Nature’s supplement
Do pasteurized milk products give you an upset stomach? Have you been diagnosed lactose intolerant? Have you given up all dairy because of adverse side effect?
I’ve been there too. Just this year I had to cut dairy out to avoid stomach pains and gut issues. I was able to offset some of the side effects by taking digestive enzymes and probiotics. But the stomach pain still persisted and the supplements were expensive.
There had to be a better way.
Pasteurization of milk kills off the bad bacteria in milk but also the good. It also kills off helpful digestive enzymes like lactase which helps our bodies break down lactose. The pasteurization process also damages the nutrients in milk making them less beneficial to us.
Fresh, unprocessed, whole milk has all of it’s beneficial probiotics and enzymes intact. The majority of people with lactose intolerance have found that while they cannot drink pasteurized milk, they are able to digest raw milk without a problem. While this is not a recommendation you’ll find from the CDC or FDA, there is plenty of antidotal evidence and stuidies to show the nutritional value. Leaving the milk in it’s natural state has given it the digestibility and nutritional benefits that people had enjoyed for thousands of years prior to pasteurization.
Image from Raw Milk Institute
So why pasteurize if it makes dairy products harder to digest? Not all raw milk is the same. While all dairy farmers work very hard and grade A pasteurized milk does have a very high standard to meet, raw milk intended for pasteurization can let a few things go that raw milk (fresh unprocessed whole milk) absolutely cannot. The standards are much higher on farms that sell their raw milk in states where it is legal or on farms with herd shares. A more in depth look at why milk pasteurization started is a blog post for another time.
The raw milk we drink from our cows we take extra care to insure that it is as clean as can be while maintaining the benefits of it being raw.
Once I started consuming raw milk, my stomach problems went away! I no longer had knots in my stomach and my bowel movements became normal! And I’ve even found my dependance on probiotics and digestives enzymes is much less if not unnecessary completely.
For more in depth information, check out these articles from the Raw Milk Institute!
