raw milk

I drank raw milk today.

1. I'm not dead yet.
2. The police haven't arrived.

But I did hear sirens going by a few minutes ago. Maybe they couldn't find my address and gave up. :)

This is the first time I've tried raw milk. Actually, it was frozen raw milk, because the goats don't produce much now in the wintertime. There was a little note taped to the fridge where I bought the milk, explaining that they were out of it, and frozen was all that was left. I'll try fresh-not-frozen whenever it becomes available again. (This makes me think of Antal Fekete writing about the 'good old days' of futures markets, where we expected seasonal variations in the prices of agricultural commodities. I can actually SEE this seasonal variation because the market is so small and low-tech. This isn't a factory farm operation. It's wintertime, so we don't have anything for sale. The milk is all gone. It's a reality check that reminds me of what it means to live in a climate with cold winters.)

I was pleased with the trust-based informal buying method where I got the milk. It's a place where you go only if you already know to look there. It's inside another place of business, because the original store shut down. I don't know why they shut down, but I'm guessing it was just another economic downturn kind of thing. It's a little refrigerator hidden in a dark, small, cluttered office area. If you didn't know what it was, and didn't look closely, you would mistakenly think it was just an employee break room. You just grab what you want and put money into a box, and write a note describing what you took. I also sent them an email first so that they would get to know me.

*****

So, what happened? I tried only a little sip at first, to make sure nothing bad would happen. All my life, I drank ordinary, store-bought, pasteurized milk, until my mid-twenties. I had a mysterious illness in 1999 that caused months of severe fatigue and digestive problems, and during that time, I became unable to eat certain foods and couldn't tolerate milk anymore. I had difficulty swallowing, and felt like I was going to throw up after eating, and had pain in the upper right quadrant of my abdomen. (That is the location of either the liver and gallbladder, or part of the large intestine. I thought I had hepatitis, but tests were negative.) I stopped drinking it permanently after that, because it just seemed too disgusting. So I was afraid that milk would be nauseating and undrinkable like it was during that time period.

The 1999 illness was my first experience of long-lasting unexplained illness, and my first experience of going to doctors and getting diagnostic tests only to find nothing wrong. (I watched a show called "Mystery Diagnosis" on cable at a friend's house last night. I'd like to talk about that show but I'll save it for some other time. You know I can't say anything in fifteen words or less. My reaction is: "They make it seem as though unsolvable illnesses are always obscure rare diseases - but actually, lots of hard-to-cure illnesses are very common and are caused by widespread problems in society." I have heard a million stories about people with ordinary, familiar illnesses who went to one doctor after another unable to get anybody to listen to them and unable to get any treatments that worked, even though their disease wasn't at all obscure. However, it's still important for doctors to recognize obscure diseases, and I don't have anything against that. I enjoyed the show and have a lot to say about it.)

My problem was probably from:

1. swimming in local non-chlorinated freshwater lakes, where I might have picked up a parasite or bacteria;

2. an unknown virus, since I heard stories of many people in the town getting sick at once with symptoms like my own - extremely severe fatigue that made us all think we had mononucleosis, and, in particular, a very specific type of fatigue that made your NECK in particular very tired, so that you could not hold your head up, and always wanted to lay your head down on your desk if you were working in front of a computer, as I was at the time. This "tired neck" and "wanting to lay your head down" was very specific and it was described by several people;

3. a bad reaction to the gypsy moth spray distributed every year by airplanes flying low over the trees (it seemed to happen right after that, and the gypsy moth spray is DESIGNED to interfere with the digestive system - but only the digestive systems of the moths, not humans; they say it contains a type of bacteria that only affects the moths, but I have my doubts - I've gotten sick every time they spray it);

4. food poisoning from a chinese restaurant, where my then-boyfriend's daughter threw up, and we all seemed to get sick for a while after that;

5. it might have even been bacterial contamination in PASTEURIZED milk, because during that time, I drank milk from a particular place - and I don't want to say their name - and even though the milk tasted good, I seemed to get sick a lot from drinking it, and strongly associated the sickness with milk.

The mystery is still unsolved. But I "got better" whenever I switched to the Feingold diet in winter 2000. I stopped drinking ALL milk. I stopped drinking coffee at that time, too. Quitting milk and coffee made my stomach able to tolerate food again. I became able to eat fats and greasy foods without getting sick. But now I drink coffee all the time, lots of it, and have few stomach problems. However, I am still sensitive to "bad quality fat" in restaurant foods, where a greasy hamburger might be sitting out exposed to the air, kept hot for a long time in a heated case, and the longer it's kept out, the more oxidized it becomes. There are changes when food is kept hot for a long time, or reheated over and over, and exposed to the air. I don't know the names of all the chemicals or how they change.

*****

Well, today with the raw milk, the first thing I noticed was allergic hives appearing on the side of my jawline, and above my lips. They appeared within about five minutes. That's the same place I get hives when I eat shrimp. They are merely a non-life-threatening nuisance. So, now I know, I'm mildly allergic to goat milk. It could be the particular plants the goats were eating in the pasture, or it could be the milk proteins themselves. I don't know. I decided I would drink the milk anyway.

After a while, I started wiggling my feet, because my legs get restless when I react to certain foods. This is something I learned about from the Feingold Diet (which is similar to the Urticaria Diet, a diet designed to eliminate the foods that trigger allergic hives). Milk makes some people hyperactive, restless, and uncomfortable.

So that's not too much of a surprise, but it's a little bit of a disappointment. Some raw milk advocates were hoping that maybe milk allergies were caused by the CHANGES in the protein that resulted from cooking it. But I reacted to the raw proteins (if it was the protein, and not the pasture plants).

Other fears about raw milk: that it could be contaminated with bacteria. I take this seriously. The bacteria come from the way the milk is handled and processed, not from the animal itself. A baby goat drinking goat milk from its mother would not get bacteria-contaminated milk. But a human might, if the milk has been in unclean containers or equipment sometime while being bottled.

There is a placebo-like hopefulness that maybe raw milk is a cure-all. I don't expect it to be a cure-all, but rather, I expect that maybe some things will get mildly better with dietary changes. Over time, if I make the right changes and observe which diets work best for me personally, then I will feel better. People vary with regard to which foods they tolerate, which foods make them sickest, and which foods they need the most.

If you talk to a random person about drinking unpasteurized milk, it triggers anxiety. They have always heard that pasteurization is necessary.

Raw milk is semi-illegal. (It's not as illegal as marijuana.) You need certain licenses to sell it and to make cheese from it. In order to get specific types of raw milk cheese, you have to go through some complicated loophole of buying the milk first and then contracting somebody else to make "your" milk into those types of cheese. (I read this on some papers that were there where I bought it.)

Some raw milk sellers have been harassed by government and by groups of people who don't understand the nuances of what causes it to be safe or unsafe. What I mean is that if you follow certain procedures, it will most likely be safe, and if you do things wrong, it will be dangerous... but instead, they want to forbid ALL raw milk entirely, instead of saying "It's safe if X, but unsafe if Y." They call it unconditionally dangerous, without understanding cause and effect.

My understanding is that milk becomes contaminated by the containers, pipes, bottles, and other equipment used to process it. If those things are clean, then raw milk is most likely safe. Raw milk AS SUCH is frowned upon, when instead, we should be frowning upon unclean milk-processing equipment.

You eat raw fruits and vegetables. Those can also be contaminated by containers and surfaces that they touch. They can be contaminated by manure or bad water in the fields where they're grown.

*****

Anyway, I am drinking small amounts at a time to see if it causes any problems (other than hyperactivity or hives). I will know what it is that's causing those problems and can easily stop drinking the milk.

I can also observe if it's giving me any benefits. I'm not sure what to expect. The cure-all claims are pretty extreme. There's something similar to the "cure-all" concept, and that's a "causes-all." (There must be a better word for that.) The lack of something, or some activity, CAUSES ALL modern illnesses or at least strongly contributes to them or makes us more susceptible to them. Raw milk, or, more generally, raw foods, are in the cures-all/causes-all categories. Supposedly all modern illnesses are made worse or caused by the lack of raw foods in the diet. This includes diabetes, obesity, and heart disease, among many other things. I get that impression from reading Weston Price articles - I agree with it, but also feel that there are other important causes to pay attention to.

I would add that the presence of certain chemicals, like pesticides, drugs, and heavy metals, are very significant causes of many health problems. Both of these are relevant to common modern diseases like obesity, deformities, mental health problems, severe tooth decay, and everything else (you name it).

*****

Genes

I was reading something today arguing against the belief that genes cause disease. I am noticing this idea and becoming aware of it. There is a pervasive belief in society that if you have any kind of long-term, hard-to-cure disease at all, it's the fault of your genes. You were born and destined to get this problem. Obesity in particular is viewed as something with genetic causes, and all of the focus is on looking at the genes to decide which people are most susceptible to obesity.

The "Genes Caused Your Long-Term Illness" belief makes people more helpless. Only high-tech, expensive, complicated, specialized drugs and procedures can fight back against those genetic causes.

In some ways I'm happy to read about highly technical scientific research and new drugs, new methods of treatment, and new knowledge. But the other side of me feels frustrated because so much troubleshooting can be done before you even reach the step of resorting to high-tech drugs and complicated treatments. Troubleshooting isn't emphasized enough. There are non-urgent, non-emergency problems where you DO have enough time - years and years - to try out different lifestyle changes and troubleshooting procedures. With long-term diseases, you aren't running to the emergency room about to DIE if you don't get some treatment right away. Sometimes in an emergency you accept a treatment you wouldn't have wanted, because your life is at stake. But not all problems are like that.

Anyway - though I don't necessarily agree with every single word of it - I liked reading this guy (http://www.youngerthanyourage.com/waisays/genetic.htm) arguing against the gene theory of illness. He said, if it's from our genes, then why were previous generations healthier than we are? Why did many problems appear only recently? If it's genetic, who did it come from? Why weren't our parents and grandparents sick with these same problems?

*****

I'll quit for now... this is a long ramble.