Dairy- What It Is, Issues With Conventional Dairy, and High Quality Dairy

What Is Dairy?

Dairy is the food group that is classified as the food group containing lactose. These include milk, cheese, and butter. Dairy has it’s place, and can be great for some people, but there’s a lot of people who also have issues with it, especially with an autoimmune disease. Dairy affects people in different ways, but it really depends on your state of health. The quality of the dairy is very important is well.

Issues With Conventional Dairy

Dairy we have now is not the same as it used to be. For one, babies produce an enzyme called lactase. This breaks down lactose, a protein found in milk, but in the early ages of life we stop producing this enzyme because we stop breast feeding. This is why most people are lactose intolerant. Most milk now a days is A1 protein. This is very irritating to the digestive track. The healthier version of this is A2. A2 is much easier on the digestive track. Also, if you get conventional milk, this is not coming from one cow. It is actually coming from hundreds of cows, so you have a hormonal soup. Milks is also pasteurized and homogenized. Pasteurization is heating the milk to a very high temperature, so you can kill unwanted bacteria, and preserve shelf life. The problem is that this dramatically degrades the nutrition. Homogenization is making a smooth consistency with milk. The cream usually rises to the top, but this makes it so it doesn’t happen. Again , the problem is that it absolutely denatures the quality of the milk. Another thing is that these cows in a CAFO (confined animal feeding operation) are treated very poorly. they don’t get to go outside, and they are stuck in a barn. They are pumped with growth hormone, so they grow faster, and are slaughtered faster. Also, they are given antibiotics to fight disease because of the conditions they’re in. In fact 70% of the antibiotics that we use go to the animals. If you drink milk from a pasture raised cow, it’s very unlikely to have the harmful bacteria in the first place.

High Quality Dairy

With dairy, we want to make sure it’s all pasture raised, and organic. This goes for milk, cheese, and butter. Then you can consume to raw milk, which is legal in some states. Some people are concerned with pathogens in raw milk, but this is not actually an issue if it’s high quality, and comes from a good farmer.

 

 

 

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