Did You Know?

Does Every Body Need Milk?

The next time you savor that Kentucky Fried or "Fresh" Washington State Poultry, think about the fact that this animal hasn't seen sunlight, can't move, is given chemicals to fatten it, calm it, and kill it's gut microbiology....A chicken 100 years ago was a chicken; a chicken in 1995 is a miserable creature that has never enjoyed a natural day in it's life.

 - Jonathan Collin, M.D.

To Dr. Hawkins and Dr. Price, milk and butter were the most valuable foods for preserving the teeth.  But both doctors were writing in the forties, when you could still get raw milk and butter from cows that grazed in green pastures.  Milk, eggs, and many other staples are not the same products today.  Modern commercial dairy products do not come from pastured animals, and raw milk is hard to obtain.  Dairy cows are now raised in confinement, where they are surrounded by their own excrement, routinely injected with antibiotics and hormones, and fed dry foods that are deficient in nutritional value.

The Hazards of Pasteurization and Homogenization

Dr. Hawkins wrote, "Raw milk from healthy cows that have been suitably tested is of the highest biological value."  But pasteurized milk, he observed, "greatly increases the difficulty of calcium assimilation as well as injuring vitamins and probably hormones...Homogenized milk is usually pasteurized from 165 to 186 degrees F by the flash method.  This type of milk is not suitable for a growing child or invalid as only about half the theoretical calcium is assimilated by the average child according to our tests."

Live enzymes are necessary to aid the body in assimilating the minerals in milk.  When milk or any other calcium source has been heated above 125 degrees F, these enzymes are lost.  In 1946, Dr. Edward Howell, in The Status of Food Enzymes in Digestion and Metabolism, cited numerous studies demonstrating the superiority of raw over pasteurized milk.
They included:

• A study conducted at London hospital finding that raw milk conferred immunity to dental caries.  No incidence of caries was found in forty children fed over a 3� year period on a diet that was rich in refined carbohydrates but in which the milk was raw.

• A study in which six premature infants at the University Pediatric Clinic in Leipzig fared very well on raw human milk fed over a sixteen day period.  When they were fed sterilized human milk for the next sixteen days, their growth rates decreased and they developed diarrhea, catarrhal conditions of the respiratory tract and impaired utilization of protein and other nutrients.

• A study finding a higher content of calcium and phosphorus in the bones of rats fed raw milk than in rats fed pasteurized milk.

• A study finding that body weights of rats fed pasteurized milk were about ten percent lower than those fed raw milk.

Other evidence of the damage done by the heat treatment of milk comes from certain epidemiological studies implicating it in heart disease.  In the United Kingdom and in Olso, Norway, at different times and in different regions, a sudden steep rise in coronary heart disease was seen within two years of the introduction of Holder pasteurized milk.  Holder pasteurization involves heating for a period of thirty minutes at not less than 145 degrees Fahrenheit.  In the United States, the consumption of milk products that were extensively heated, such as evaporated milk and ice cream, doubled from 1931 to 1945; and the consumption of cheese that was pasteurized, processes, or cooked came close to doubling in the same period.  Heart disease deaths increased twelvefold during that time.  Meanwhile, populations that consumed no milk products (including the Yemenites, the South Vietnamese, the Atiu Mitiaro, and the Hunja), all remained free of arteriosclerotic heart disease.

Other primitive peoples manage to remain free of heart disease although they consume great quantities of milk, including the African Masai, the rural Zulu, the Samburu, the nomads of Nigeria and Somaliland, the West Africans of Gabon, and the Congolese Pygmies.  But their milk is preserved by fermentation (e.g. as yogurt) rather than by pasteurization.

There is evidence that homogenization (the even disembursement of fat through the milk) further increases the risk of arteriosclerotic heart disease. Researchers at Fairfield University in Conneticut found that homogenization causes an enzyme to enter the bloodstream that damages the arteries.  This enzyme, called xanthine oxidase, is present in all milk; but when milk is drunk raw, the enzyme is digested and passed through the system without harm.  When milk is homogenized, the enzyme is protected from digestion by tiny droplets of fat that surround it.  it gets carried into the bloodstream, where fat droplets are broken down and the enzyme is freed, producing a chemical that damages the arteries. Plaque then builds up where the arteries have been injured, contributing to atherosclerosis.  This may explain why very young children in the United States already have signs of hardening arteries.

The alternative is to drink raw milk, but many people question whether it is safe.  Outbreaks of food poisoning have been attributed to it.  Certified raw milk producers counter that more outbreaks of food poisoning can be traced to pasteurized milk.  But for most people, the issue is moot in any case, since the sale of raw milk has been banned in more than half the states in the U.S., and the FDA has banned its interstate sale.

From Newsletter Farm Folk City Folk Summer 2003

Grassfed is Best

In the last forty years, the Western (or so-called 'developed') world has changed their eating habits more than in the last forty thousand years.  Humans still think and act like predators and their bodies are still well tuned to a diet of grass seeds, nuts, roots, meats and fruits.  Grass was and always will be the foundation of every civilization on our planet and ruminant animals have efficiently harvested grass since their existence.

No human invention ever came close to a ruminant's wonderful ability to turn cellulose into the high protein energy food called meat.  Only in the last fifty years was this changed in North America by feeding ruminants high grain rations in feedlots.  Nature did not intend these animals to eat starch.  Almost overnight, the quality of their meat changed.

Meat that was tasty fifty years ago, high in Omega 3 fatty acids and high in conjugated linoleic acid (CLA) turned out to be rather bland in taste and cannot boast the health benefits as can grassfed meat.  Carotene gives grassfed beef fat the slightly yellow to orange colour.  This same fat has a soft buttery texture and tastes great when it comes off the barbeque.

"And great tasting food that is good for you is what we should be eating every day of our lives", says Felix Schellenberg of Pasture to Plate:  "Jasmin, our four daughters and I are grazing cattle, sheep and goats in the beautiful Chilcotin Valley, one hundred and fifty kilometers west of Williams Lake BC."

"We were in our early twenties when we emigrated from Switzerland in 1979 and settled on this place.  Over the years, we expanded our land base and raised cattle solely for the commodity market.  Getting increasingly disillusioned by the practices of this industry, we started to take to schools and seminars in the last five years all over North America to educate ourselves in alternate ways to mainstream agriculture.

We do not use chemicals, have very little machinery and have heaps of fun.  On our travels, we learned that there is a customer base out there that not only demands but also deserves the right to choose what they eat.  With our new knowledge and a lot of enthusiasm we go to farmer's markets in Vancouver to let the world know that we exist.  It is a real fun experience to be able to tell people about what we and our products are all about.

We do take meat orders and ship our frozen and dried meats directly to our BC customers.

Over the last winter months, our eldest daughter developed a website and you can visit us at: https://www.pasture-to-plate.com
In the summertime, we are holding Parelli Natural Horsemanship clinics on the ranch taught by Glenn Stuart of fort St. John, BC.  One of our deepest felt ambitions is to hold yearly summer camps for children from anywhere in the world to introduce them, through hands-on  experience, to sustainable ways in agriculture."

Felix Shellenberg