Death By Supermarket (19 page)

While natural milk is an excellent source of protein and saturated fat, as with saturated animal fat and polyunsaturated vegetable oils, there are controversy and misconceptions about milk. Since the USDA’s “Got Milk?” milk moustache campaign, millions of Americans have increased their intake of milk. There’s no other food that appears more comforting or healthy than a tall glass of frothy milk, even though studies dating from the early 1900s to the present demonstrate that factory milk is a contributing factor in the epidemic of allergies, asthma, precocious puberty, multiple sclerosis, and type 1 diabetes, as well as degenerative diseases.
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PART SIX
Milk: Deadly or the Perfect Food?

On May 10, 1611, a straggly band of fortune hunters watched as Sir Thomas Dale, the newly appointed governor of Jamestown, Virginia, disembarked at Jamestown Harbor. Four years earlier, the ships
Susan Constant, Godspeed
, and
Discovery
had brought these spying men, whose hopes of finding riches and a northeast water route to India had been systematically dashed by Algonquian attacks, disease, and starvation. Several ships had since arrived carrying provisions and hundreds of replacement settlers; thus the ranks of the Jamestown colonists had swelled and shrunk. Now the men observed as the ship’s crew labored to bring one hundred cows to shore. Dazed and weak from the four-month sea voyage, the cows ambled into the pastures, lured by tall native grasses. The arrival of milk cows spelled the beginning of prosperity in America’s first permanent settlement.

Nine years later, in 1620, the Plymouth colonists arrived in Massachusetts. In the fall of 1621, the half who had survived the first year celebrated a feast of thanksgiving, eating maize, seafood, and game. “Survived” being the operative word. By 1623, an observer wrote that the colonists were in “very low condition, many were ragged in aparell, and some little beter than halfe naked.”
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If not for the arrival of three heifers and a bull in March 1624 on the merchant chip
Charity
, the remaining Pilgrims would have likely perished too.

Similar accounts of milk cows saving the lives of early Americans are documented in each and every colony in seventeenth-century America.
Since the early colonies, milk has been a healthy, life-sustaining part of the American diet.
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Back in the 1940s, when Weston A. Price sent 20,000 food samples back to America for analysis, he also sent milk samples, which he characterized as “the most efficient single food known.”
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Natural milk was consumed in the United States until the War of 1812 with England, when whiskey shipments from the British West Indies abruptly halted.
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To address this problem, distilleries sprang up, extracting alcohol from grain to produce whiskey. Enterprising distillery owners, looking for a use for the chemically altered, acidic waste product known as “distillery slop,” built dairies adjoining or in the basements of distilleries and fed the waste product to cows. Now the cities had their whiskey and their “slop” or “swill” milk.

Distillery dairies were filthy hellholes, sullying the air with horrendous fumes. Eating steaming slop from a distillery is not the same thing to a cow as grazing in an open pasture, but cows are sweet, docile creatures that will ultimately eat anything put before them. Still cows—like humans kept in dungeons—succumbed to disease.

The unnatural swill feed lacked the life-sustaining nutrients necessary to maintain healthy metabolic processes and was foreign and toxic to bovine physiology. Thus the resulting milk lacked nutrients and was unfit for human consumption. Swill milk was doctored with starch, sugar, flour, chalk, and plaster of Paris. Milkers went about their duties with filthy hands and often came to work sick. As the swill milk business boomed, infant mortality rose, with babies dying of tuberculosis, diarrhea, typhoid, cholera, scarlet fever, and diphtheria.

In the 1860s, Louis Pasteur discovered that heating milk killed off pathogenic microorganisms that led to many infectious diseases (and launched the germ theory of disease). There were two courses of action the food industry could have taken to halt the spread of infectious diseases through swill milk: They could have cleaned up the filth in the dairy industry and initiated the production of pasture-fed, clean, nutrient-rich milk in the countryside to feed city dwellers. Instead, the industry continued to
produce filthy milk from diseased, abused cows and then scald the germs out of the milk.

Naturopathic physician Ron Schmid, author of
The Untold Story of Milk: Green Pastures, Contented Cows and Raw Dairy Foods
, told me, “Given the sorry state of milk supplies in the early twentieth century, pasteurization prevented a lot of sickness and death. On the other hand, we didn’t need to treat good, clean, healthy milk the same way we treated tainted, unsanitary, nutrient dead milk.”
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What was not known in Pasteur’s time is that the heat of pasteurization kills vitamins C, E, A, D
₃
, and B complex, diminishes calcium and other minerals and makes them harder to absorb, and reduces the digestibility and lessens the nutritional value of protein. Most important, the heat of pasteurization destroys the enzymes in milk. The temperature at which substances feel too hot to touch—about 118 degrees Fahrenheit—is adequate to kill enzymes.

The ridding of enzymes from our food supply has been a major contributing factor to the downfall of Americans’ health. Enzymes are essential to life because they are biochemical catalysts of cellular function both inside and outside of the cell. Without enzymes no biochemical activity would take place. Vitamins, minerals, and hormones cannot perform in the body without enzymes. The five thousand identified enzymes are divided into three categories: Metabolic enzymes enable all bodily processes and functions, including maintaining immune function. Digestive enzymes are manufactured in the pancreas to break down food. Enzymes in food jumpstart digestive processes when you eat.

Born in 1898, researcher Edward Howell devoted his life to researching and promoting nutritional approaches to chronic illness. In his book
Food Enzymes for Health and Longevity
(1939), he explained that eating foods that contain enzymes reduces the need for the pancreas to produce its own digestive enzymes. If your pancreas is overtaxed during your lifetime because you are not providing your body with an adequate supply of enzymes in food, its function will decline. The length of your life depends
on how fast your pancreatic enzyme-producing capacity is used up. If you place constant demand on your pancreas to produce enzymes to digest and process incoming dead food, you will die sooner than if you eat enzyme-rich food. That’s why food enzymes are one key to staving off degenerative disease, slowing accelerated aging, and promoting longevity.
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According to Dr. Schmid, although the belief took hold that we could pasteurize unhealthy milk and make it both safe to drink and healthy, the fact is that healthfulness of milk is determined by two factors: (1) The cow’s diet and living conditions determine whether or not the cow is healthy, and (2) the health of the cow determines the nutritive quality of the milk.

The modern cow’s diet and living conditions are not much better than a swill cow’s of one hundred years ago. Modern dairy cows don’t graze contentedly in pastures on farms like the precious cows I met on Dr. Schmid’s farm. Today cows are housed in CAFOs, where they live out their short lives tethered in stalls shoulder to shoulder in pens, standing in manure.

Modern milk cows’ production is maximized by selective breeding—the process of breeding for particular genetic traits—which has created cows with freakishly active pituitary glands that overproduce growth hormones that stimulate milk production. Selectively bred cows are highly stressed milk-producing machines that require massive amounts of species-inappropriate feed to fuel their aberrant metabolisms, as well as massive amounts of drugs to address the health problems caused both by the feed and by the stressful environment. Milk production is further increased by 10 to 20 percent by injecting cows with recombinant Bovine Growth Hormone (rBGH).

Confinement cows are fed soybean and grain feed, which are unnatural foods for ruminants (cud-chewing animals) that have four stomachs, designed to digest fibrous grasses, plants, and shrubs. Soybeans and grains lack the life-sustaining nutrients necessary to maintain healthy bovine metabolic processes. Grain-fed cows can become afflicted with a painful condition called sub-acute acidosis, requiring constant, low-level doses of antibiotics.
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(And now we have ethanol plants springing up next to dairy
farms where the corn mash by-product is being fed to dairy cows—exactly like the swill cows of old.)

Soybeans and grains are grown with herbicides and pesticides or are genetically modified to resist pests and are grown with chemical fertilizers, which are toxic to bovine physiology and also migrate to a cow’s milk. Aflatoxins are cancer-causing chemicals found in moldy grain and are secreted in the milk of grain-eating cows.
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Grains also cause mastitis (infection of the udders). Normal milk contains low levels of white blood cells that are shed from the secretory tissue during milking. A somatic cell count (SCC) determines whether milk contains a normal white blood cell count or a high count, signaling mastitis. A SCC level of 300,000 indicates mastitis, yet federal regulations allow the sale of milk with SCC levels of 750,000, which in simple terms means there’s a lot of pus in your milk.
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Government regulators ruled that this is fine as this milk will be pasteurized, so you won’t be drinking live pus but dead pus.

Because cows suffer health problems as a result of their stressful confinement and species-inappropriate diet, sixty-odd drugs are federally approved for use on dairy cows, including penicillin G. Antimicrobial sulfonamides are suspected human carcinogens that taint milk. Antiworming agents also migrate to milk and are associated with bone marrow diseases and neurological disorders. Numerous nonapproved drugs are also used illegally.
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After this adulterated brew is milked, pasteurization kills some of bad bacteria in the milk and refrigeration keeps the remaining bacteria from growing but does not eradicate any of the contaminants; neither does ultra pasteurization, although it eliminates the need for refrigeration prior to opening the container, because it sterilizes milk.

The homogenization process breaks up butterfat globules into tiny particles, which keeps the milk “stirred up,” so that the cream doesn’t rise to the top, ostensibly making it more attractive to consumers. In recent years, a hypothesis has emerged suggesting that the sliced-up fatty particles
can abrade arterial walls, which results in attracting a protective coating of plaque. But the jury is still out on whether homogenized milk contributes to coronary artery disease.
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Still, homogenization is for the convenience of the manufacturer. “When unhomogenized milk is transported in a tanker truck,” Dr. Schmid said, “the cream rises to the top as it churns. The result is butter and buttermilk.”

Modern milk suppliers are well aware of the fact that the heat of pasteurization kills vitamins and enzymes and changes the chemical composition of calcium and other minerals. Like swill milk that in the past was prettied up with chalk and other substances, today’s milk is fortified with calcium and synthetic vitamins. As previously stated, Enig and Fallon point out that vitamin D
₂
was yanked from our milk supply as it causes hardening of the arteries and softening of the bones.
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Milk suppliers can never duplicate nature’s perfect ratio of nutrients and create a nutritious food by adding synthetic nutrients into weeks-old, pasteurized, denatured milk that contains high levels of contaminants and is the commingled product of thousands of cows. Like swill milk, factory milk lacks nutrients because it’s produced by abused cows in mostly unsanitary conditions. Said Dr. Schmid. “The best we can expect from commercial milk is that it might support people until they begin to wear out and die at age fifty or sixty and they can go for ten or twenty years into the medical industry.”
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Twenty years ago the episode of
Nip/Tuck
in which Julia McNamara (Joely Richardson) discovers a bloodstain in her eight-year-old daughter Annie’s (Kelsey Bateman) panties and realizes it’s premenstrual spotting would have been far-fetched. In this episode, to soften the blow of telling her the facts of life, Julia and a friend throw Annie a “Princess Menses” party attended by a gaggle of little girls dressed in flowing white dresses and tiaras. “She’s barely out of pajamas with feet,” says plastic surgeon McNamara (Dylan Walsh) to his partner, Christian Troy (Julian McMahon), “How did this happen?”
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