it) and is verified by websites including realmilk.com, raw-milk-facts.org and westonaprice.org.

First, a general statement that seems to be the consensus of what I've read: raw milk and raw milk products are kind of difficult to find and kind of inconvenient to transport and keep, but the health benefits are so great that they're worth the inconvenience.

What makes milk so awesome in general?

It's complete.

~Cow's (and other mammals') milk, much like breast milk, is nutritionally complete. It's a good source of complete protein, contains all of the essential amino acids in the right amounts, contains carbohydrates for energy and a good balance of fats.

~Milk is made for growing babies, and therefore it contains everything required to digest and absorb its nutrients. The fats in it are necessary to digest its protein and absorb its calcium.

~It contains potassium, vitamins C and B, and especially B12, which is found only in animal food.

Those complete, absorbable vitamins and minerals do a body good..

~Weston Price, the dentist I mentioned a couple posts ago who traveled the world studying different cultures' diets, noted that cultures who drank milk received more calcium and phosphorus, and this resulted in stronger teeth, less tooth decay, a more handsome facial structure and less plaques and cavities.

~It contains vitamin A for healthy skin, eyes, bones and teeth, vitamin D for the body to absorb the calcium and phosphorus, Riboflavin for healthy skin, eyes and nerves, Niacin for growth and development, Vitamin B6 to build body tissues and prevent heart disease, Vitamin B12 for healthy red blood cells, nerves and digestion and to prevent heart disease, Folic Acid for healthy red blood cells and prevention of birth defects and heart disease, Magnesium, Phosphorus and Calcium for strong bones and teeth, and Zinc for tissue repair and growth.

A disturbing thing I've found...not all milk is equal. Not even close.

Traditional/Raw Milk vs. Industrial Milk--It's all about the cows!

~Traditional milk comes from pastured cows who eat fresh grass and, occasionally, hay. It is raw, unhomogenized and unpasteurized (I'll explain what those mean later). It's free of synthetic hormones.

~Industrial milk comes from cows typically raised indoors and fed mostly a corn, grain and soybean ration, often with a dose of synthetic hormones to boost milk production. It's pasteurized and homogenized. All of these descriptors are problematic.

The Ills of Industrial Milk

~Cows' bodies do their best stuff (make all those awesome nutrients absorbable for us) when they get the diet they were meant to have--grass and hay. Grain/soy/corn-fed cows develop acidic stomachs, which creates the perfect breeding ground for pathogens and doesn't allow the lactic acid (milk's own way of naturally killing the bad bacteria) to form.

~Factory farms are breeding grounds for disease.

~Because of the advent and progress of the booming dairy industry, milk can now be handled in bulk, transported over long distances and has a longer shelf life. Pasteurization has made this possible. Milk is sterilized and bad bacteria is killed. Unfortunately, though, so is just about everything that makes milk worth consuming.

~Pasteurization is a form of sterilization (originally meant for beer and wine) accomplished by heating the milk to certain temperatures. For those of you who remember Biology 101 and 102, enzymes and beneficial bacteria need to maintain a certain temperature in order to remain alive and do their jobs. Pasteurization is an attempt to destroy certain pathogens (salmonella, E. Coli, etc) and bad bacteria. (71)

~Pasteurization destroys folic acid, vitamins A, B6 and C. It inactivates the enzymes required to absorb the nutrients in milk: lipase (to digest fats), lactase (to digest lactose), and phosphatase (to absorb calcium). It creates oxidized cholesterol, alters proteins and damages beneficial omega-3 fats. While it does destroy the bad bacteria initially (and the good...major bummer), it can be contaminated at any point after pasteurization. Also, this idea of a "guaranteed sterilization" has had an off-putting effect on the hygiene and practices of dairies who have become less likely to keep up with cattle health and sanitary milk handling. (74)

~Homogenization is a process that forces the milk and cream (which naturally rises to the top) to be blended together. Milk is pumped through pressure through a fine mesh to break up the fats into tiny globules. While originally developed to emulsify margarine (NOT a real food), it mostly made things more convenient on dairies--separating milk and cream takes time, and time is money. It also evenly distributes those nasty dead white blood cells that would sink to the bottom after pasteurization (eww). It breaks up delicate fats, ruins flavor and causes milk to sour more quickly. (75-76)

The Virtues of Raw Milk:

~With raw milk, the above list that answers the question "what makes milk so awesome" remains untouched, true and intact! Industrial milk makes a lot of the awesome stuff on that list obsolete.

Also....

~While pasteurization attempts to kill pathogens and bad bacteria, raw milk is actually designed to do that for itself (I love that!)!

"When left alone in raw milk, the good bacteria kill off harmful bacteria which may taint milk during handling...by pastuerizing milk we turn it into the ideal medium for dangerous bacteria." (78)

~Raw milk contains heat-sensitive folic acid and vitamins A, B6 and C.

~Raw milk contains important heat-sensitive enzymes: lactase to digest lactose; lipase to digest milk fats; phosphate to absorb calcium.

~Raw milk has beneficial bacteria, including lactic acids, which live in the intestines, aid digestion, boost immunity and eliminate dangerous bacteria. (79)

Other tidbits....

Whole milk? What about all that fat?

~Raw milk is whole, with the cream on top. The flavor is in the fat. But for those who are more concerned about nutrition than flavor, the butterfat in milk helps the body digest the protein, and our bones need the milk's saturated fat to lay down calcium. The cream in whole milk contains the fat-soluble vitamin D. Without Vitamin D, less than 10% of dietary calcium is absorbed!

~I could go on for a long time here, but I'll have another post dedicated solely to fats. For the time being, take my word for it that the fat in raw milk is extremely beneficial, NOT detrimental.

What about skim milk? We don't need all that fat, right?

From what I understand, the fats in the milk are as essential as the vitamins and minerals themselves. Skim and 2% milk have had so much of their nutrients stripped that they have to be fortified with synthetic Vitamins A and D, which have been suggested to be toxic in excess.

A philosophical query...are humans supposed to drink milk from other animals?

This has never really been an issue for me. But as a short answer to this question, I'll say that I don't think it's a helpful question. Supposed to? I don't know. Is it good to? I think yes. I don't really feel equipped to answer whether it's "natural" or not to drink milk from another animal. I will say that I find it encouraging that my body can reap so many benefits from drinking milk since animals can convert a lot of unusable plants to beneficial vitamins and nutrients. If I can do that without harming or causing detriment to the animal I'm taking it from, then I think it's fine. That may feel like an incomplete answer, but that's the best I've got at this point.

Looks like I'll be hitting up a dairy for real milk sometime soon! If your interest is piqued and you want to investigate it as well, here's a place that lists raw milk dairies near you!

http://www.realmilk.com/where2.html

My First Real Meal

I made my first meal of entirely real food!

I found the recipes on a real-food site recommended to me by a dear real-foodie friend,

www.NourishedKitchen.com. You can find all the recipes I used under the "Recipes" tab.

I made the Moroccan Roasted Chicken...

The Green Beans with Shallots and Bacon...

And then (not from the site) my own little smashed fingerling potato yumminess...

For the smashed potatoes, boil them until just about fork tender, drain and cool them, then smash them with the palm of your hand slightly to make them uniformly flat.

Heat a couple tbsp of olive oil, two whole garlic cloves and a few shakes of red pepper flakes in a skillet until garlic is just starting to brown, then remove garlic. Add potatoes, salt and pepper to skillet and saute on both sides until golden brown and crispy.

It's delightful, doesn't take nearly as long as roasting them in the oven, and is way more interesting than straight up mashed potatoes. A lovely side, indeed.

I've also been enjoying a breakfast most mornings this week of homemade whole-wheat bread with fresh, unhomogenized whole-milk mozzarella. Real food is the goooooood.

General Overview: My Presuppositions Get Challenged

There is so much information to sift through! Bahhh!

I have a ton of presuppositions about food. Saturated fat is bad. Trans fats are worse. Cholesterol must be low. Milk must be pasteurized. Whole grains are better. Vegetarians are healthier than meat eaters. High fat causes heart disease. The long list goes on.

I knew I'd be confronted with a lot of information that I'd have a hard time swallowing and that likely contradicted what the society I've grown up in believes. It's laughably easy to get a book published, to put a website up, to feign research, to ignore significant data or twist findings.

The real-food resources I'm investigating, however, anticipate that their readers and potential converts come in with these presuppositions. Thankfully, the first thing they do is confront the ideas we've believed for so long with research to the contrary. Cross-referencing has become my best friend and gives more credibility to the things I'm reading.

In her book Real Food: What to Eat and Why, Nina Planck begins with some pretty generic statements about real food.

"Fruits and vegetables are best when they're local and in season; grains should be whole; fats and oils unrefined." (2)

I think that's all generally accepted. These statements are a little more bold:

~Real beef is raised on grass (not soybeans) and aged properly.

~Real milk is grass-fed, raw and unhomogenized, with the cream on top.

~Real eggs come from hens that eat grass, grubs and bugs--not 'vegetarian' hens.

~Real lard is never hydrogenated, as industrial lard is.

~Real olive oil is cold-pressed, leaving vitamin E and antioxidants intact... (2)

Did she just say raw milk? What's unhomogenized? And lard? Really? This is going to be a long road uphill.

The best resource I've found for real food is the Weston A. Price foundation. Real food proponents have been looking to his research for decades. Weston Price was a Canadian dentist in the late 19th/early 20th centuries who moved to the States. After a time of practicing dentistry in America, he was concerned for his American patients plagued by tooth decay and chronic diseases. Suspecting poor health due to nutrition, he spent years doing first-hand research of cultures all around the world, taking inventory of their diets and monitoring their health. The results are super interesting:

Price went to preindustrial communities from Canada to Papua New Guinea, studying the diets of Gaelic fisherman, Ugandan shepherds and Swiss dairy farmers. All over, he found people with beautiful teeth, perfectly formed faces, and little or no tooth decay...They were fine in overall health, with none of the chronic illnesses and diseases he found at home. (24-25)

I found this compelling:

When they changed their diets, however, and ate what Price called "the displacing foods of commerce"--the sugar and jam, white flour and white rice, and refined vegetable oils that came on ships with European settlers--their health declined sharply. (25)

Those in the Swiss dairy villages had whole raw dairy products, meat and bone broth soups. In South Asia they drank tea with milk and butter from sheep and female yaks. Mountain shepherds in Egypt had butter. The Masai in Kenya and the Muhima in Uganda ate meat, blood and whole milk. All these fatty foods that we avoid like the plague, and yet these people were receiving exponentially more vitamins and minerals and were in better health than those on the typical American diet at the time. (27)

Price took his findings back to his American children patients, and their health and performance in school "improved sharply." (28)

You can read more about the Weston A Price Foundation at www.westonaprice.org. I'm sure I'll come back to it.

General things I've gleaned so far:

~For us to get the most vitamins, minerals and nutrients possible from the food we eat, it needs to be raw, unprocessed and unrefined. Our soil is depleted and our food is bastardized by the industrialization of food. A lot of the material I'm coming across draws lines between "traditional food" and "industrialized food."

~For this raw, unprocessed and unrefined food to be safe for us to consume, we need to be extra diligent about where the food (milk, meat, produce, etc) comes from and how it's grown/taken care of. More details to come on this one.

~Our bodies are fantastic, but we require lots of things that we can't make ourselves. We can get them from animals and plants, but to get the most from them (or even anything), they have to be bought/eaten under certain conditions. More to come on this, as well. Way more. :)

~Despite our culture's growing wariness of cholesterol and our championing of low-fat diets and avoidance of fatty dairy and fatty meats, heart disease is higher than ever and Americans are still among the unhealthiest in the world. A correlation doesn't always indicate a cause, but it may suggest that something other than traditional foods (meat, eggs, butter, cheese, milk) are causing these chronic diseases.

In blogs to come I'll be looking at certain topics specifically, including real dairy, real meat, real fish, real fruit and vegetables, and real fats vs. industrial fats.

In other news, I went to Central Market this evening to buy my first batch of real(ish) groceries. Not a boxed item in sight! Central Market doesn't have raw milk, but I did find unhomogenized fresh mozzarella and pasture butter with 84% butter fat. I also have fresh bread dough rising in the kitchen. A good start, if I do say so myself. :)

I will need to finish my easter basket full of (not real...) candy and goodies that my sweet husband gave me. But as far as groceries, I'm good to go. :)

Real Food

This is the next step of an exciting journey!

My relationship with food has always been complicated. For most of my childhood I was a picky eater--the kind parents hate to raise. I hated anything that (I have now discovered) makes food taste good, including any kind of sauce and most condiments. I hated onions, tomatoes and peppers. I separated my meat from my spaghetti noodles and asked my mom to give me the meat before she added the tomato sauce to it. I loved cheese and milk, but if you combined them to make a sauce, no way was I eating them. Highly suspect. I remained this way until college.

When I married my husband in 2006 we decided to be vegetarians. We were both interested to see the effects it would have on our bodies and wanted to be more healthy in general. As far as the rules we abided by, we allowed ourselves sea food and dairy. I was introduced to lentils, lots of beans and rice and produce. I developed a love for loose-leaf tea and began using this as a substitute for Dr. Pepper. After a year of being demi-veg, Asher and I had each gained about 20 lbs. We missed the ease of buying/cooking with meat and decided that we needed a slightly more drastic change.

Upon moving to Dallas, TX in 2007 we began the Rotation Diet--a strict low-calorie diet that puts you on a 3-week "rotation." Week One had three days of 600 calories for women and 1200 calories for men, and four days had 900/1500 calories. Week Two moved up to 1200 calories for women and 1800 calories for men, then Week Three went back to the 600/900 and 1200/1500. The diet eliminated just about everything (bad and good, it seemed). Low sugar, low fat, low carb, extremely low sodium. I was too hungry to keep this up for long, so I would do one 3-week rotation and then take a few months off to maintain the fifteen or so pounds that I lost each time.

Over a period of about a year-and-a-half I went from 225 to 160. I learned a lot from this diet, especially about sodium, but my body had a lot of damage as I essentially crash-dieted once every few months. Through regular exercise and a somewhat healthy diet, I've maintained the 65lb weight loss ever since.

What I have now is a "somewhat healthy" diet.

I try to avoid foods that are high in fat, sugar and sodium. I enjoy fresh produce. I don't eat frozen meals except the very occasional (once a month would be a lot) frozen pizza and frozen veggies. I eat multi grain and whole wheat bread instead of white. Brown rice instead of white. I haven't had a drop of soda since July 2007. I drink lots of water. I eat breakfast. I buy organic milk and cage-free eggs. I take a multi-vitamin. I get candy at the movies every once in a great while when I go. I finally like most of those foods I didn't like as a child (save sour cream, mayonnaise and olives).

Popular nutritional consensus says that most of these things are pretty good. Over the last few months, though, I've been quietly pursued by the idea, however cliche, that "good is the enemy of best."

While whole wheat and grains are fine, a lot of my food isn't as good as it could be. Dead. Processed. Refined. Industrialized. Oxidized. Depleted. From what I've gathered, nutrition hasn't changed much in the history of humanity, but food has. The pressure to be innovative with food changes both its composition and the way it's marketed. There's a staggering amount of research to sift through, and it's important to be critical as some of it's biased, some of it's interpreted incorrectly, and some of it is great.

I don't pretend to have the know-how to sift through it all correctly. But I want to try.

So here is where I start the research to make the move from good to best, or at least to better, with what I put in my body.

I've begun with the book Real Food: What to Eat and Why by Nina Planck. She grew up on a real-food farm in the US, became a vegan/vegetarian for years, then while living in London working as the speech writer for the US ambassador to England made her way back to real food and started the first farmers' markets in London in 1999. The book is a compilation of the research she did after years of being unsatisfied with her vegan lifestyle, and it ultimately brought her to a place of being an advocate for real food.

I've got a number of good friends who have, in their words, discovered the joy of a fully nutritious diet through real food. Right now I'm learning about the difference between traditional whole, raw milk and industrial homogenized milk. Pretty fascinating! More details to come as I read them.