What raw milk did to my stomach
Like many adults, my body just does not do very well with milk.
This summer, I felt compelled to return to the drinking of milk, despite a long hiatus.
I remember a time in my past fondly, when I had the joy of working for a shepherd.
From early morning until 9 or 10 am, I would go out and help milk the sheep, then make the cheese, prepare for the afternoon milking, and clean the equipment.
In the afternoon the same took place for a second milking.
The rest of the time, I would write. That season in my life was a time set aside for me to process what preceded that time and to determine what I wanted to come next.
I was already very strong and have always been (‘strong like ox’ says one friend about me in a fake Eastern European accent).
But it was hard to believe how much stronger I got while working for the shepherd. And it happened no matter how little I ate. There was something special I was drinking at the time — a soured whey drink, a waste product from the cheese making. The whey was stored in milk churns in the creamery for a few days to sour, and while I realize that sounds anything but delicious, does it ever turn into something so delicious.
This beverage, locally pronounced as “zhin-chee-tza,” was a popular novelty among tourists passing that way through the Tatra Mountains, straddling the border between Slovakia and Poland. That beverage came complete with an entire tradition around it, including what type of handmade wooden cup to properly drink it out of. What the tourists did not buy up, would get fed to the pigs. They loved it too, and it really fattened them up.
I would drink a liter or so a day of that stuff and could feel how it made my body stronger. I can’t exactly explain how, but it did that exactly.
Well, while that environment might be a challenge to replicate precisely, I knew my body could use a little dairy.
I did not want the pasteurized fluid sold in the store. I wanted the real thing. So off to the internet I went and found the real thing two hours away, on a path I was expected to soon be traveling.
When I got the glass bottles of milk home, I tried half a cup. I was not sure how my lactose intolerant tummy might react, especially after years of not having milk. After waiting a little while I tried another half cup. And then another half cup.
Wouldn’t you know it.
Nothing but goodness.
Milk contains lactose. It also naturally contains lactase, which helps you digest the milk. When milk gets pasteurized, the lactase gets altered and can’t help you digest the milk. Raw milk, however, still contains the naturally occurring lactase. Nature made this food to be easily digestible and super nutritious for you, provided that you do not pasteurize it first.
If you do that, it becomes toxic for some 30 or 40 million Americans.
So why do something that makes it toxic?
Well, there have been harmful farming practices in the past, created in an attempt to industrialize the milk process. People accordingly got sick from milk. Pasteurization helps prevent that. However, pasteurization has also become a crutch for totally unsanitary industrial milk production. A farm that produces raw milk is forced to be very different from a standard dairy farm, because it cannot rely on the crutch of pasteurization to sanitize all the nastiness that ends up in standard milk. It just needs to rely on keeping things hygienic.
It needs to stay clean. The cows need to stay healthier. And there are competing microbes in the raw milk that make that milk safer. There are also plenty of other things that are more beneficial for you about raw milk.
So what did all this raw milk drinking do to my gut?
It made it feel awesome. And, I was right, that milk was the nutritional pick-me-up that I needed.
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Allan Stevo