Milk. MRSA in Milk. Raw Milk Is Safer. Think Fat-Free Milk is Healthy? Grand Canyon. Anne Frank’s Miep Gies.

 

For “Foodie Friday”:

MILK 

“Milk is one of nature’s most perfect foods. Most of our milk comes from a sacred animal, the cow. Today, however, in the industrial system, we imprison cows indoors for their entire lives; we give them inappropriate feed such as soy, bakery waste, citrus peel cake and the swill from ethanol production, foods that cows are not designed to eat. The confinement environment and the inappropriate feed make these cows sick, so they need antibiotics and other drugs. We breed them to give huge amounts of milk, and give them hormones to increase milk production as well. These cows produce large quantities of watery milk with only half the amount of fat compared to milk produced by old-fashioned cows eating green grass. Then this milk is shipped to factories for processing.

Inside the plants, the milk is completely remade. As described by Emily Green in the Los Angeles Times(http://articles.latimes.com/2000/aug/02/food/fo-62752 ) centrifuges separate the milk into fat, protein and various other solids and liquids. Once segregated, these are recombined at specific levels set for whole, lowfat and no-fat milks. Of the reconstituted milks, whole milk will most closely approximate original cow’s milk. What is left over will go into butter, cream, cheese, dried milk, and a host of other milk products. The dairy industry promotes lowfat milk and skim milk because they can make more money on the butterfat when used in ice cream. When they remove the fat to make reduced-fat milks, they replace it with powdered milk concentrate, which is formed by high temperature spray drying.

 
Then the milk is sent by tanker trucks (which are not refrigerated) to bottling plants. The milk is pasteurized at 161^oF for fifteen seconds by rushing it past superheated stainless steel plates. If the temperature is 230^oF (over the boiling point), the milk is considered ultrapasteurized. This ultrapasteurized milk will have a distinct cooked milk taste, but it is sterile and shelf stable.  It may be sold in the refrigerated section of the supermarket so the consumer will think it is fresh, but it does not need to be. The milk is also homogenized by a pressure treatment that breaks down the fat globules so the milk won’t separate. Once processed, the milk will last for weeks, not just days.
Processing makes the milk difficult to digest and renders the proteins allergenic. Animals fed pasteurized milk exclusively develop nutrient deficiencies and become infertile after several generations.

Fortunately, Real Milk from pasture-fed cows, milk that is not pasteurized, processed or homogenized, is becoming more widely available. In fact, demand for Real Milk is growing rapidly. To find Real Milk in your area, visit http://www.realmilk.com/real-milk-finder/

In order to make powdered milk, fluid is forced through a tiny hole at high pressure and then blown out into the air. This causes a lot of nitrates to form, and the cholesterol in the milk becomes oxidized. Contrary to popular opinion, cholesterol is not a demon but your best friend; you don’t have to worry about consuming foods containing cholesterol, except that you do not want to consume oxidized cholesterol. Evidence indicates that oxidized cholesterol can initiate the process of atherosclerosis.
Powdered milk is added to reduced-fat milks and milk products to give them body. So, when you consume reduced-fat milk or yoghurt, thinking that it will help you avoid heart disease, you are actually consuming oxidized cholesterol, which can initiate the process of heart disease.”  

From: http://www.westonaprice.org/modern-foods/dirty-secrets-of-the-food-processing-industry

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MRSA Found in Conventional Milk Shows Why Raw Milk Is Safer

“Pasteurization is nothing more than a showy bandage covering a festering wound created by Agribusiness. But the truth can be seen in news that MRSA is found in vats of milk, but don’t worry, it’s gonna be pasteurized. Raw milk doesn’t produce MRSA.

Short-horned Cow, by CameliaTW  by Heidi Stevenson

Currently, raw milk is legal in England. It’s the cleanest and healthiest milk you can buy. MRSA-infested milk from standard cruel tightly-packed operations—milk that must be pasteurized to be rendered anything close to safe—has been found in bulk milk.

If you drink milk from almost any source other than directly from a caring farmer who provides raw, unpasteurized milk, then you should worry. The plan is not to dump this contaminated milk. No, the plan is to pasteurize it and declare it “safe”.

Of course, pasteurization does nothing to remove the products of the disease, such as toxins produced by the bacteria or pus that the cows produce in an attempt to heal themselves. So, any time you purchase standard commercial milk, you should assume that you’re getting something beyond the milk itself—but don’t expect to find it on the label.

The pressure is on conventional milk producers to get every last ounce they can from their poor miserable cows. They milk them when they’re sick. They milk them when they have mastitis. They dose them with strong antibiotics, and when they still get sick, they give them ever more—and they keep milking them through it all. Surely it’s obvious that healthy milk cannot possibly come from such a source.

On the other hand, raw milk is delivered by healthy cows. On the rare occasions when a raw milk producer becomes sick or gets mastitis, that cow is temporarily retired from producing milk for sale. She may be given antibiotics to help her heal, though some farmers treat with homeopathy, but she is not returned to milking until she’s again healthy and needs no further treatment.

Conventional cows are usually raised in concentrated feed lots and forced to eat unnatural foods, like grains and even ground-up animal parts. Healthy cows that live a more natural life in fields and eat a natural diet of grass produce raw milk.

Conventional cows deliver considerably more with their milk. They deliver antibiotics and any other drugs they’ve been given. Since they’re often sick, they deliver pathogens and their toxins, and pus. You can be fairly sure that you’ll get at least some of these items any time you buy conventional milk because the milk is collected in mass storage vats, so you’re getting the milk from many cows of many feed lots.

Healthy raw milk cows deliver nothing but healthy milk. Since it’s purchased directly from the farmer, you know precisely what farm your milk came from.

Nutritional Differences in Raw and Pasteurized Milk

Pasteurization changes milk. It is much more able to grow bacterial pathogens. Raw milk inhibits bacterial growth.

Scurvy is much more common in children who drink pasteurized milk. Granted, that’s not a major issue today, but it is indicative of the destruction of vitamin C by pasteurization.

Teeth are less likely to decay on raw milk than on pasteurized.

Pasteurization causes calcium to be more tightly bound to milk. As a result, pasteurized milk is a poor source of calcium, but raw milk is an excellent source.

Pasteurization destroys as much as 80% of vitamins A & E. It can destroy anywhere from 38-80% of B vitamins and 25-50%, often more, of vitamin C. Raw milk, obviously, provides the full complement of these nutrients.

Vitamin B is produced by lactic acid bacteria, which are killed by pasteurization. Probacteria keep raw milk from putrefaction, that is, decaying or rotting. It turns sour and is still nutritious and usable as yogurt, cheese, and other cultured forms of milk. On the other hand, by killing off the beneficial bacteria, pasteurization causes an increase in the growth of harmful, disease-producing bacteria. Therefore, pasteurized milk is far more likely to contain disease-producing organisms than raw milk.

Protein is destroyed by pasteurization. Many minerals are lost by volatilization (evaporation).

Pasteurization is heating. Heating milk destroys enzymes. Enzymes are required to release nutrients in the foods we eat. Phosphatase is an enzyme destroyed by pasteurization. It’s necessary for the release of calcium. Therefore, though the industry and governments tout the high calcium level in milk, it’s largely inaccessible once it’s been pasteurized. Of course, raw milk is still an excellent source of calcium.

Benefits of Pasteurization

Clearly, human health doesn’t benefit from pasteurization. There is, though, one beneficiary: Agribusiness. Farmers of milk bound for pasteurization have little motivation to keep their facilities clean, so most don’t. The cows live in degrading and degraded environments. Their lives are shortened dramatically.

Their suffering and the destroyed health benefits of milk are the price paid for profits to a smaller and smaller number of people, those who are at the helm of Agribusiness.

That’s all. They’re the only beneficiaries of pasteurized milk. The animals lose. The land and environment lose. And the people lose.

Promotion of Pasteurized Milk

So why is it becoming all but impossible to obtain raw milk? Agribusiness is all about money, and uses it to suppress and delegitimize anything but what they produce. Therefore, they’ve virtually taken over governmental agencies that are supposed to be protecting us. So, instead of protecting us and the environment against the depredations of Agribusiness, they protect Agribusiness from genuine choice of the people.

People not only still want raw milk, more and more are making the decision to buy it. Propaganda campaigns haven’t been enough to completely squelch it. Now, governmental agencies, at the behest of their corporate masters, are making the final moves to completely ban it, to make sales and purchase of raw milk illegal.

In the US, the FDA has done full SWAT operations against raw milk producers and stores that sell it. In the UK, the FSA is now moving to ban it completely. In their Microbiological Safety of Raw Drinking Milk, they state that pasteurization of all milk should be a “critical control measure and is the most effective means of protecting public health”. In recognition of the fact that many people do drink raw milk, they suggest that “a clear, consistent and appropriate regulatory framework to control the public health risk, particularly in the light of developments in the marketing of these products”.

In other words, they want to place more and more restrictions on raw milk to make it harder to produce and purchase. They hope to do this in the face of the admission that “the available data indicates that there have been no reported outbreaks of illness associated with raw drinking milk or cream in England and Wales since 2002.” They discuss historical situations in which people did die from drinking raw milk, mostly from tuberculosis. What they don’t note, though, is that these deaths occurred during the earliest stages of modern milk production, with its concentrated feed lots and mistreatment of animals.

The Raw Truth

What should be abundantly clear is that raw milk is far healthier than pasteurized. The bulk of milk’s health-producing factors are destroyed when it’s pasteurized. Safety is provided by raising healthy cows in life-affirming environments. It doesn’t come from filthy crowded environments and sick animals. It isn’t provided by the destruction of health-producing elements, and it doesn’t come from treating food of any sort as nothing but a commodity that exists for only one purpose, profits.

The truth is that reducing the nature of food to the most efficient and profit-producing materials possible is counterproductive. Health doesn’t come from sick animals and pasteurization is nothing more than a showy bandage covering a festering wound.

As Dr. William Campbell titled his book, The Milk of Human Kindness is Not Pasteurized.

From: http://gaia-health.com/gaia-blog/2012-12-30/mrsa-found-in-filthy-milk-but-warnings-given-for-innocent-raw-milk/

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Think Fat-Free Milk is Healthy? 6 Secrets You Don’t Know About Skim

“Fat-free skim milk is the quintessential staple of any health-conscious home in America. You’re supposed to drink skim because whole milk has too much fat, too many calories, and cholesterol that can give you heart disease. Right?

In case you’ve been led to believe these lies, I’ve got a few things I’d like you to know about the darling of the dairy industry, skim milk.

1. It was designed to profit off of you, not make you healthy.

People haven’t always bought into the idea that fat is unhealthy. It all started with a flawed theory by a really bad scientist who said that saturated fat and cholesterol cause heart disease. Which is pretty weird, considering no one had heart attacks around the turn of the century when everyone was still eating pounds of butter and cream every week.

Somehow, by the time World War II rolled around, we were all convinced that fat was the enemy, anyway. Butter was replaced with cheap margarine made from toxic industrial oils, and creamy, full-fat milk was dumped in favor of skim.

Dairy manufacturers were thrilled with this new trend, however, because what was once an industrial waste product had quickly become a highly-desirable “health food.” When cream was skimmed from milk, the remaining fat-free milk used to be considered a nearly useless byproduct of obtaining the cream. But, market that wasteful skim milk as being a healthful choice for consumers, and suddenly, you’ve got a serious money-maker on your hands! Now, the agribusiness giants running the dairy industry are able to profit off of both products, and don’t intend on stopping anytime soon.

2. It’s got a mystery ingredient they’re not telling you about.

Before processing, skim milk has a very unappetizing blueish color, a chalky taste, and watery texture that doesn’t resemble natural milk at all. So, to whiten, thicken, and make it taste a little more normal, powdered milk solids are often mixed into the milk.

What’s so bad about powdered milk? Well, in the manufacturing process, liquid milk is forced through tiny holes at very high pressure, which causes the cholesterol in the milk to oxidize, and toxic nitrates to form. Oxidized cholesterol contributes to the buildup of plaque in the arteries, while unoxidized cholesterol from unprocessed foods is actually an antioxidant to help fight inflammation in the body. The proteins found in powdered milk are so denatured that they are unrecognizable by the body and contribute to inflammation.

Shockingly, dairy manufacturers are not required by the FDA to label the powdered milk as a separate ingredient, because it’s still technically just “milk,” the single ingredient found on the list. So, there’s no way to be sure that it is or isn’t in your fat-free or low-fat dairy products.

3. It contains antibiotics, nasty bodily fluids, and GMOs

Water downstream of a factory farm in Idaho, where animals are generally knee-deep in their own waste.

The skim milk you’ll find in most grocery stores is a mass-produced product from animals in concentrated animal feeding operations, or factory farms, where the cows are kept in confinement and fed a diet that is completely inappropriate for their species. Because cows are designed to eat grass, when they are fed a diet consisting primarily of corn, as they are in factory farms, they get sick.

And because they get sick, they’re often given antibiotics to keep them alive so they can continue to produce. But because they’re still fighting off infections, things like blood and pus from open sores frequently make their way into the finished product — the milk we see on store shelves. The FDA allows up to 750 million pus cells per liter of milk, to be sold legally.

Also legal, are the injections of recombinant bovine growth hormones, or rBGH, a known carcinogen banned in virtually every industrialized nation in the world, except the United States. The “recombinant” part of the growth hormone means that it was genetically modified from the cow’s natural growth hormones to stimulate increased milk production.” 

More at: http://butterbeliever.com/fat-free-dairy-skim-milk-secrets/

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Science Shows Full-Fat Dairy is Good for You

“Unfortunately, fats in general are considered the dietary villains by many people, even though natural fats, like the kind found in full-fat raw dairy, are very good for you.”  Article at: http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2011/05/21/why-you-need-to-avoid-low-fat-milk-and-cheese.aspx

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Theodore Roosevelt makes Grand Canyon a national monument, Jan 11, 1908:

“On January 11, 1908, U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt declares the massive Grand Canyon in northwestern Arizona a national monument.

Though Native Americans lived in the area as early as the 13th century, the first European sighting of the canyon wasn't until 1540, by members of an expedition headed by the Spanish explorer Francisco Vasquez de Coronado. Because of its remote and inaccessible location, several centuries passed before North American settlers really explored the canyon. In 1869, geologist John Wesley Powell led a group of 10 men in the first difficult journey down the rapids of the Colorado River and along the length of the 277-mile gorge in four rowboats.

In January 1908, Roosevelt exercised this right to make more than 800,000 acres of the Grand Canyon area into a national monument. "Let this great wonder of nature remain as it now is," he declared. "You cannot improve on it. But what you can do is keep it for your children, your children’s children, and all who come after you, as the one great sight which every American should see."

Today, more than 5 million people visit the canyon each year. The canyon floor is accessible by foot, mule or boat, and whitewater rafting.  Hiking and running in the area are especially popular. Many choose to conserve their energies and simply take in the breathtaking view from the canyon's South Rim--some 7,000 feet above sea level--and marvel at a vista virtually unchanged for over 400 years.”

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Miep Gies, who hid Anne Frank, dies at 100, Jan 11, 2010:

“On this day in 2010, Miep Gies, the last survivor of a small group of people who helped hide a Jewish girl, Anne Frank, and her family from the Nazis during World War II, dies at age 100 in the Netherlands. After the Franks were discovered in 1944 and sent to concentration camps, Gies rescued the notebooks that Anne Frank left behind describing her two years in hiding. These writings were later published as “Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl,” which became one of the most widely read accounts of the Holocaust.”

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Yesterday:

What a difference a day makes! 

It was sunshine, sunglasses, T-shirts, shorts, with windows and doors open.  A nice Winter day in TX.

Misty and I went to get Jay in the van.  The gas can that we use to put gas in the Puddle Jumper needed filling.  So Misty had to wear her safety harness that clips to a seat belt because we were leaving the subdivision.  I think she was a little disappointed that we only went around the corner to the store.

Jay put the new battery in the motor home, and it would run for a while, and then quit.  Oh, No! I was thinking fuel pump again.  Jay and I had our pencil and paper for making a plan for what can be built where part of the RVport was.  But first I really wanted to mark along the lot line, and the MH was in the way.   Jay must have dug around for an hour, and I was raking the dirt out of the way, but we couldn’t find the survey stake.

When I called Jim the mechanic down the street about the MH, I asked him if he would bring his metal detector.  He hitched his truck to the MH, and we pulled it out into the front yard.  He tried to get the MH to run, and came to the conclusion that it was fuel related.  He took the ‘doghouse’ off the engine, found a leaking fuel hose, took it off and went back home to get some fuel line.

I was using Jim’s metal detector trying to find the metal stake, and it kept on indicating that there was something down there, so I would dig, and dig, and there would be nothing.  Jay and I found that stake a few months ago, and hammered a piece of white PVC pipe down into the ground around it, so we could find it again!!  As it is right where the car is driven, it has gone down into the dirt all the way to China, I suppose.  Defeated, I took Jay home.  I haven’t had much to do with metal detectors for many a year, but I don’t think that one was adequate for the job.  The ones I used to use in England would find buried ancient coins, and a metal stake would have been steak to them!

Jim came back and installed the new piece of fuel line, and the MH will start and stay running now.  That classic MH has never had to have an expensive repair, runs like a Swiss watch, and rides like a Caddy.  I have bought several newer MH’s, and then sold them, as I liked it better.

So the now MH is running, but the stake is still in hiding, and it was a beautiful day.