How to choose a good cow’s milk?

Milk is the unmodified secretion of the udder of cows for milk production. It is obtained by milking once or several times a day. However, according to paragraph 2 of the current milk regulation, the white liquid sold in stores as milk is no longer milk at all.

How to know the real cow's milk?

The milk on the market is heat-treated, pasteurized or treated at ultra-high temperature. In some cases, they are also sterilized. Therefore, a large part of the German population has never drunk real cow's milk. Milk is by nature a delicate substance. Careful thought must be given to how the milk is processed so that it reaches the end consumer while retaining its quality. However, this quality is lost because it no longer contains a vital resource. Indeed, it does not guarantee optimal baby care anymore, except if it is drunk by the baby's body directly from the cow's udder.  The fact that man wants to drink the milk of a cow, but at the same time refuses to keep her and suck the milk directly from her udder is strange enough in itself. But if man then develops very complicated processes in order to be able to still get hold of the milk, transport it over long distances or store and process it for a long time, and if he continues to believe that it will retain its unique and vital quality, then he is mistaken. Indeed, the milk that is on sale everywhere today has nothing to do with the milk that comes from the mother's udder or breast.

How to milk cow's milk?

A large part of the western city dwellers still associate idyllic images with the word milking. Indeed, city dwellers often imagine a romantic farm, with pretty spotted cows in the meadow and a steaming pile of manure in front of the big barn. The image of the red-cheeked farmer sitting with a bucket and a stool next to his cow is ingrained in everyone's thoughts. Yet this idea is as far from reality as fairy tales.  Dairy lovers should say goodbye to the idea that dairy products for sale come from family farms. Dairy products originate in huge automated factory halls where thousands of dairy cows lead miserable computer-controlled lives. Milk production is probably the least pleasant thing about this era. Cows do not exist to give milk to humanity. Cows do not exist because they want to be treated to death by people who steal their children. Cows and cattle once lived in large herds in the forests and steppe regions.  Cows have filled their own ecological niche in a harmonious balance of all living things on this planet. These giant mammals transformed leaves and grasses into an excellent fertilizer for the earth. Moreover, their bodies were used to feed a family of predators. However, the idea of a wild cow living in the wild has become impossible especially in Central Europe, because it would have no chance of survival. It would be immediately captured and put in a cage and milked immediately.

Milking cows in modern times

Today, the calloused hands of farmers do not milk anymore. Yes, there are actually no more farmers in the classical sense of the word. The person who often looks after several thousand dairy cows on a dairy farm is called a production or plant manager. Milking machines are the only machines in operation to milk today's cows. Milking by hand is not only tedious and time consuming, but for hygienic reasons it is not at all welcomed by health and veterinary authorities.  With the milking machine, the procedure of milking twice a day has turned into an unpleasant and even very painful affair for the cow. If you take a layman into a modern milking parlour, he will not know at first sight where he has ended up. He is in an artificially lit machine room, dominated by steel and chrome, where the doors can be opened and closed by remote control. The smell of chemical disinfectants almost brings tears to the visitor's eyes. He will never dream that a living mammal is kept here, an animal that belongs to the prairies and forests. The excerpt from the description of a milking parlour makes it clear that a milker must know how the machines work, but not how the cows work.  Today, a milker is an animal farmer who specializes in raising cattle. A milking machine milks several cows at the same time and normally takes 5 to 10 minutes for one cow. The milk is transported through pipes directly to a tank where it is cooled from body temperature to 4° to 8° Celsius. This procedure seems quite normal in the age of ubiquitous cooling equipment. For milk, however, cooling means a significant reduction in quality.

Milk cooling and protein structure

Milk is now stored for a minimum of a few hours and a maximum of two days until the dairy's tanker arrives. These mechanical loads, combined with strong temperature variations, cause initial damage to the fat and protein structure of the milk. The proteins take on a different structure: they become denatured and are no longer present in their natural form. The fats split and oxidize, in other words: they become rancid.  The milk is now pumped into the tanker at maximum speed and shaken during the transport to the dairy. The milk is now processed. It is pumped again through numerous pipe systems. The outer shells of its sensitive fat globules are damaged and free fat leaks out. The prescribed permanent cooling increases this free fat leakage, the rancidity continues unabated.  Under natural conditions, milk never sees the light of day. The infant drinks it directly from the source. But if it comes into contact with light and air, it must be destroyed as quickly as possible to be broken down by bacteria. This is why milk is a real magnet for microorganisms, including those belonging to pathogens. Depending on the type of microorganisms that settle, humans either like or dislike the product that is now growing.  However, the colonization of pathogens cannot be recognized by taste. That is why the milk is heated as a precautionary measure before being put on the market. The aim is to destroy harmful microorganisms and reduce the risk of illness for consumers. The most dreaded disease allegedly transmitted through raw milk. However, it is often the bad micro-organisms that escape pasteurization, while the good ones are destroyed. This is why pasteurized milk that rests for a long time rarely turns into sour milk.

The taste of the pasteurized sour milk

After the pasteurization, the bad bacteria remaining in the milk, the putrefactive bacteria multiply with an extreme speed. Extreme, because their natural counterparts, namely the good bacteria are henceforth absent. As a result, the milk rots instead of souring. When milk becomes sour, it is immediately noticeable by smell and taste, but not with pasteurized milk. You can drink it for a few more days until you vaguely notice that the good milk has long since turned into rotten milk.  In nature, cow's milk is never exposed to temperatures above or below the body temperature of the cow, which is about 38 degrees. However, during food processing, the milk now undergoes the opposite process, as it is heated to 72 degrees and rises to 135 degrees during heating. These bacteria are not comparable to those that may colonize milk after milking.  The bacteria that the infant drinks from the mother's milk are microorganisms that help the infant develop a strong immune system. They are microorganisms that settle in the infant's body to live in symbiosis with him, that is to say in a community of life for mutual benefit. The pasteurized milk, on the other hand, is a matter without life. Rancid fats and putrefactive bacteria are not exactly what transmit vitality. That is why this milk does not do that - neither to the calf nor to the human milk consumer.

Who benefits from pasteurization?

Chemically speaking, pasteurized milk does not differ much from the original raw milk. It still contains the same amount of protein, calcium and iron. But why does the calf often die at the latest after six months when it receives only the milk of its mother in pasteurized form. The factors of this phenomenon have not yet been discovered by the researchers. If pasteurized milk were better than its raw counterpart, each udder would have a built-in hot plate to heat the milk.  Since no scientist has yet reported such a device, everyone must consume the rawest form to cause less damage. Pasteurization and all the other processes used to treat milk benefit the dairy industry, not anyone else. After all, the once delicate substance can now be stored in huge quantities, transported over long distances and easily transformed into all sorts of products without being surprised by a sudden deterioration.  Pasteurization was introduced to produce bacteria-free milk. However, the milk is not automatically clean. It is simply heated. The milking parlors, milking machines and all the machinery in the dairies must of course be in an absolutely hygienic state. Therefore, they are constantly cleaned with aggressive detergents and disinfectants containing chlorine and iodine. The residues of these agents are never removed from the milk.  Other minute impurities such as dust, cow hair, feces, tiny insects and residues may still contain them. Although they are now pasteurized, they are still inside. Tuberculosis pathogens are extremely resistant and sometimes survive pasteurization as well.

Antibiotics and residues of drugs, still preserved!

Pasteurization causes such significant changes in the quality of milk that no one would think that the labeling on the carton could be taken seriously. This milk is pretty much everything, but it is no longer fresh. But the dairy industry is still allowed to write the word fresh on the packages.  Although there have been several complaints from consumer protection associations about this, they have all been rejected. Rats with a tooth decay process similar to that of human teeth were divided into three experimental groups. The first group was fed ordinary rodent food and thus an average of one hole in the tooth during their lifetime. The second group was fed a pure sugar diet. The result was 5.5 holes. The third group had an average of 9.5 holes after ingesting pasteurized milk, almost twice as many as the sugar group.

Ultra-high temperature milk: heating and sterilization

Pasteurized milk contains rancid fats, denatured proteins, whole colonies of bacteria, yet it loses heat-sensitive vitamins and enzymes. Nevertheless, their taste remains unchanged for more than a week. However, in order to be able to preserve the milk even longer, an ultra-high temperature heating and sterilization has been developed.  Ultra-high temperature milk is heated to at least 135°C for two to eight seconds. Unopened UHT milk can then be stored at room temperature for at least three months. If the milk is heated to 120°C for half an hour, it is sterile, i.e. absolutely germ-free. Sterile milk can even be stored for six months at room temperature. Needless to say, the quality of milk has not improved after these procedures.  With the exception of milk from certain organic dairies, milk is regularly homogenized. In this process, it is subjected to such pressure that the droplets of milk fat, which would otherwise accumulate on the surface of the milk and form a creamy lump of butter in the bottle which is upsetting to the consumer, are broken down into tiny particles.

Is homogenized milk as harmful as cigarettes?

The lump has disappeared, but the fat particles in milk are now so tiny that they can pass through the intestinal wall and cause allergy reactions. Consumption of homogenized milk carries a twenty-fold higher risk of triggering an allergy than consumption of untreated milk. In addition to the fine fat particles, an enzyme also migrates from the milk into the bloodstream, which can clog the arteries and cause high blood pressure. Conventional dairy cows are now fed a cheap ready-made feed instead of grass or hay. For financial reasons, they are now imported from third world countries. The use of pesticides is now the order of the day. Multinational pharmaceutical companies from Germany, Switzerland, the United States and other industrial nations are exporting these toxins at a profit to poor countries. Insecticides and herbicides are widely used in animal feed crops. Because toxins accumulate in animals, meat contains on average 14 times more pesticides than plant foods, while dairy products contain another 5.5 times more.  There is a so-called maximum quantity regulation for milk in which about 300 different poisons are listed that must actually be constantly monitored for their presence. However, the state milk control authorities do not even test milk for about 100 officially known toxins. No thought is lost on poisons that have not yet been registered.

Iodized milk used as a disinfectant

Modern dairy cows have to produce a huge amount of milk every year and the udder tissue and mammary glands are completely overloaded. Cow-unfriendly milking machines still contribute to the fact that today's cows are constantly suffering from udder inflammation.  Iodine is used not only for disinfecting rooms and machines, but also for the specific treatment of udders. The blood-red remedy, which causes great pain when the wounds are open, is applied directly to the udder. Today, microorganisms hardly penetrate the milk any more, but iodine does.

Genetically modified milk and crack for cows

The first genetically modified food to be widely marketed in the United States was milk. It contained a genetically manipulated growth hormone for cattle. Crack is a mixture of drugs containing cocaine and RBGH was nicknamed that because it stimulates cows. It causes dairy cows to increase their milk production by 30%.  The FDA or the Food and Drug Administration has declared this genetically manipulated milk safe for human consumption, although various independent scientists have warned against RBGH. It is said to promote the formation of another hormone that stimulates unnatural cell division in humans who consume milk and prevents natural cell death, both characteristics of cancer cells.

Unlimited use of antibiotics

But even without the warnings of these scientists, U.S. dairy farmers soon realized what the new hormone was doing to them. Cows suffered more severe hoof, joint and udder infections. Farmers had to constantly resort to antibiotic injections. But in doing so, they risked exceeding the allowable limit for antibiotics in milk.  Before the farmers could take all their packets of RBGH to the hazardous waste incinerator in a fit of rage, the FDA moved quickly. It quickly changed the allowable limit for antibiotics in milk and increased it 100 times. RBGH can now be given without concern, as there is no longer a need to spare with antibiotics for the infectious diseases that follow.  At that time, people were thinking about how best to label genetically manipulated foods. Milk could be sold publicly without labeling, but with up to 100 times the dose of antibiotics. So if the calf is fed exclusively pasteurized, ultra-high temperature, homogenized milk, it will get sick and die within six months.