Everyone who is interested in good nutrition asks this question sooner or later that which milk is best. This post will shed some insight into how to determine if the milk you are getting is good or not. The criterion used is that all foods which are closest to the way they are found in nature are the best.
Using this criterion, how is the milk found in nature. All female mammals produce milk for their off spring. So it’s a no brainer that the best milk for babies of human beings is their mother’s milk. There have been countless studies done in this regard and all prove conclusively that mother’s milk is the best for babies. Period.
For adults, it’s almost impossible to get mother’s milk so the next best option is cow’s milk which has been consumed for centuries if not thousands of years.
Before we messed up the food with modernized production and processing methods, even upto a few decades ago, the cow’s milk was available as raw, non-homogenized & unpasteurized.
After the arrival of food processing and modern dairy farming methods, getting the most out of every cow became the motto. This led to hormone injections to the cows and then all hell broke loose. The hormone laden cows were more prone to diseases which led to antibiotics usage. The milk was not healthy anymore so it was pasteurized (a fancy term for boiling the milk to kill bacteria).
Seemingly this was not enough and the food processors thought of making milk look good (what were they thinking!) so that the cream doesn’t rise on top. They introduced homogenization (a fancy term for mixing cream so well into the milk that it doesn’t rise on the top).
When all of this was done, we had milk that was beautiful to look at but nutritionally a mess to drink.
The use of hormones caused reproductive issues in women, early puberty in girls and so on.
The homogenization caused heart disease by plaque deposition in arteries of everyone.
The pasteurization caused elimination of natural nutrients & enzymes.
Consumers who are smart have caught up with the reasons of ill health, that’s why the demand of natural unprocessed milk is growing constantly.
So if you can find family owned farms who take care of their cows and are not using the “modern farming” methods of injecting hormones, antibiotics, homogenizing & pasteurizing, that would be the best milk.
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