http://www.fda.gov/Food/FoodSafety/Product-SpecificInformation/MilkSafety/ConsumerInformationAboutMilkSafety/ucm165105.htm

I wouldn’t expect them to speak kindly of their competition. Now weigh the incidents involving raw milks versus the incidents involving supposedly safe, pasteurized foods.

Here are some parts of the show (sorry french only, no subtitles);

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mWVpaYFbmaY
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lvBHCDdVgQY
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tNFN8CmjMOM
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bivLKBTso4k

There were several points that were made in the show that were quite surprizing:
- raw milk is safer than pasteurized milk (if you kill the normal bacteria in milk they are easily replaced by nasty ones like listeria or salmonelles, all the listeria contaminations happen on pasteurized milk cheeses). To enter a pasteurized milk cheesery you get the full NASA treatment of decontamination and what not, but a traditional raw milk cheesemaker does only need to have clean hands.
- the lobbies in France always accuse the EU for their push to pasteurized milk but when the show master goes to Brussels to see what the Commission has to say, the official tells him that the legislation is quite clear, that raw milk cheese are absolutely allowed and are not subject to any special regulation going farther than normal hygiene ones. They then taste samples of commercially available raw cheeses from all Europe (even English raw milk cheddar).

As to the raw milk business, I have not much experience with raw milk products, since they are so expensive. They can be traded with warning label in Europe, but it’s like one cheese is one buck, raw milk cheese four bucks something, for less than a (weak anglo-saxon) pound of cheese.
In any case, the ‘live enzymes’ hypothesis doesn’t sound so good. Enzymes are technically not alive at all. Then, what should they help to digest – there’s lactose (we got lactase for that and it’s already fermented down in cheeses), protein (got HCl and proteases), and fat (bile). If we couldn’t “crack” significant shares of cheese bacteria would do it for us, producing certainly no constipation (ask anyone with lactose intolerance). “Normal” cheese is also not pasteurized at all, it’s made from pasteurized milk but is alive – your Camembert will, uh, mature. (Most cheeses in Europe are from pasteurized milk, I think it’s true even in France.) In summary, I would propose that the alternative theory of introducing alien germ strains (causing mild diarrhea) is much easier and more credible. The effect can also be had by having a nice breakfast of live yoghurt with sauerkraut condiment and turkish coffee, I suppose. There may be other health benefits from raw milk, like “unchanged” fats (not homogenised) however.

I find the raw-milk cheese much easier to digest. It’s more expensive — roughly double the price per pounds — but worth it.

All hominid species except one went extinct and the line leading to humans came very close probably several times. Fossil remains of early hominids suggest that they suffered from a variety of nutritional maladies as well as many other problems.

I should note in the above example I said late Paleolithic, which means between about 50,000 and 10,000 BC. This was the golden age of mankind but by that time we had evolved to basically our present day physical structure. It still represents less than 5% of our history. Before that technology limited our ability to harvest food from the environment – the further you go back the more it was limited.

Before the late (or Upper) Paleolithic people rarely lived to see their grandchildren. About 50,000 years ago (or so) dramatic improvements in technology allowed us to improve what we could capture (specifically more meat but other stuff as well). Things took a bit of a reverse during the Neolithic (after 10,000) but that’s another story.

“If you think industrial food’s so great for people, well, onus for proof’s on you. So far the data do not look good.”

Well, I could say that people are living longer today than they ever have and that life spans are getting longer all the time. Of course diet may or may not have a lot to do with this so its not really proof. However, the statement that “industrial food is good for you” is one I never made and would be just as
problematic as its opposite. My point is that you have to take each case individually and not make blanket all encompassing statements about processed vs unprocessed food.

“You know, when you get right down to it, indigenous primitive people *have* applied rigorous scientific reasoning to the different ways they live, in most respects, or else they could not have naturalized to their respective territories.”

Yes they have. They have use experimentation and experience, just over a longer period of time. Their tests often based on survival were therefore very rigorous.

“Unfortunately a lot of what passes for civilized “science” does the latter, not the former.”

I don’t disagree with this either. A lot of what passes for civilized science is not very rigorous. That doesn’t change the truth of what I stated nor the efficacy of science when properly performed.

I am not adverse to the idea that the choices of Upper Paleolithic people or modern day hunter gatherers may be informative. It is an interesting hypothesis. The point is that this has nothing to do with the physical evolution of humans (although perhaps it is an example of cultural evolution).

http://www.marlerblog.com/2010/01/articles/legal-cases/2006-e-coli-o157h7-outbreak-linked-to-organic-pastures-raw-milk-one-victims-story/

http://www.foodsafetynews.com/2009/12/considering-drinking-raw-milk-read-this/

Excuse me? How in the world did we survive if we were not meeting our basic nutritional requirements? Wow. Civilized people come up with the most hare-brained excuses for why we weren’t better off back then…

“So I don’t think natural food is necessarily better than artificial or processed food any more than natural medicine or natural shelter, or natural clothing is better.”

You’re SO right. I’m gonna go back to eating out of boxes and jars *right now.*

Actually I agree with you that the case against processed food is overstated. If you peel an apple, you’re processing it. I finally decided that the real division in terms of healthfulness is between industrial and non-industrial food. If you think industrial food’s so great for people, well, onus for proof’s on you. So far the data do not look good.

You can’t take any of these individual items and judge them by themselves, though. If you’re eating right, you’re less likely to get sick. Even from infectious disease: Weston Price documented that dairy-consuming peoples who ate their traditional diets almost never got tuberculosis even though they were routinely exposed to it. If you’re less likely to get sick, you’re less likely to need medicine of any kind, natural or not, so that knocks out the natural med vs. conventional med debate. And you need only speak to ecologically-minded design specialists to understand that building according to your local environment is better in the long run, both for your building’s integrity and for your health and safety, than building from a template better designed for some other locale. In other words, don’t build at ground level in a flood zone, and don’t live in a tipi in Hurricane Alley.

“We should take each case individually and apply the most rigorous scientific reasoning.”

Yeah, that’s worked out real well so far. You know, when you get right down to it, indigenous primitive people *have* applied rigorous scientific reasoning to the different ways they live, in most respects, or else they could not have naturalized to their respective territories. Scientific reasoning involves looking at what works, not trying to re-invent the wheel. Unfortunately a lot of what passes for civilized “science” does the latter, not the former.

Now to the original post: I live in Ohio, and just saw an article in the Columbus Dispatch some days ago about raw milk. The writer lied through her teeth and said the purchase of it is not legal here. But you can get it if you purchase a herdshare. I would have to drive some distance from the city just to pick the stuff up, so I haven’t tried this yet. Instead I buy milk that has been minimally pasteurized.

I thought I was imagining the taste difference until we ran out of it one day and bought some grocery-store-brand whole milk to tide us over. Oh my God, it was nasty. I won’t be doing that again.

Had to dig this one out of the spam folder; sorry for the delay.

Michigan

“In 2002, at hearings on the revision of the Michigan State Dairy Code, the industry attempted to amend the code to make it illegal for dairy farmers, their family members, their farm workers, and even their farm animals to drink the farm’s raw milk.”

Farm animals??? If that had passed, then a calf or kid goat would not legally be able to drink milk from it’s momma. The milk would have to be pasturized before feeding it to the baby animal. How did these vulnerable baby animals ever survive in the past on that contaminated raw milk????

How stupid can people be????

Pretty stupid, apparently. I hope they have enough jails to hold all the criminal calves.

Regarding the differences in ideal diets between individuals certainly some of this is caused by their different ancestry. The thing is though that one of the most salient features of most modern epidemiological nutrition (or for that matter drug) studies is the huge variation between individuals. So even people who are closely related and live in a similar environment will not necessarily have exactly the same dietary requirements.

So for example with your milk example, there is no difference as far as I can tell whether I eat raw milk cheese or pasteurized milk cheese . Seems like a fairly big physiological difference to me. (another example is that some allergy medicine has serious negative side effects one of my sisters but not effect on the other)

I wouldn’t put to much emphasis on evolution to define the best diet though. Evolution is anything but an ideal process. For most of human evolution we barely scraped by nutritionally; it wasn’t until the late Paleolithic period that humans came anywhere close to meeting their basic nutritional requirements and then not long after that during the Neolithic they suffered a relapse called agriculture. Modern man, especially in developed countries probably has a much more ideal diet than any prehistoric person. Also, evolution has focused on early developmental stages and would be much more likely to match a child’s requirement than an adult. That said I am sure there are cases where you are right – certainly if some crucial molecules are very abundant in the food source, humans might easily have lost the ability to make them and if these happen to be lost in the processing of food that is an argument for the natural version – these are specific cases though and do not justify the ’natural’ is always better hypothesis.

Actually humans have been processing (i.e. cooking) their food for a long time; at least as long as 800,000 years and possibly 1.4 million.

So I don’t think natural food is necessarily better than artificial or processed food any more than natural medicine or natural shelter, or natural clothing is better. We should take each case individually and apply the most rigorous scientific reasoning. At an individual level we need to experiment to determine what is best for each of us.

For additional help with digestion, try adding lacto-fermented vegetables (like raw sauerkraut) to your diet. The friendly microbes boost digestion as well as immune function. They’re easy to make, though you can find them at the farmers market or online. Along those lines, lacto-fermented sodas (kombucha or water kefir sodas, etc) are a great replacement for sugary or diet sodas as well as alcohol. I can send you more info on how to and where to buy. I think this will be my next blog topic.

I appreciate the info. Remind me when you post about it on your blog.

With respect to milk, this is not the best example since based on its biological function it is especially unlikely to match the requirements of adult humans. Still, with your example there is really no way to know whether the molecules you lost during pasteurization are good, bad or indifferent without a very in depth study. At the very least you would have to show that something rare and necessary was lost or do a careful comparison between people who use pasteurized vs. non pasteurized milk. So, the enzymes that are lost would have been broken down into amino acids in your stomach. These could be easily replaced by a couple bites out of a steak.

I also mentioned that dietary requirements vary considerably between individuals. Your ideal diet will not be the same as mine. The best advice I could give would be to try to eat a relatively wide variety of food, take a nutritional supplement and above all experiment with your diet and listen to your body.

I agree with the part about listening to your body. No diet is optimal for everyone because we come from different ancestors who evolved in different parts of the world.

I don’t believe whole, natural foods evolved to make themselves ideal for humans, but humans evolved eating whole, unprocessed foods. Pasteurized cheese blocks up my digestion. Raw-milk cheese doesn’t. Something gets lost or altered in the pasteurization that isn’t replaced by eating a steak. And from what I’ve heard, same goes for lactose intolerance; many people who believe they’re lactose intolerant find they can drink raw milk without any problems.