Raw Milk - History, Health Benefits and Distortions
by Ron Schmid, N.D.
Distillery Dairies, Pasteurization, Certified Raw Milk and the Milk Cure
“Raw milk cures many diseases.” [viii] - J.E. Crewe, MD, The Mayo Foundation, January, 1929
The War of 1812 with England resulted in the permanent cutting off of the whiskey supply America procured from the British West Indies. As a result, the domestic liquor industry was born, and by 1814, grain distilleries began to spring up in the cities as well as the country. Distillery owners then began housing cows next to the distilleries and feeding hot slop, the waste product of whiskey making, directly to the animals as it poured off the stills. Thus was born the slop or swill milk system.
Slop is of little value in fattening cattle; it is unnatural food for them, and makes them diseased and emaciated. But when slop was plentifully supplied, cows yielded an abundance of milk. Diseased cows were milked in an unsanitary manner. The individuals doing the milking were often dirty, sick or both. Milk pails and other equipment were usually dirty. Such milk sometimes led to disease. By the last decade of the nineteenth century, a growing number of influential people throughout the country believed that American cities had a milk problem.
Pasteurization, begun around 1900, was a solution of sorts. The other was the certified raw milk movement, which insisted on clean, fresh milk from healthy, grassfed animals. Henry Coit, a medical doctor, was the founder of the first Medical Milk Commission and the certified milk movement. Physicians in cities throughout the country considered raw milk essential in the treatment of their patients; they worked together to certify dairies for the production of clean raw milk. This resulted in the availability of safe raw milk from regulated dairies. Initially, from around 1890 to 1910, the movements for certified raw milk and pasteurization coexisted and in many ways even complemented one another. From about 1910 until the 1940s, an uneasy truce existed. Certified raw milk was available for those who wanted it, while the influence of the pasteurization lobby saw to it that most states and municipalities adopted regulations that required all milk other than certified milk be pasteurized. The end of this truce (detailed below)has led to the subsequent outlawing of all retail sales of raw milk in most states and even of on-farm sales in many.
Many people today find it surprising that support of raw milk among physicians was widespread in the first half of the twentieth century. The use of raw milk as a treatment of chronic disease has a rich and well-documented history. In 1929, J. E. Crewe, MD, one of the founders of the Mayo Foundation, the forerunner of the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, published an article entitled “Raw Milk Cures Many Diseases.” Here are excerpts from Dr. Crewe’s account of his experience with raw milk:
“For fifteen years the writer has employed the certified milk treatment in various diseases and during the past ten he had a small sanitarium devoted principally to this treatment. The results obtained in various types of disease have been so uniformly excellent that one’s conception of disease and its alleviation is necessarily changed.” [ix]
The Health Benefits of Raw Milk
“It is very difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on not understanding it.” – Upton Sinclair
During the early days of pasteurization, researchers showed that scurvy often resulted when pasteurized milk replaced raw milk in the diet of infants. “Pasteurized milk gradually induces infantile scurvy, unless antiscorbutic diet is given in addition,” Alfred Hess wrote in the American Journal of Diseases of Children in 1916. “This disorder quickly yielded to the substitution of raw for pasteurized milk.”[x]
Thus from the earliest days of pasteurization scientists demonstrated that heat treatment had a profound effect on the health-giving properties of milk. A loss of nutrients other than vitamin C was demonstrated in subsequent studies. One article, “The effect of heat on the solubility of the calcium and phosphorus compounds in milk,” was published in 1925 in the Journal of Biological Chemistry. The author’s conclusion was unequivocal: “There is a loss in the soluble calcium and phosphorus contents of the milk due to heat and the amount of the loss depends upon the temperature to which the milk has been heated.”[xi] Other studies showed that pasteurization caused the loss of significant percentages of many of the B vitamins and nearly all of the enzymes in milk.[xii]
Further compelling evidence of the superiority of raw milk appeared in The Lancet in 1937, in a report on the work of the medical officer to a group of orphanages. The physician gave pasteurized milk for five years to one group of 750 boys, while giving raw milk to another group of 750. All other conditions were alike except for this one item. During that period, 14 cases of tuberculosis occurred in the boys fed pasteurized milk, while only one occurred in those fed raw milk. The article also discusses the dental health of the children brought up on raw milk: “Dr. Evelyn Sprawson of the London Hospital has recently stated that in certain institutions children who were brought up on raw milk (as opposed to pasteurized milk) had perfect teeth and no decay. The result is so striking and unusual that it will undoubtedly be made the subject of further inquiry.”[xiii] [xiv] Instead, the report has been conveniently forgotten.
Very little research was done after about 1950 on the relative nutrient content of raw versus pasteurized milk. The move toward universal pasteurization was in full swing and interest in raw milk was waning in agricultural colleges increasingly supported by dairy industry and agribusiness funding. One study, however, published in the Journal of Dairy Research in 1967, confirms much of the earlier research. The authors were interested in finding ways to preserve more of the vitamin content of milk during processing and they made a number of interesting comments.
“On leaving the udder, milk quickly takes up oxygen from the air,” they wrote. “During subsequent processing and distribution, this dissolved oxygen promotes oxidative changes that degrade several important nutrients in the milk. Thus, though potentially milk could supply an important fraction of the daily dietary requirement for vitamin C, average market milk supplies relatively little. Similarly with vitamin B12, much of which may be destroyed during heat processing. Fresh milk is also in fact a rich source of a form of folic acid. Like vitamin B12 and ascorbic acid, the folic acid in milk is unstable to heating.” How ironic to see these statements in an industry publication some 50 years after pasteurization had been presented by the milk industry as a purely beneficial process that did not substantially alter the nutritional value of milk.
More: http://www.drrons.com/raw-milk-veritas.htm
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) Ds#1 and dh LOVE it, and I mix it in my morning smoothie, with both boys drink too. We do still buy pasteurized milk (either organic or alta dena) for yogurt and cooking, but 99% of any milk we drink is raw.
The other thing is to spread your dose throughout the day for better absorption.
