Hi Dave. I can see you have put a lot of effort into eating healthily and hope you continue to do so. A few years ago I ate anything, so my position now is a big change for me. And perhaps no one is "wrong" to drink cow's milk. If for example there was nothing around but a cow, I would probably milk it - if I could work out how. But I think there are benefits to be had and penalties to be paid for various things, knowing the true values of those benefits and penalties is the key issue for me.

Going back to milk, I think there is casein in both raw and unpasteurized milk, and that seems to be harmful. Then there is also the penalty of calcium loss. Heart disease is also a major killer. Any experiments, I think, would be similar to the "mad scientist" experiments in the trailer for the "processed people" video.

If you look at some of the writings and youtube videos of the group of doctors mentioned at vegsource.com and places like the wellness forum, you will find some indicators. An example, when Germany invaded Norway in the second world war they took away all the animals to feed the troops. Heart attack rates plummeted, and went back up again when the animals were returned after the war. Of course that would have been meat and dairy - presumably unpasteurized in those days, so it's hardly a scientific experiment.

Take a step back and have a think where you got the idea from that it's healthy to drink the breast milk of a particular quadruped species. Was it from wise elders that you know, who have long observed how people's health improve when they drink it? Or may it have been from the media and television, news that is processed before it gets to you (again, see the same processed people trailer). It may have been your parents, school even. But where did they get the information from? If it's so good to drink the breast milk from a bovine quadruped, should we do experiments with unpasteurized canine and feline breast milk?

You are right, it probably does have B12 in I am sure. But I tend to question why, if I eat a plant based diet, might I be deficient in B12. I don't know if you saw the film of the stricken Apollo 13 mission with Tom Hanks (I watchef the events on TV live), but the ground crew reached a tipping point where they had a radical change of thinking. Instead of following routine procedures they were forced to ask "what have we got on the ship that's good?" From that point onward the procedures were torn up (literally, to provide a seal for the CO2 scrubbers) and problems started getting fixed. I think I must have done had a radical change of thinking along those lines, perhaps starting in January 2008, when I realized that there was something much better than getting old and sick and having a heart attack or ending up with Alzheimers. Or it might be because I went through this change, outlined in John Robbins Book Healthy at 100:
"I have been blessed to know many men and women who, when they reach the age of fifty or sixty, begin to free themselves from cultural constraints and to express themselves in ways they had not dared to do before."

So now I question everything, and the more I know the less certain I am of many things. Anyway I think we are doing something else wrong to be deficient in B12. Our ancestors must have done something right, else I wouldn't be here typing this message. Perhaps if we got back to our roots and grew vegetables, we may find that we are not deficient in B12 (I do tend to buy in to the dirt theory). For omega 3 oils, I read that we have omega 3 oil in our skin and hair oils. Why on earth do we remove it on a daily basis with petrochemicals, then apply other forms of oil in little bottles from the drug store to deal with the problems we have when we remove our skin oil?

Sorry, was rambling. To get back to the point, yes it would be interesting to see a clinical trial of people who were given raw and pasteurized milk, but I wouldn't want to be part of it even if I was paid!

Mrs Thatcher, milk snatcher, may not have been a favourite of the dairy farming industry when the removed the subsidy on school milk on the UK, but she probably did a lot of kids a good turn.

Happy eating (and fasting)

PS - I think a milk fast is more of a milk diet, or milk feast, as some say
PPS yes I would love to see the links you mentioned, ask me if you need links to any of the above.