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Many of us put milk, cream, or half and half in our coffee and tea. Because of this I feel comfortable in the post I am about to publish being within the realm of my subject matter, ie: coffee and tea.
Ultrapasteurized milk is subjected to very high heat to kill bacteria and other microbes.
That’s good, right?
Well, no. Not really. You see it also means that the milk has a really long shelf life. Like your nuked milk that is in your lovely organic coffee right now? Probably months from the cow. You can’t even make cheese with ultra-pasteurized milk.
And it doesn’t taste like milk. It tastes like…
yeah.
In the battle for healthy, pure, and just really good food please know what you are drinking.
I wrote an article called,Ultrapasteurized:What Does It Mean? I don’t usually push my other articles here, but this one is near and dear to my heart. Please read it. Please research on your own. Here is an exerpt that I want you to read even if you don;t read the rest of the article:
If drinking tasteless milk is acceptable to you maybe the health information won’t be. You see, milk has both friendly and unfriendly bacteria in it. For the most part milk produced in clean environments, with careful farming practices does not have an over abundance of unhealthy bacteria, and in the small amounts actually help our body build up a resistance to illness, while the good bacteria keeps our bodies healthy and working properly.
Pasteurization also cuts the nutrient content of the milk. Pasteurized milk has up to a 66 percent loss of vitamins A, D and E. 50% of the Vitamin C is lost. High heat affects water soluble vitamins and less effective. How much less? Anywhere for 35-80%. Vitamins B6 and B12 are completely destroyed during pasteurization. Pasteurization also kills numerous beneficial enzymes, antibodies and hormones. Pasteurization destroys lipase (an enzyme that breaks down fat), which impairs fat metabolism and the ability to properly absorb fat soluble vitamins A and D. This is why the milk is fortified with vitamin D. It is also why Americans in the 20th century experienced high cholesterol like never before. Milk is a wonderful source of calcium, but pasteurization makes calcium and other minerals harder to absorb. One method of testing to see if milk has been adequately pasteurized is to test to make sure that phosphates have been completely removed. Phosphates are essential for the absorption of calcium. Uh oh.
Now, go find milk that is not ultra pasteurized. Here’s to your health.
As modern humans I find that we tend to mentally displace the fact that human beings have existed for thousands of generations before us. The masses have only been drinking pasteurized milk for about 70 years. During the first 9,000 years that milk was used as food, all milk was raw. We’re only scared of raw milk because we we’ve all raised on pasteurized milk and inculcated to think raw milk is dangerous. Of course drinking raw milk from a commercial dairy farm that produces milk intended to be pasteurized is a bad idea. There are plenty of small farmers who milk their small herds daily with the intention of drinking and selling it raw, i.e. certain measures are taken to ensure the milk is procured in the most sanitary way possible. Milk intended to be pasteurized doesn’t need to be held to these same standards since everything living in the milk is expected to be killed off during pasteurization. There is a big difference between drinking raw milk from a commercial herd and raw milk from a small farmer who milks specifically to produce raw milk for his/her family and to sell.
I find it telling that we’re the only species on the planet that consumes another mammal’s milk. Given that you can find something wrong with cow’s milk in just about any form why would you drink it? And lest you think raw is better, check out this news story about a man left paralyzed after drinking raw milk:
http://www.thepittsburghchannel.com/news/23199238/detail.html
Personally I don’t drink milk. I find it unappetizing in any form. As a friend of mine said, milk just makes you fat and farty. Funny, but spot on. Get your calcium elsewhere.
Our family drinks raw milk, about 8 hours after the cow has been milked. It’s not gross at all. I grew up getting dairy milk delivered, but that is going by the way side and, no, I’m not an old granny… I’m 35. Our family also drank store milk without any problem… until… one day the milk, freshly bought, turned a weird gummy thick sludge. I don’t know what happened to it. It wasn’t left out and it wasn’t old. We thought maybe we bought a bad gallon, so we dumped it and bought more. The same thing happened. This was the WalMart brand milk. We then switched brands, but we also started researching milk.
Yeah, I’m not a “schooled” dietitian or anything but I thought that I could learn a few things regardless. I checked out the pasteurization and homogenization and cow feed and all that. I wasn’t trying to find fault with milk, I was just trying to find out why it was getting sludgy on me. I found out more than I bargained for, including a lot of misconceptions about the “safety” of milk.
Our family drinks raw milk now and I think that we are informed enough to wisely decide the matter. I suppose I could go to college and get properly instructed on the “facts”, but it doesn’t sound like all the facts are being presented and taught. Sometimes we just have to expand outside the information box of biased schooling. So, anyway, the raw milk tastes just fine, like rich milk (about 20% of the milk is cream!) and there is no funny cow taste or whatever else people think of it. The only time the milk has tasted awful is when the cow gets into eating something it shouldn’t… such as the onion patch. The milk doesn’t keep for very long… about 4 days, then it starts tasting a bit sour. The good thing is that I can still cook with the sour milk… biscuits, waffles, soup, etc. Store bought milk doesn’t sour, it rots. So, my preference is raw milk from a healthy cow (I’m talking health, as in not a commercial setup of crowded cows tramping around in manure mud and living off of cheap feed and antibiotics). Thanks for the article… hopefully it will prompt others to consider what they eat, milk or whatever else, and to look beyond the spoon fed public information.
While I agree with you that ultra-pasteurization also kills the good bacteria and enzymes you have made a big mistake with something very important. The (U) with the D next to it does not mean that this milk was ultra pasteurized, it means that the milk is Kosher and the D means that it is a dairy product. This is an other prime example of people who are not Registered Dietitian feeding the public with wrong, harmful information. Please check your facts before you make an other clearly wrong post.
Seems to me that unpasteurized milk leads to a greater risk of getting Crohn’s Disease, one of the ugliest intestine-destroying afflictions of modern times (it was around before pasteurization):
http://aem.asm.org/cgi/content/abstract/62/2/631
http://www.scribd.com/doc/9702523/Crohns-Disease-Caused-by-Bacteria-in-Milk-from-sick-cows
I love Ultra-Pasteurized 1% Milk. It tastes delicious – it has this roasty/creamy flavor. A lot of people prefer it. I think standard pasteurized milk tastes like water.
The nutrient loss in ultra-pasteurized is debatable. I drink it for the calcium, protein, and flavor.
We could drink raw milk if we wanted, but…..ick.
You are absolutely right Eddie and I do apologize..I checked and rechecked my original sources several months ago but forgot about this post..I hope youw ill forgive me for my ignorance,.
OU is a kosher certification program where they supervise and consult food makers, it has nothing to do with ultra Pasteurized milk if you check again there are HTST (pasteurized milk) with the ou mark, not just the ultra. I suggest you check with ou before you spread incorrect ideas.