Real Milk -The Health Protector

Properly produced milk isn’t just a healthy food – it’s a health food. We grow up thinking of it as a great source of calcium for building strong bones and teeth. But modern science is coming up with an impressive array of other health-promoting compounds – vitamins, proteins, peptides, fatty acids and probiotics. Nutritionists have even started talking of milk as a “functional food” because it contains so many bioactive compounds that help protect human health.

Because of its health giving properties milk has been valued as a food for thousands of years. Sadly it’s now being demonised by some campaigners as an unhealthy food. Critics point to the distressing symptoms of cows’ milk allergy – which include diarrhoea, eczema and asthma – plus the apparent intolerance of some people to the carbohydrate lactose in milk. Others have begun to link milk drinking with more serious conditions such as heart disease, breast cancer and prostrate cancer.

The dairy industry has only itself to blame for these attacks. For decades they’ve blindly followed the path of producing more and more at ever lower cost, with scant regard for the nutritional value of this once great food. They’ve bred a freak cow hardwired for high output even when she’s pregnant, so the milk is laced with unhealthy growth hormones. And instead of grazing her on herb-rich grassland – plus hay or silage in winter - they feed her unhealthy foods such as maize, soya and pesticide-ridden cereal grains. When this impoverished white liquid reaches the dairy it’s then taken apart, heated, smashed up and reassembled into a standardised factory product. No wonder supermarket milk has little in common with the healthy, natural food of old.

New research at Newcastle University shows that organic milk contains up to 90 per cent more vitamins and protective fats than conventionally produced milk. This is probably because the organic rules lay down minimal levels of grass and forage in the diet. It doesn’t seem to have occurred to the mainstream industry that what you feed to cows determines the nutrients that turn up in the milk. So if you want to drink milk that does you good rather than harm, organic milk is a must. But if you’re after the full health package you’ll need to go further.

Rather than buy “commodity milk” – in which the production of dozens of farms is all mixed together – you need to find a local farmer who’s producing milk from little else but grass, hay or silage plus a few home-grown forage crops such as kale or a grazed cereal crop. It’s best if they’re using one of the traditional dairy breeds such as the Ayshire, British Friesian, Dairy Shorthorn or, of course, the Jersey or Guernsey. But whatever the breed the important thing is that they’re grazing fresh, species-rich pasture in summer with a winter diet based on grass silage or hay. Milk produced this way is a fantastic food and will be worth every penny it costs.