Wow, milk. A staple in most every home in America. Nasty stuff actually, and kind of gross. I don't drink milk, but not for the reasons you might think. We didn't drink it as kids, so I never ever developed a taste for it. WHAT? No milk as a kid. Well might have had something to do with the incredible explosive gases that developed after drinking some. I can recall using that to my advantage in my late teens and early twenties when consuming large quantities of beer and participating as a contestant in frat style parties wherein each of us was judged by time, reverberation, overall quality and lastly, quantity of farting. I was frequently a victor in such competitions, my secret weapon was simple, a couple pickled eggs, a fistful of peanuts and two glasses of milk a couple hours before the competition. I believe my capabilities were once described as being able to power a small city and in close quarters, could remove chrome from a bumper.
But that was a lifetime ago, and I learned how to alleviate that lactose intolerance that plagued me in my youth. But I still never drink milk. I do love yogurt, and have been known to eat ice cream at times, just as long as it is the all natural no HFC kind. I am hoping that the organic yogurt and ice cream that I consume is in fact the great stuff that the producers claim them to be. I hope so. I don't have a lab to test the stuff, so I rely on others to do that for me. Ouch, maybe I am wrong about that, the FDA isn't doing such a good job policing our food supply so far.
But let's go back to the milk itself. I wrote that blog yesterday about how modern medicine is the number one cause of death in America today, and in it I talked about MRSA and other antibiotic resistant bacteria that are becoming so prevalent in our world. It is becoming a problem. It may in fact lead to extremely serious and horrific problems in the near future. And the death rate is just going to grow exponentially as we humans consume more and more nutrient deficient processed foods that do not allow our bodies to have the natural ability to fight off infections and have healthy lives. And of course the hospitals where individuals contract the disease are the worst offenders for providing nutrient poor foods to their patients. Everything on their menus is processed this white that, reconstituted flotsam and to kill any appetite you might have, everything they serve has High Fructose Corn Syrup Poison as an ingredient. Thank God for Kim, Key, Roberta and David for bringing me brown rice and real food when I was hospitalized so many times back a few years. I would have died I think if I had been forced to eat that slop.
Did you know that a full 80% of the antibiotic production in the United States goes into farm animals. And that is what this is all about. Cows. Cows are really pretty resilient creatures and if fed a harmonious diet of grasses and plant material that nurture the digestive systems that cows evolved with; if they are kept in sanitary conditions, they will live long healthy lives and give milk that is wholesome, nutritious and contains the enzymes that humans need to digest the milk properly thereby eliminating completely that lactose intolerance thing. Yes, it is true, raw milk will not give anyone gas. Once it is heated, or pasteurized, the enzymes are broken and most of the nutritive value of the milk is degraded. But getting raw milk from healthy cows is not possible. Not anymore. For one thing, the FDA believes that they are divine by nature and will prosecute anyone that they find selling raw milk. It is as if they have no concept if how life works. Healthy cows will give healthy milk. Their reasoning for the ban on raw milk is because big agribusiness is INCAPABLE of producing milk that is in fact healthy.
The problem is in the way cows are cultured in this country. First they are fed things that are not part of their normal diet that the cows evolved eating. Dairy and also beef farmers, feed their stock agricultural byproducts on a regular basis. It is cheap, and they are told it is good for them. One of the big things that livestock are fed is canola meal. This is the stuff leftover after the canola oil is removed from the seeds. It used to all be sent to England to feed cows there and it is one of the main causes of the outbreak of bovine spongeform encephalitis they had there. Yep, mad cow disease. NO GOVERNMENTAL AGENCY WILL EVER ADMIT THAT IT WAS A NUTRITIONAL PROBLEM, NOT A DISEASE! But the facts are in, animals fed canola meal develop BSE symptoms including large holes in their brain material that resembles swiss cheese. Scientists discovered that if they take canola meal and bake it at high temperatures with lye, then that effectively neutralized the euricic acid that is the toxic part of the canola. But it still isn't a healthy food. The lye burns holes in the guts of cows and they become more inclined to bacterial infections. Cows are also fed a whole list of other byproducts, cottonseed meal, soy meal, corn byproducts, chicken byproducts, (yes it's true, feathers, scrap chicken entrails, heads and feet) and on occasion, alfalfa. None of which is what cows are designed to eat in order to be healthy. They evolved eating grasses. And not corn either, they put on fat when fed corn and give a fatter milk, but it isn't that good for them.
The next problem is that cows are kept in feedlots. Great big areas that are pretty much covered in several feet of cow shit. They smell bad. They smell like shit. And the cows live there, they lie down in their own stinking shit and roll around in it. And that is how they contract the number one problem with milk producers today, mastitis. I have read a whole lot of information on various sites on the web about mastitis. I get a huge variation in the numbers, from one USDA site claiming that mastitis affects as many as 47% of cows in the US (2009) to North Carolina University findings of 37% of the cows contracting the disease. Well, either number is pretty disgusting. It goes back again to cows fed healthy food and living in a healthy environment won't get sick. Cows fed crap, and living, literally, on crap, get sick.
What does this mean to you as a consumer. Well, basically it means that if a cow gets sick and their milk contains the pus that is coming out of a mastitis infected udder and teats, then the dairyman will treat the cow with antibiotics. But they don't throw that milk with the pus in it away, they pour it right into the tank with all the good milk. Hey, it is only pus. And it gets pasteurized right?
I don't drink milk. And I never eat beef.
No comments:
Post a Comment