The truth about milk

“Raw” milk proponent and dairyman Mark McAfee sheds light on pasteurization, the benefits of consuming unadulterated food, and the war on bacteria.

By Loren Muldowney

Editor’s note: The following article is the first of a four-part series that will appear monthly in the nutrition section of our website. It is based on the first of four recent lectures in a Seminar Series on Raw Milk hosted by Rutgers University Agriculture Experiment Station.

Mark McAfee is owner of Organic Pastures Dairy Co. (www.organicpastures.com) in Fresno, California. His high-energy talk February 6 was entitled “Raw Milk: Mother Nature's Inconvenient Truth.” “Raw milk” is milk in its natural state, McAfee explained, as it comes from the cow, without heat treatment or pasteurization. Pasteurization is used to extend shelf life and to immobilize certain bacteria, he said, and public health authorities generally appear convinced that this process is highly desirable.

McAfee's overarching theme can be summarized as the coexistence of people and milk and bacteria. Even when produced under the most sanitary conditions, he said, it is normal for milk to contain some bacteria, and human societies have been coexisting and benefiting from these bacteria in the milk for thousands of years. Fermented milks are and have been important foods in many cultures for their nutrient value, McAfee informed the crowd, for their superior digestibility, and for the preservation that fermentation, a bacterial process, provides. Today products are marketed as containing “probiotics,” as if this is something brand new. Of course, McAfee said, various active bacteria have always been in these foods—only the standardization and taxonomy are new. Some of what he termed “Mother Nature’s truths about bacteria” follow. Bacteria...

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http://www.rodaleinstitute.org/20080515/n1


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