Growing up as a millennial, you got your gallon at the store and that was that. In grade school each year at least a paragraph if not a chapter was dedicated to the heroics of Louis Pasteur and his world renown life saving pasteurization discovery. But now, local dairy farms are offering raw milk, and I’ve a few friends who are swearing by it, as tastier, helping with digestion, skin issues, etc. but the CDC would lead me to believe if we buy raw milk we will all get E. coli and die . So just knowing that so many of you are leap years ahead of me on such subject. What’s the deal? Raw milk yes? Raw milk risky business?
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9 Reasons To Stop Drinking Any Kind of Pasteurized Milk
by NATASHA LONGO
Pasteurization is a dangerous method of heating our foods with tragic side effects which are largely ignored bu the FDA and downplayed by the dairy industry. To accept these facts would be to surrender after a hundred-year war indiscriminately waged against all bacteria--a hundred-year war that has now turned to attack the immune systems of the public. Here are 9 reasons why pasteurization destroys the nutritional and enzymatic value of milk and why you need to avoid it.
Raw milk contains vast amounts of nutrients including beneficial bacteria such as lactobacillus acidolphilus, vitamins and enzmes, and only a very modest source of calcium (if left unpasteurized).
To understand what heat does to a good bacteria, we need to know about its structure. A bacterium is a single-celled organism. Think of it like a studio apartment, one room containing all the things a person needs to live: food, water, air. The walls of the apartment enclose the electrical wiring and gas pipes that deliver energy, along with the sewage pipes that get rid of waste products. In contrast to the size of this single-celled organism, even an animal as small as a mouse would be like a huge city with thousands of buildings and extensive infrastructure to keep it "alive."
When the temperature gets hot enough, the enzymes in the bacterium are denatured, meaning they change shape. This change renders them useless, and they're no longer able to do their work. The cell simply ceases to function.
Heat can also damage the bacterium's cell envelope. Proteins and fatty acids making up the envelope lose their shape, weakening it. At the same time, fluid inside the cell expands as the temperature rises, increasing the internal pressure. The expanding fluid pushes against the weakened wall and causes it to burst, spilling out the guts of the bacterium.
Pasteurization constitutes one of the milder forms of thermal processing. Ultra-high temperature and sterilization methods kill all microorganisms in the food, while milder heat treatments like thermization and pasteurization only kill some of them. Why not use a higher temperature if it will kill more pathogens? The answer is that higher temperatures change the characteristics of the food.
At higher temperatures, as with Ultra High Temperature Pasteurization, several things happen to milk that make it less desirable to consumers:
High-Temp Pasteurization - Milk is heated to 161F for 31 seconds in order to sterilize the milk. The problem is that this also kills enzymes, much of the healthy microorganisms, and more importantly it denatures the proteins. Essentially, high-temp pasteurization kills the milk and makes it much more difficult for your body to digest. This can typically lead to inflammatory bowel disease, among others.
Ultra-Pasteurized - This is the majority of our milk today, what you would typically find in a grocery store. Ultra-pasteurization heats the milk to 280F for only a few seconds. The reason for using ultra-pasteurization is because it kills everything. Ultra pasteurization not only kills potentially harmful bacteria in the milk, but also damages all of the vitamins, minerals and other nutrients originally contained in the milk. This process also kills the healthy enzymes which help your body digest the milk, and drinking it without the enzymes can lead to lactose intolerance.
Low-Temp Pasteurization - Milk is only heated to 145F. This is significant because it’s below the temperature that kills most of the beneficial enzymes and the proteins remain in-tact. The main downside to low-temp pasteurization is that some of the enzymes and probiotics can be damaged. But, by culturing (fermenting it with good bacteria) this dairy and making yogurt, kefir or amasai, many of those probiotics are added back. This also improves the digestibility of the dairy. Low-temp is the closest to raw milk products most of us in the US can get.
Most cow's milk has measurable quantities of herbicides, pesticides, dioxins (up to 200 times the safe levels), up to 52 powerful antibiotics, blood, pus, feces, bacteria and viruses.