Super Natural Milk
By Jo Robinson
-Most cartons of milk in the
supermarket show a picture of cows contentedly grazing on grass. In reality, 85
to 95 percent of the cows in the United States are now being raised in
confinement, not on pasture. The grass they eat comes in the form of hay, and
the ground that they stand on is a blend of dirt and manure.
-The reason for confining cows in
feedlots and feeding them grain rather than grass is that they produce far more
milk under these unnatural conditions. If you also inject them with bi-weekly
hormones, standard practice in the dairy industry, they produce even more.
Milk
them three times a day instead of two and you have the tried and true formula
for today’s Super Producers. On average, cows raised in confinement produce
more than three times as much milk as the family cow of days gone by and 15
times the amount required to raise a healthy calf.
-But with so much emphasis on
quantity, the nutritional content of our milk has suffered. One of the biggest
losses has been in its CLA content. CLA, or "conjugated linoleic
acid," is a type of fat that may prove to be one of our most potent cancer
fighters. Milk from a pastured cow has up to five times more CLA than milk from
a grain-fed cow. To date, most of the proof of the health benefits of CLA has
come from test tube or animal studies.
But a few human studies have produced
encouraging results. For example, French researchers compared CLA levels in the
breast tissues of 360 women. The women with the most CLA in their tissue (and
thus the most CLA in their diets) had a 74 percent lower risk of breast cancer
than the women with the least CLA. If an American woman were to switch from
grain-fed to grass-fed dairy products, she would have CLA levels similar to the
women in the study who had the lowest rate of cancer.
-Milk from pastured cows also
contains an ideal ratio of essential fatty acids or EFAs. There are two
families of EFAs—omega-6 and omega-3 fatty acids. Studies suggest that if your
diet contains roughly equal amounts of these two fats, you will have a lower
risk of cancer, cardiovascular disease, autoimmune disorders, allergies,
obesity, diabetes, dementia, and various other mental disorders.
-Take a few moments to study the
chart below showing EFA levels in milk from cows fed varying amounts of grass
and grain.The green bars represent omega-3 fatty acids, and the yellow bars
represent omega-6 fatty acids. As you can see, when a cow is raised on pasture
(represented by the two bars on the far left), her milk has an ideal,
one-to-one ratio of EFAs.
-Milk from pastured cows offers
additional health benefits. (I'm beginning to sound like a TV infomercial:
"But wait! There's more!") Besides giving you five times more CLA and
an ideal balance of EFAs, grass-fed milk is higher in beta-carotene, vitamin A,
and vitamin E. This vitamin bonus comes, in part, from the fact that fresh
pasture has more of these nutrients than grain or hay. (When grass is dried and
turned into hay, it loses a significant amount of its vitamin content.) These
extra helpings of vitamins are then transferred to the cow's milk.
-There's another factor as well. As
I mentioned, a cow raised on pasture produces far less milk than a cow raised
in a confinement dairy on a grain-based diet. This is a bane for the farmer but
a blessing for the consumer. The less milk a cow produces, the more vitamins in
her milk. This is because a cow has a set amount of vitamins to transfer to her
milk, and if she's bred, fed, and injected to be a Super Producer, her milk has
fewer vitamins per glass. It's a watered down version of the real thing.
-Oh, I almost forgot the best part
of all. Dairy products from grass-fed cows taste delicious, and they have a
rich yellow color that is visible proof of their bonus supply of carotenes.
Serve cheese or butter from a grass-based dairy, and everyone will notice the
difference. Also, your cookies and cakes will have that rich buttery color that
hasn't been seen since Great-Grandma's day. (You do bake, don't you?)
