Poison or Protection?

I love raw milk. It’s done wonders for my autistic son.

There I said it.  I’ve had cousins wrinkle their nose at me – as though saying I like raw milk is the same as saying I like dirty, bacteria infested fluids in my cereal.  And what kind of parent would admit to feeding their kids this kind of thing?  Don’t I love them?

Well, yes, I do, but let me back up and explain myself before someone comes and steals my poor defenseless children away!

My genius dad was the one to first  share milk’s benefits with me.  Doctor dad had been on a whole foods diet for over a year before he came to convert my family.  You see, he was convinced that American diets had been so full of over processed, refined sugars since the turn of the 20^th century that we could not help but all be sick way before our time.  He attributed conditions almost unheard of before 1900, such as diabetes and heart disease, to this cost-effective change in the food producing industry.  And the worst change of this time period was the processing of milk.

His theories were not baseless.  Besides his medical background, he also relied on such books as Real Food, by Nina Planck (great read – I highly recommend it).  According to this book, back in the day there was a legitimate reason for the need to pasteurize milk.  Cows were being fed the unsanitary leftover grains from the breweries.  They stood in their own filth, and were milked without the proper sanitization that exists today.  People got straight up sick to death, and laws were passed to destroy these dangerous microbes through the process of pasteurization.

But times have changed.

Strict rules govern the care and cleaning of our current milk supply, so while sterilizing of our milk is still done, there’s simply no reason for it.  And – we’re only getting half of what milk could do for us through this process.  The sterilization process destroys important enzymes and proteins.  Many of its delicious flavors are also destroyed, and we are left with a watered down version of milk.

Some would argue that milk is not even a necessary part of our diet. People can survive life without milk.  They also can survive on coke and chips every day, as I did almost all of my senior year of high school.  But that doesn’t mean that it’s good for us, and what’s more, it may be an important link in brain development.  Scientists have linked the timeframe where humans began drinking other animals’ milk with the somewhat sudden evolutionary increase of brain size.  This link may point to the continued benefits of raw milk in the growing child’s brain.

For my family, we started to drink raw milk because my dad felt that it might help with some of the behavior problems associated with Beckette’s rapid firing, autistic brain.  We’d had so many recent issues at his school that I had become pretty desperate.  So we tried it.

Beckette has gone from a boy with high functioning autism to behaving like a pretty normal kid.  He’s calmed down considerably, is sleeping better through the night, and overall, seems to be happier.  Is it the milk?  I think so.  It might be something else, but when our local supplier was out one week and he didn’t get his milk, his problems began to resurface.

Is it the answer for everyone?  I can’t say that.  Each family has to make the right decision for themselves, based on what they are comfortable with and what they feel is most beneficial for them.  In some states, it’s not even legal to sell for human consumption, but in many places you still have a choice. 

Choosing not to drink raw milk based on hundred year old information is just plain foolish.  Get educated, and then make whatever decision is right for you and the one’s you love.