I know raw milk is illegal in NC ( ) but does anyone know of a local farmer that sells milk produced by pastured cows? I tried searching around online but couldn't really find anything. Only grass-fed milk I've seen in the supermarket around here comes from the Midwest and is ultra-pasteurized

Thanks tdub

1/23/2011 1:55:04 PM

If you're dedicated, try any meetup.com group the looks promising and with enough elbow rubbing you'll find something.

I had the chance to try some a little while ago. I was rather underwhelmed, and my intestines didn't particularly talk to me after the experience. I used to think that store bought milk I tried in Japan tasted so good because they omitted a process that we use here, but I've come to believe that was instead because they do some tricks like sweetening.

1/23/2011 2:18:38 PM

i don't feel like googling but whats better about raw milk? (i understand the grass fed part)


i don't drink milk so i dont know about these things

1/23/2011 2:23:35 PM

pasteurization kills most of the life in the milk. The thing that people get all touchy and heated about is the health impact of the bugs in the milk (yes they are called bugs). If you believe, like most nutritionists, that humans only need organic compounds and minerals to live healthy, then consuming the teeming mass of bacteria that is raw milk is simply an unnecessary health risk.

The other view is that your intestines are a jungle. Sanitizing everything that goes into the environment is what we do now. But like a jungle, the best way to protect it is to host a healthy balance between the organisms living there. And basically, raw milk is a zoo of bacteria - they get in there and play with each other and help keep everything in check. Your digestive system becomes that of superman and your health skyrockets, no longer being held down by our mistaken Western nutrition dogmas.

There are problems with both of these arguments, for sure. But this should start us out pretty well.

1/23/2011 2:31:10 PM

^ahahahahah. i loved how you desribed it like i was in third grade


so basically people think the probiotic effects of milk are lessened by pasteurization.
thats an interesting concept.

1/23/2011 2:41:05 PM

Here is a website you may like. It gives a list of farms closest to you by typing in your zip code (it looks like about 4 farms in NC). You may not be interested because they do pasteurized all their milk....there is a section their website about that.

http://www.organicvalley.coop/

Here is a list of stores around Raleigh they sell at. I bet if you tried some of these stores there may be some more products that are exactly what you are looking for.

Carolina, Christina P.O. Box 807
Knightdale, NC 27545
Work (804) 647-3130 4.7 miles

Lowes2900 E Millbrook Rd
Raleigh, NC 27604-2816
Work (919) 873-0722 5.1 miles

Harris Teeter of Cameron Village 500 Oberlin Rd
Raleigh, NC 27605-1327
Work (919) 828-9216 6.9 miles

Harris Teeter of Glenwood Village 2603 Glenwood Avenue
Raleigh, NC 27608
Work (919) 787-5526 7.2 miles

Lowes192 Milborn St
Raleigh, NC 27609-7842
Work (919) 839-5552 8.3 miles

Harris Teeter of North Hills 4421 Six Forks Road
Raleigh, NC 27609
Work (919) 786-4895 8.3 miles

Harris Teeter of North Ridge Shopping Center 6024 Falls of the Neuse Road
Raleigh, NC 27619
Work (919) 872-5786 8.7 miles

1/23/2011 2:52:40 PM

It's complicated and what we've covered are warm-fuzzies compared to the mauling complicated discussion that would do the issue justice.

Humans are made to live in a sea of life, granted. But it's difficult to identify all the ways this matters. And one argument against raw milk, to be sure, is that drinking milk isn't natural. Drinking milk that had an unnatural process (although heat) applied to it is

unnatural + unnatural = who the fuck cares anymore?

Most of our bacterial exposure in nature was probably through drinking water and directly through environment, but the impacts of meat consumption, which have way more in the way of microscopic creepy crawlies should be unclear. Humans are only eaten large game on-and-off in the Homo Sapien history.

But either way, even parasitic organisms have beneficial effects of some type. By the very definition of parasite they really don't increase your fitness, but parasites have been shown with good confidence to account for the differences between the rampant allergies of the developed world versus the notable absence of allergies of the non-developed world.

Some people on the forefront of science are seriously interested in pinning down the effects that bugs have on our functions and see major benefits from this. Craig Venture wants to engineer artificial life to replace the bugs in your gut (yes this is a totally valid phrase), which can give you all kinds of health benefits. The main difference between that and raw milk is that one might just prefer to know what we're doing. Drinking raw milk is taking a grab-bag from nature and throwing it at your guts. It's not hard to argue that it can have both good and bad effects. If we could actually figure out how the systems work then we really could engineer the benefits that naturopaths claim to have already gained.

It'll take decades for modern medicine to prescribe remedies that are not sterile, but that's just because we can't reasonably control it yet. So what do we do with a part of nature's creation that is beyond our ability to control? Try to exude it from our environment of course.

BONUS! Waterborne parasite for the win.



[Edited on January 23, 2011 at 3:08 PM. Reason : ]

1/23/2011 3:07:36 PM

I like how she described it. Not everyone is a biologist/pharmacist/model

1/23/2011 3:09:29 PM

ahahaha. sorry. i didnt mean it mean.
i figure most of the people on here are in the know about the bacteria in most dairy products
but i could be 100% wrong.
it's a great explanation!

if i drank milk, i dont know how id feel about raw milk.
i do believe i would give it a shot though.


^^
i can honestly say

Quote :

"Most of our bacterial exposure in nature was probably through drinking water "

i've never really thought of this before.

i love shit like this.

[Edited on January 23, 2011 at 3:14 PM. Reason : fhgf]

1/23/2011 3:12:16 PM

^ lol, the image I posted was of a parasite that gets to us from water. There's lots of commentary that could be added on that species alone.

The organism hangs out as a micro-organism in water. It can be easily filtered out with modern filters... but it evolved when we didn't have such filters. Then it grows in the body while following gravity down to the foot, then breaks out of the skin to get back into water as a slimy worm at which point it promptly lays more eggs that repeat the cycle.

I find it interesting, for one, because it's fairly well tuned to humans living in a semi-aquatic environment. It expects to crawl out of the foot into wetlands basically. And it only preys on humans. That's an environment very rich with creepy crawlers of all sizes.

1/23/2011 5:00:52 PM

im thinking about prehistoric man, and how we evolve and that a lot of it had to do with unclean drinking water.

there are a million reasons to say that we (as humans) "cheat" evolution but i honestly never thought of this one! >.<

and its a big one!

1/23/2011 5:18:59 PM

Quote :

"its a big one!"

that's what she said

1/23/2011 5:28:42 PM

Quote :

"there are a million reasons to say that we (as humans) "cheat" evolution but i honestly never thought of this one! >.<"

How did we 'cheat' evolution? Don't all animals have to deal with unsafe drinking water... well, depending on the environment.

1/23/2011 5:47:26 PM

in this certain case-by purifying our water.
i mean, im mostly talking about more developed countries here (obviously )

i can guarantee you that the worlds population would be much lower if we didn't purify and clean it.

[Edited on January 23, 2011 at 5:52 PM. Reason : ^i'm talking about human evolution! ]

1/23/2011 5:51:59 PM

oh, right on.

I think that's just one of the things that 'held down' the human population right up until mass agriculture. If you think about it, if we didn't have major health issues that could be resolved so easily, then human population would have been much greater to start out with and we wouldn't have observed the same explosion, and in addition to that, Earth would have been better adapted to such a large mass of people.

This particular parasite can be filtered out with a fairly ordinary nylon cloth. But that still doesn't reach some areas of the world. Also a reason we are expecting such large population growth in Africa for the next 50 years.

1/23/2011 6:04:50 PM

i buy the organic valley stuff, i don't drink enough milk to mind the price and having grown up with milk from the grandparents dairy i can't stand the taste of the normal stuff. i used to buy maple view but i think their milk has hormones and antibiotics and i try to stay away from that.

but i don't understand the aversion to pasteurization. dairy milk isn't natural for us anyways, i don't buy into the pro-biotic argument. my purchase decision is based on grass vs. grain and hormones and antibiotics.

[Edited on January 23, 2011 at 6:42 PM. Reason : .]

1/23/2011 6:35:03 PM

I've never read one credible scientific journal that showed any benefits from raw milk consumption, but drinking raw milk is known to have severe health risks. The arguments for raw milk consumption make about as much sense as the claims that immunizations cause autism and should be avoided.

[Edited on January 23, 2011 at 6:38 PM. Reason : grass fed vs. corn fed dairy cows is a completely valid argument though.]

1/23/2011 6:37:39 PM

there was a time when pasteur was considered a hero...

1/23/2011 6:44:17 PM

^aha.

winner.

1/23/2011 6:46:15 PM

Quote :

"but i don't understand the aversion to pasteurization. dairy milk isn't natural for us anyways, i don't buy into the pro-biotic argument. my purchase decision is based on grass vs. grain and hormones and antibiotics. "

Quote :

"I've never read one credible scientific journal that showed any benefits from raw milk consumption, but drinking raw milk is known to have severe health risks. The arguments for raw milk consumption make about as much sense as the claims that immunizations cause autism and should be avoided."

There isn't any scientific backing, nor should one expect there to be. It's only a very small population of people who are interested in it in the first place, and some of those people are probably motivated by the ferociously illegal nature of it anyway.

In part due to its status, I think most of the people trying it are healthy individuals. If a healthy individual tries raw milk, the far and away most likely outcome is no effect. And I think the health risks are way overblown. I could agree that raw milk is extraordinarily risky if you took it from the obese, hormone full, barely mobile (if that) factory cows that produce most of what we have in grocery stores now. Raw milk MUST be taken from the absolute TOP TOP TOP of the line conditions, and it generally is. If you consider the natropath culture surrounding it, this isn't surprising.

Feeding it to your children... I might get squirmy about that.

[Edited on January 23, 2011 at 6:53 PM. Reason : lol quote]

1/23/2011 6:52:47 PM

^4 maple view doesn't use hormones but they do use antibiotics. And they feed the cows corn, which is what I'm really trying to stay away from.

I'm interested in raw milk mainly because a few studies haveshown it to help alleviate asthma. But since I'm not willing to drive to Virginia to legally buy raw milk, my main mission is finding at least grass fed milk, pasteurized or otherwise

1/23/2011 6:58:00 PM

I've always loved milk from fast food places. I was convinced it was cause it was like hyperultrasuperpasteurized.

Then finally I realized it was just whole milk, something I never drank otherwise. Fat tastes gooooood.

1/23/2011 7:10:11 PM

Whole milk is better for you too!

1/23/2011 7:32:45 PM

Quote :

"No milk is better for you too! "

1/23/2011 7:50:34 PM

Quote :

"Whole milk is better for you too!"

...............

shit, i had this nice bit about gut flora but it's gone now due to a glitch....

basically it's hard to influence your gut flora much, you will experience unpleasant side effects trying to mess with it much.

if you are outside much at all as a kid then you should be fine.


personally i think this kinda extreme (looking for raw milk for example) is both unnecessary and unsafe in most cases. in the end all you will really get out of messing with it much is a increase in quality time on the white throne.

1/23/2011 9:11:11 PM

milk doesn't eat grass

1/23/2011 9:17:36 PM

Kris is very intelligent and handsomely endowed with wit. I know this from his posts in The Soap Box.

1/23/2011 9:44:28 PM

^^^ There have been several studies now showing that skim milk, or even the low fat fad as a whole, is not as good for you as the government likes you to think. Milk has several fat soluble vitamins that we can benefit from. I'd rather drink whole milk in moderation than gallons of skim milk personally but it's really up to you what you want to drink

One study showing benefits of whole milk/cheese/etc
http://www.annals.org/content/153/12/I-56.full

Another study on while milk and its effects in regards to prostate cancer
http://aje.oxfordjournals.org/content/166/11/1259.abstract

1/23/2011 10:34:43 PM

This might be better for another thread, but I am interested in these topics. To be honest, I doubt the 2nd study there, which claims to find a positive effect on prostate cancer from milk consumption. I haven't heard that particular effect before, but I do know one thing milk doesn't do - give you strong bones. But the reality is that all of these studies are not blind trials, and it would be impossible to do blind trials for milk and there are so many things wrong with any study that does a non-blind trial since the independent variable is conflated with so many other lifestyle things. Nutrition simply can't be studied in the way the we do drugs.

I'm looking into these books, and hoping to find some interesting things:

Eat, Drink, and Be Healthy: The Harvard Medical School Guide to Healthy Eating
The China Study: The Most Comprehensive Study of Nutrition Ever Conducted

I haven't read them yet but I understand that the bottom line is that, on a strength-of-evidence basis, the truth is there and it's what we already knew. Eating animal products in general makes you less healthy and vegetables is pretty much the only thing that makes you more healthy that we can prove. There's a lot of other stuff that we can kind of suspect, such as Omega-3s which has a pretty good case, and some of the pro-biotic arguments in these thread have somewhat of a weak case. But we still can't really say to know any of these have positive effects.

1/23/2011 10:56:47 PM

Why cow milk though?

What evolutionary reason is there to believe the bugs in cow milk are somehow good for humans?

I wouldn't be surprised if early cultures boiled their water (not knowing exactly why) before drinking it, whenever possible.

1/23/2011 11:18:34 PM

Quote :

"Why cow milk though? What evolutionary reason is there to believe the bugs in cow milk are somehow good for humans?"

Not necessarily now, but there used to be a huge advantage to drinking milk. The lactose tolerance that most of us have is a recent development in human evolutionary history. The main actor was Vitamin D. Some people today are still living somewhat deficient, but historically it has always been a problem.

And aside from that... milk has some superior qualities over meat, and if your choices are seasonal plants and meat (they were), milk helps a lot. Not to mention, it's a massive calorie advantage, and if obtaining vitamins and sufficient calories are in any below the optimal levels for optimal fitness, then drinking animal's milk will get you more offspring. It did and the genes for it proliferated massively in the last 10,000 years.

Quote :

"I wouldn't be surprised if early cultures boiled their water (not knowing exactly why) before drinking it, whenever possible."

What did they use for a pot?

[Edited on January 23, 2011 at 11:30 PM. Reason : ]

1/23/2011 11:29:34 PM

You can use a hollowed out log for a pot.

1/23/2011 11:30:39 PM

That just seems like a lot of effort for people who already have built a sufficient tolerance to water bacteria, especially when you consider the benefit would be dubious and there would be little case for experimentation in the first place which would have to be maintained over a long period of time to observe effect (if any is observed).

I could be convinced they did soup though. I'd want a big bowl of soup if I had nothing but fibrous plant matter and bulbs that taste terrible raw. I mean, shish kabobs would get old after a while.

1/23/2011 11:37:30 PM

it wouldn't make sense for a society without an understanding of any kind of germs to boil water to sterilize it. even fairly modern societies were still often using alcohol as a water substitute because it kept better.

1/24/2011 12:04:16 AM

Quote :

"it wouldn't make sense for a society without an understanding of any kind of germs to boil water to sterilize it. "

Of course it would. The ancient hebrews had cleansing rituals that they attributed to religious edict but were really just because they knew a certain practice caused people to not get sick as much, but they just used their god as an excuse to get people to follow it.

It's the same way that people in this century knew X-Rays exposed photographic plates, but they didn't realize that this same process was carcinogenic until much later.

1/24/2011 12:37:36 AM

Quote :

"Not necessarily now, but there used to be a huge advantage to drinking milk. "

not as much as for the reason you state, much much more so for the winter calories it can provide if your body can process it. more calories in 800 bc in say, denmark, = better chance at having kids born or in gestation at the time survive and/or not be as deficient. (i agree with this part of your shpeel obviously)

basically a HUGE leg up food wise in northern areas, the vitamin D thing is incidental and is not found in milk naturally in very high levels, that started in the 1930's with fortification.... (yeah, the D think you were talking about, pretty much wrong....)

i think the excess of calories in whole milk out weigh its perceived benefits if you have a halfway balanced diet. that extra fat can't be good for the ol' ticker either. not saying the whole lowfat thing has any overly solid bearing either, but i'd rather enjoy my calories in other things other than milk...... i do love me some chocolate milk after a hard swim though, that shit is the tits)

Quote :

"What did they use for a pot?"

pottery, it's old yo, very old. (29,000–25,000 BC)

while drinking milk does not increase bone strength it can very much decrease bone loss

moron is correct

1/24/2011 3:01:15 AM

Quote :

"The ancient hebrews had cleansing rituals that they attributed to religious edict but were really just because they knew a certain practice caused people to not get sick as much, but they just used their god as an excuse to get people to follow it. It's the same way that people in this century knew X-Rays exposed photographic plates, but they didn't realize that this same process was carcinogenic until much later."

cite your source, that doesn't make any sense at all

and the second part is wat

1/24/2011 7:06:19 AM

^ i could understand the first part. sort of like the black plague doctors. wearing masks and long coats so that the "evil" would not get inside them. they were partially right

[Edited on January 24, 2011 at 7:36 AM. Reason : ps the 2nd im done with my book now, im checkingout those 2 books you posted. ]

1/24/2011 7:36:25 AM

Quote :

"Why cow milk though?"

I enjoy goat milk too but it's too expensive for me.

Organic Valley milk is not made from grass fed cows unless something has changed with them recently.

1/24/2011 8:27:40 AM

Quote :

"Of course it would. The ancient hebrews had cleansing rituals that they attributed to religious edict but were really just because they knew a certain practice caused people to not get sick as much, but they just used their god as an excuse to get people to follow it."

Think about the absurdity of this statement. You are suggesting that they arbitrarily started the behavior of boiling water which was accidentally improved their health.

In the civil war the armies WIPED their surgical implements off. That's right, in the 1860s people were not advanced enough to pull the pot-of-boiling-water trick when they were shoving metal knives into sick and wounded people.

IMO, if ancient people did boil water in ancient (i'm sure they did at some point), they still woke up the next morning and drank straight from dirty water sources. It clearly has no major role in improving human health until the industrial revolution.

[Edited on January 24, 2011 at 9:37 AM. Reason : ]

1/24/2011 9:36:36 AM

this thread is better than most

1/24/2011 10:31:34 AM

its Craig Venter just fyi.

and yes, there are several schools of thought on this.

one the one hand our sterile/anti-biotic way of life is screwing up our immune system, and we are weaker as defined by everything from allergies to cancer; but on an individual level this may reduce the incidences of acute trauma caused by germs and hence reduce the risk of death or debilitating illness in the context of that particular germ incident.

1/24/2011 11:35:03 AM

anti-biotics are like bug zappers.

Some bugs are biting me, this is a problem.
I know, I'll make a death trap for bugs and put it near my house.

Wait, you mean some other bugs are important for the balance of the ecology?

--
By the way, on the subject of evil geniuses, Nathan Myhrvold's company has been working on a death laser that kills mosquitoes and spares the rest of the flying insects. I imagine this is what nanobots will do in out guts in the future.

1/24/2011 12:13:43 PM

Quote :

" Think about the absurdity of this statement. You are suggesting that they arbitrarily started the behavior of boiling water which was accidentally improved their health."

LOL

This is not absurd.

This is verified fact. This is the reality as it has been written by Father Time. There's not really anything to dispute. Humans throughout the ages accidentally stumbled about practices for sanitation without knowing why it worked. Eastern medicine is rife with things like this.

And i'm not suggesting it was arbitrary. Someone at some point noted that doing one thing lead to another thing, and attributed the mystery to a ritual ordained by god.

South Americans don't need to know about anesthesia to know a cacao plant has an anesthetic effect, for example, but it has been used this way for centuries. 15th century "surgeons" experimented with opium.

Quote :

"It clearly has no major role in improving human health until the industrial revolution."

This is obviously true in the broader sense, but the people who were the healthiest most likely were the wealthy individuals who could afford the boiled water or naturally cleaner spring water.

1/24/2011 12:22:54 PM

cite source

1/24/2011 1:31:07 PM

milk is probably the biggest scam around.

there is no need for it at all.

makes you shit. screws your cholesterol, makes you fat, makes your money go down the drain.

you people dont need any meat/dairy to live a good life.

[Edited on January 24, 2011 at 1:35 PM. Reason : ]

1/24/2011 1:34:44 PM

Dairy is probably better than meat but both can be said to be bad for your health.

The bottom line is that the more vegetables you eat the longer you'll live.

Note this only applies for industrialized nations today. We don't have a problem obtaining sufficient calories. In other cases both milk and dairy can help you get the calories you need.

1/24/2011 1:47:10 PM

Quote :

"makes you shit. screws your cholesterol, makes you fat, makes your money go down the drain."

false, false, false, subjective

1/24/2011 1:47:25 PM

1/24/2011 1:53:29 PM

Moderation is key

Now back to the subject at hand, where can I get dat 190% pasture-raised moo moo juice?

1/24/2011 1:54:24 PM