Is raw milk better for allergies?

The raw milk debate is raging as we speak and was featured on Radio 4 only last week. Basically raw milk is milk which has not been pasteurised and treated to remove bacteria and increase shelf life; a process which began to become commonplace in the UK after the first world war.

On the BBC Radio 4 Food Programme, called, “What is milk?” Sheila Dillon interviewed Professor Peter Atkins, author of “Liquid Materialities: A History of Milk, Science and the Law”, which charts the changing stuff that we call milk. The programmed discussed how Raw milk, despite being banned in Scotland and sold with a health warning in England and Wales, has seen sales grow recently, a result of farmers markets, online sales, and the beliefs of many that raw milk straight from the cow is a fundamentally different substance.

Dr Natasha Campbell McBride was also interviewed on the show. She advocates raw milk for many of her patients for a range of conditions, including lactose intolerance. She formed Be Healthy, an independent consultancy and distribution partnership with Peter Campbell-McBride and is a fully qualified medical doctor with a special interest in human nutrition. She claims that enzymes, nutrients, proteins etc. are killed during pasteurisation and it becomes a dead product; her patients can often tolerate raw milk even if they previously had an intolerance to milk.

To find out about modern raw milk production Sheila also visited ARLA who produce Cravendale filtered milk (which lasts much longer than normal milk) and Hook & Son, who sell raw milk online and through farmers markets. Hook & Son follow very strict hygiene guidelines to ensure their raw milk is safe to drink. Farmers are paid approximately only 28p per litre of milk they produce when it goes for pasteurisation, however a raw milk farmer can name their price and have complete control of how they treat, market and sell their raw milk.

You can listen live here.

It wasn’t something I knew very much about so I decided to find out more. Today we drink skimmed, semi-skimmed, whole, UHT, 1% low fat milk, filtered, goat, sheep, soya, rice, oat and even potato milk, but here we’ll discuss the much maligned raw milk. Basically it’s milk which has not been pasteurised and treated to remove bacteria. The first pasteurisation test was completed by Louis Pasteur and Claude Bernard on 20th April 1864. He was best known to the general public for inventing a method to stop milk and wine from causing sickness, a process that came to be called pasteurisation.

Pasteurisation is a process wherby milk is heated to over 70 degrees to remove bacteria, make the milk last longer and render it safer to drink. Ultra Pasteurisation gets it even hotter to create UHT milk which will last years in a sealed carton. Milk’s popularity has dropped as more people follow a low fat diet and cut milk out of their diets, or try alternative milk products.

Raw milk is milk which has come straight from the cow to your fridge, and the debate is on as to whether this is actually far better for you to drink. The reason being it still contains the bacteria and organisms which the human body needs to aid digestion and is also packed full of nutrients and goodness. The process of pasteurisation kills these healthy bacteria as well as all the goodness in the milk and is widely held to be the cause of the ever growing number of milk and dairy intolerant and allergic people.

Should we know exactly where the milk we drink has come from? Just as many of us do when buying meat, bread and other organic produce. When you buy pasteurised milk from the supermarket you can have absolutely no idea where it’s from or how the cows who produced it lived and were treated.

It’s not easy to buy raw milk in the UK but there are farms who will supply it. It is sold for animal and pet consumption in the UK but generally not for human consumption. However Raw milk advocates swear by it, claim to be healthier and happier and compare the shop bought milk to processed food. However on the other hand, some experts claim that raw milk is dangerous to drink and can make you ill. So who do we believe?

We originally started to mass treat our milk to make it love longer, not necessarily due to worries about disease and illness, but surely if the cow is healthy the milk will be good too? In the US there is a whole industry growing up around the raw milk movement and you can buy it in shops and supermarkets in some states.

Foods Matter website have interesting information which has some great links to research reports and other resources, as well as some farms who supply raw milk. Read Raw Milk

All the sources I’ve read have either been from raw milk advocates who say it’s safe, better for you, and that cows reared for raw milk production are fed organic feed, are free range and kept in hygienic conditions. Is the only reason we ever pasteurised our milk because cows were being farmed intensively and so kept in unhygienic conditions? The other sources say that pasteurisation is totally necessary and that raw milk is bad for you and should not be allowed, indeed it’s banned in Scotland and some states of the USA.

The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is very pro pasteurised milk and claims it’s much safer and states that many diseases are caused by raw milk.

An article by Jennifer Read, owner of ‘My Life in the slow lane’, a social website for people who grow, cook and eat organic food, entitled “Organic Raw Milk – Is it Dangerous?” shares the following:
But according to the Weston A. Price Foundation, unpasteurised milk is higher than pasteurised milk in Vitamin C, Calcium, Folic acid, Vitamin B12, Vitamin B6, Vitamin A, Vitamin D, Iron, Iodine and minerals. Many raw milk consumers believe it is responsible for building up their immune systems and relieving their allergies.

It would be really interested to conduct a study comparing two separate test groups, one given raw milk and one given pasteurised and compare their health at various stages in their lives. This would really be the only way to prove one way or the other which is best. I couldn’t find any examples of such studies. Do any exist? Is anyone considering conducting such a study?

Would someone with a severe allergy to dairy be able to tolerate raw milk? I suspect not, but perhaps with treatment to desensitise they could go on to tolerate raw milk in the future. People who grow up on farms and drink milk straight from the cow rarely have allergies. Farmers – is this true? So are there any raw milk drinkers out there? Do you have any allergies? Any raw milk lovers? Why do you swear by it? Anyone in the UK who is buying raw milk? Is this easy to do? Does it taste the same? Is it much more expensive?

I can’t try Raw Milk since I have a life threatening allergy to all dairy but I’d love to hear from all those out there who do, or people with an intolerance would like to try it.