Milk

I've been drinking coffee again, even though I quit it on Monday. Some other things are still contaminated, and I had hypersomnia again and I slept all day Tuesday - I think I already mentioned that. I got new Goodwill clothes and when I wear them I feel so much more comfortable - no more drugs on my skin. Anyway, to reduce the amount of coffee I'm drinking, I've been getting a small cup of coffee and filling it most of the way up with half-and-half. Today it was about 3/4 cream and 1/4 coffee (plus sugar).

I've noticed before that milk has hormones that affect my own hormones, and now that I've been drinking this coffee with lots of cream in it, I'm noticing it again. I usually don't drink milk anymore. I used to, but in 1999 or whenever I got really sick for a long time, I had to stop drinking milk because it was making my upset stomach much worse, and I never started drinking it again, except a little bit here and there, or in ice cream.

Theories about why I seem to get a dose of hormones from milk:

1. Leftover synthetic bovine growth hormone. I was told (by Ken, a guy who used to work on a dairy farm and knows other dairy farmers) that they're not allowed to use bovine growth hormone anymore, and they supposedly stopped using it. Maybe some people are still using it, secretly, or maybe there is leftover bovine growth hormone in the pipes and tubes that the milk goes through when it comes from the automatic milker. I saw automatic milkers, and I saw the pipes, and the pipes are disgusting and full of old, clotted milk that never gets rinsed out. It could have leftover hormones in it. (Some farms are cleaner than others. I visited two different farms, and they were drastically different from each other in their way of being organized and how they were run. The whole style was different. You might visit a nice, clean farm, and not believe how disgusting the automatic milkers can be, because you might have seen only a farm where they keep the equipment clean. But they're not all that way.)

2. Holstein cows have lots of hormones anyway, because they were bred to have a large pituitary gland that causes them to have large udders and produce a lot of milk.

3. None of the above - something else is giving milk a hormone-like effect.

What would be the ideal milk that I would like to buy?

1. raw, not pasteurized

2. milked into a non-metallic pail, instead of being milked into an automatic milker and then going through the disgusting pipes and tubes, full of germs and mold and fungus and slime. Pail must be nonmetallic because I suspect that it's not good for food to get metal dissolved in it. (I don't want it to be plastic either. I'm not sure what it should be made of. I like glass or ceramic, but that seems inconvenient, and with my luck, I would discover that ceramic is toxic, too. This is an "I don't know, YOU think of something" situation. The free market will take care of it.)

3. milk from a non-Holstein cow. I read once, somewhere, in some forgotten place, that there used to be a cow called a 'scrub cow', which was a basic, generic, inferior type of cow, sort of like an alley cat is just a generic type of cat. I don't know if I really understood correctly, but I had the impression that this was a kind of non-breed cow. Anyway, that's the type of cow I'd use, some cow that didn't have anything special about it. I guess all domesticated cows will have some kind of 'breed,' but maybe, I would want any kind of breed that wasn't made for milking. That would mean it had fewer hormones, and more nutrient-dense milk. Weston Price pointed out that the Holstein Cows (or maybe it was that other book, Nourishing Traditions, that talked about this) can produce a lot of milk, but they can only put a little bit of nutrients in it, so it has a low nutrient density. Another cow breed produces less milk, but the milk is better quality.

4. nothing but pasture-fed. No grain at all fed to the cows, just grass and whatever other plants they eat. No hormones, no antibiotics, no drugs, no vaccines, nothing given to the cows. 'Organic,' no pesticides, no fertilizers. I wouldn't mind certain kinds of fertilizers if they were organic.

5. not homogenized.

6. absolutely NO VITAMINS added to the milk. Synthetic vitamin D causes the symptoms of vitamin D deficiency. In other words, the more synthetic vitamin D you use, the more you show symptoms of not getting enough vitamin D, which causes you to start using MORE vitamin D because you think you're not getting enough. Synthetic vitamin D is bad for you. Synthetic vitamin A is also bad for you. Both of them are added to milk.

7. no powdered milk added. Reduced-fat milk supposedly has some powdered milk added to it, and powdered milk contains oxidized cholesterol. Oxidized cholesterol is bad for you. Also, the powdered milk contains some preservatives and other chemicals - I read that in the Feingold Diet informational materials somewhere.

8. milk is whole, nothing taken out of it at all. Not reduced-fat, not skim.

That's all I can think of for now. I'll probably think of a few more criteria after publishing this blog.