Béchamp did not deny that microorganisms can cause disease, but he believed that in most cases they do not invade from the outside; rather they are present throughout the cells of the body and both maintain its life (metabolic) and aid in its disintegration (catabolic) if it is injured or dies. Microorganisms are not immutable, but are living things that adapt to the conditions they encounter. Every disease arises because the underlying health of the body has been compromised in some way. People can reduce their susceptibility to disease by living and eating well and by listening to their bodies, which will remain healthy if treated with respect and good sense. Most alternative medicine is founded on these principles. And actually, much of human health depends on them. Doctors do not maintain good health. They can prolong life, but often it is by creating the conditions for the body to heal itself.
In 1919, Professor Henry Armstrong observed in an article for the Journal of the Royal Society of Arts that it was ‘astounding the extent to which Pasteur had influenced our doings’, and remarked that ‘the real harm was done when milk was tampered with’, because its dietetic value was diminished by heating it anywhere above blood temperature. Sterilizing milk undoubtedly reduced the risk of infection from typhus and tuberculosis, but destroying the ‘lactic organism’ encouraged the growth of ‘putrefactive organisms’, causing cases of infantile diarrhoea and lactic intolerance.
It is widely recognized, and not only by its opponents, that pasteurization damages milk and makes it harder to digest. In 1932, the physician to the royal family, Lord Dawson of Penn, warned that ‘pasteurization could never make bad milk into good milk’. He argued that a better solution to the problem of disease would be to clean up dairies and improve hygiene on the farm rather than damage a highly important part of the national diet. He was far from alone in opposing routine pasteurization. The late Queen Mother is said to have insisted on raw milk from the royal herd of Ayrshire cows at Windsor.
Considering the opposition to it, it is all the more remarkable that Pasteur’s germ theory has become accepted as necessary to make milk and dairy products ‘safe’. The medical establishment and public health authorities are so convinced of their absolute rectitude that in certain countries and states of the US, compulsory pasteurization is backed by the full force of law. It is not a matter over which people are allowed to make up their own minds.
Pasteur’s biographer has an unattributed account of him recanting on his deathbed: ‘Bernard is correct. The bacteria are nothing. The soil [terrain] is everything.’1 He is said to have been referring to the conclusions of Claude Bernard (1813–78), the third of the triumvirate of nineteenth-century French scientists whose research into fermentation, microbes and contagious disease overlapped. Bernard’s theory was similar to Béchamp’s and described the ‘milieu intérieur’ by which the cells of the body maintain it in a state of equilibrium. The medium in which bacteria grow is the defining thing, and if the germs do not find a fertile soil for their growth, they will have no effect. ‘It’s not the mosquito, but the swamp it grows in.’ Pasteur collaborated with Bernard, but went to some lengths to denigrate Béchamp’s work, which threatened his reputation and income. He has been accused of not being afraid to falsify the results of his experiments if it suited his purpose and to denigrate the theories of the more self-effacing Béchamp.2 As a result, Béchamp is almost unrecognized today, even though his work supports the theory that underlies the practice of much alternative medicine.
As well as being pasteurized, most of our milk is now homogenized. This process was invented by another Frenchman, Auguste Gaulin, to prevent unscrupulous dairymen from skimming off some of the cream and passing off what was left as whole milk. The milk is forced, under great pressure, through tiny tapered tubes, which breaks up the fat globules into smaller particles and mixes them with protein particles to form a solution. This creates a uniform product with a creamy consistency that doesn’t need shaking up before the container is opened. When it was first introduced to the US in 1919, customers were suspicious of such messing about with a natural product and thought (with some reason) that it would make it hard to digest. One dairy in Michigan got its employees to drink the product in front of sceptical housewives and then vomit up the partially digested milk curds, to try to convince them that homogenized milk was easily digestible.
After the fat has been broken up, the smaller globules can attract fragments of whey and casein and sometimes are completely surrounded by a layer of protein. These chemically altered globules of fat and protein tend to clump together and must be put through the process again to break them up further to make a permanent solution. The milk is usually pasteurized first, to kill the enzyme lipase, which would otherwise start to digest the ruptured fat globules and turn it rancid. The high pressure of the homogenization process generates enough heat to pasteurize the milk a second time.
Pasteurizing milk benefits the processor and does not necessarily provide a superior fresh product. The average pint from a supermarket has seen a fair bit of the world before it reaches the customer’s breakfast cereal. Its journey begins with the cows being milked and the milk passed into a refrigerated bulk tank on the farm, where it remains for up to 24 hours – sometimes two days. It is then collected by tanker and carried to the processing dairy, which can be a hundred or more miles away, where it is mixed up with other milk and kept until it is pasteurized – sometimes for as long as four days.
But it is the next process that most people are unaware of. The product is ‘standardized’ by separating all the cream from the milk and then adding back however much cream is needed to make it either ‘whole milk’, ‘semi-skimmed’ or ‘skimmed’. Any cream left over goes into other products. Even what is sold as whole milk does not always have all the cream added back. The milk with cream added back is then homogenized, packaged ready for distribution and carried to wherever the processor has customers. It is not unknown for milk to travel hundreds of miles before ending up at a supermarket in the town next to the farm it came from. Because pasteurization prolongs its life significantly, the milk can be anything up to two weeks old by the time it reaches the customer’s fridge.
1 Ethel Douglas Hume, Béchamp or Pasteur? A Lost Chapter in the History of Biology (Chicago: Covici-McGee, 1923; London: C. W. Daniel Co., Ltd).
2 Marie Nonclercq, a French pharmacist, wrote for her doctoral dissertation a biography of Béchamp. It was published as a book in 1992 by Maloine as Antoine Béchamp, 1816–1908: The Man and the Scientist, the Originality and Productivity of His Work.
CHAPTER 8
Raw Milk
SHORTLY AFTER I started milking cows, I took over a round in the village from a neighbouring farmer who had decided to retire. He had delivered about 150 pints of unpasteurized raw milk (‘green top’, from the colour of the cap) every day for decades. He also sold home-grown vegetables: potatoes, cabbage, carrots and swedes – or turnips, as we called them. My father grew most of the vegetables we ate at home, but occasionally we ran out of something and had to buy it. I remember my mother asked our farmer neighbour for a turnip, which he delivered next day. For some reason I could not understand at the time, she was furious at the price he charged her for it. ‘Fancy charging that for a turnip, the greedy little man!’ I thought it was perfectly reasonable, but she wouldn’t let the subject drop. ‘It’s not as if he hasn’t got plenty. There’s a field full up there!’ She never really forgave him for being ‘tight’ and ever afterwards used his name as a metaphor for meanness.
I had never bottled or delivered milk before I took over his round. But after going with him once at the end of the month, the next day he handed over his round book, a few crates of empty bottles and the ageing, well-used bits of equipment he used to do the bottling, and next morning I was on my own. He gave me the goodwill of his round, and his equipment, thus confounding my mother’s belief that he was tight.
Every morning after that, once the milk had cooled in the tank, I filled and capped 15
0 wide-necked pint bottles ready to be loaded onto the back of my pickup after breakfast. I would then set off with Spot, my hairy collie, in the passenger seat. Sometimes one of the children came as well. It was usually Libby, who was about two at the time, and struggled to carry four pints of milk in a little wire carrying crate. She could see through the windscreen if she stood up in the footwell and pressed her palms on the dashboard, bossing the dog about if he got in her way or wasn’t sitting right, and shouting, ‘Phot!’ because she couldn’t say her ‘S’s. Spot was immune to her rebukes, ignoring every command except mine – and on occasion, mine as well.
If I got a move on, it took about an hour and a half to do the round. I had it down to a fine art and amused myself by trying to find ways of doing it quicker each time. Part of the main street in the village was on a slight slope and had a high flagstone kerb along the edge of the pavement. I had one of those elastic bungee cords with a hook on each end that people use to tie luggage onto their roof racks. If I fastened a hook onto one spoke of the steering wheel and stretched it tightly round the driver’s seat and back onto the other spoke, then set the pickup off in bottom gear, with the engine just ticking over, it would more or less drive itself in a straight line down the road, occasionally bumping against the kerb, which corrected its course. I ran from house to house with the milk crate, in and out of the gardens, just about keeping up with the pickup, now and again leaning in through the window and tweaking the steering wheel if it was going off course.
Mercifully there was little traffic in those days and I knew everybody who was likely to come up the road. Using this method I could do the work of two people – driver and delivery boy. I could only do this on days when I didn’t deliver eggs or collect the money. If anybody increased their order – as they did regularly by leaving a note on the doorstep – I had to run a bit faster to catch up with the pickup as it ticked along down the road, grab the extra bottles and run back into their garden.
Saturday was the best day of the week, when I would usually go home with not less than £150 in cash – a great deal of money in the early 1980s. My monthly milk cheque from the MMB came to about £3,000 for around 250 gallons a day (1,100 litres) – the milk from 60 cows – whereas for selling 14 gallons (60 litres) of milk a day in bottles – the milk from three cows – I got £600 a month. I think the Milk Marketing Board paid something like 8 or 9p a litre, whereas the statutory retail price for a pint was around 20p – roughly 35p a litre.
Some people in the village refused to take my milk because it was unpasteurized, straight from the cow. Others bought quantities because it was unpasteurized. One customer, who had retired to the village from some high-flying civil service job on a huge pension, credited my milk with life-saving properties. He had developed ulcerative colitis and his doctor told him he would need a colostomy to save his life. Just before the operation, he consulted an alternative healer, who told him that yoghurt made with unpasteurized milk might cure his bowel problems. And it did. He made an almost complete recovery by eating a pint of yoghurt a day made with my milk. At the time I took what he said with a pinch of salt, because I thought he was exaggerating the benefits of raw milk. But over the years I’ve heard too many stories about its healing properties not to take them seriously – it can cure chronic digestive problems and skin ailments, and some people even claim it shrinks tumours.
Not every one of my customers was equally delighted with natural milk. One Saturday morning when I knocked for the week’s money, one of my more hygiene-conscious patrons opened the door grasping a full bottle by the neck and lifted it up to point to an unmistakable ring of grey-brown sludge at the bottom that disappeared when she shook it up. She claimed all the milk I had delivered the previous day had been similarly tainted. I was rather worried about this because at the time the public health people were just getting into their stride looking for reasons to stop farmers selling untreated milk. Despite their best efforts they had never been able to find anything wrong with mine, but this might have been the pretext they were looking for.
My customer was unmoved by my offer not to charge her for that week’s deliveries, so rashly I offered not to charge her for any milk for the rest of the year if she got so much as one more bottle with sludge in it. With rather bad grace she accepted what, in anybody’s view, was a tremendous offer. It wasn’t as if her family ran any risk from consuming my milk: all my other customers and my own family drank it without ill effects. It just had fine bits of mineral matter in it, rather like Morbier cheese with its layer of wood ash through the middle, or a decent bottle of claret that throws a sediment. I didn’t dare make these analogies, because she had a kitchen like an operating theatre and was terrified of Pasteur’s ‘germs’. She didn’t want her milk natural, or for nothing; she wanted it pure and white and not to be reminded where it came from. Another bottle with grit in it would have caused her to cancel her order altogether.
I was a little shaken by this encounter, and thinking about it on the way home, it dawned on me how the grit had got into the milk. We had had a few wet days and some of the cows’ udders had been particularly muddy when they came in for milking. Unless they had cow muck on them, I didn’t normally wash their teats, because washing udders tends to spread mastitis, which is the bane of a dairyman’s life. As a result, my herd’s mastitis cell count – which the dairy measured and showed on my monthly statement – was very low. I simply rubbed off any dry soil and relied on a filter called a milk sock, which fitted on the end of the pipe that took the milk into the bulk tank and which I changed every milking. I remembered that at some point during the previous evening’s milking the sock had blown off the pipe. I replaced it with a fresh one and thought nothing more about it. It had never happened before and so I didn’t realize the consequences. My customer never found any more grit in her milk and I had learned a valuable lesson.
Cream rises to the top because whole milk is an emulsion, a mixture of fat, protein solids and water that settles out. Homogenizing milk turns it into a colloid – a mixture of microscopic particles of milk solids dispersed in a liquid – which doesn’t settle out.
Raw milk contains a full complement of vitamins B and C, but these are largely destroyed by heat treatment and they also decay as the milk ages. After about 7–10 days, most will have disappeared. Raw milk is also a tremendous source of fat-soluble digestible calcium, but if the fat is damaged by high-temperature pasteurization, its structure is altered and it becomes insoluble, so that it passes through the human body without it being absorbed. To be available, the soluble calcium must be present with soluble vitamin D so that the milk fat can dissolve them. To get the full benefit of all the calcium and vitamin D, the milk must be consumed whole and raw with none of its fat removed. Skimmed milk contains minimal fat and barely any vitamin D, and so most of the calcium in it cannot be absorbed by the body.
Fresh raw milk also contains large amounts of fat-soluble vitamin A. But if the fat in the milk is damaged by pumping or heating or removed by skimming, almost none of that is available either. Damage to the fat can happen when milk is being transported by tanker, or pumped into and out of the dairy and along pipes to the processing plant. The agitation causes aeration, leading to oxidation of the fats, which significantly reduces the vitamin content. Homogenization also has a similar effect in deforming the fat. The less milk is aerated, pumped or otherwise messed about with, the more fat-soluble vitamins are conserved. Most damaging of all is heat treatment, which also destroys most of the natural enzymes.
Raw milk is one of the most easily assimilated sources of calcium, of which there is a severe shortage in the modern Western diet, especially amongst younger people, who are afraid that milk is bad for them. They might have a point about pasteurized milk because as the dead bacteria decompose, they release histamine, which might cause eczema and other allergies. Raw milk, on the other hand, is a living food that seems to have a beneficial effect on allergies, eczema and hay fever, particularly
in children. There are many reported instances of eczema disappearing within a short time in people who take up drinking raw milk.
Even when the fat-clogs-your-arteries hysteria was at its height and the margarine manufacturers, aided by tame scientists, had terrified millions of people in the US and Britain into giving up animal fats, I could see no logic to it. Granted, there seemed to be an epidemic of heart disease in America. But I couldn’t see how it could be caused by eating foodstuffs that had sustained us for millennia. I thought there must be something else at play, although I didn’t know what it was. It was hard to avoid the blanket condemnation of animal fats. People even became afraid to eat their breakfast egg because it contained poisonous cholesterol. I remember being advised in apocalyptic tones by the government to avoid eggs, and if we couldn’t give them up completely, to eat only one a week.
The scientific research (much of it paid for by US margarine manufacturers) was so convincing and the relentless advertising campaigns so successful that it became embedded in the Western psyche that eating fat would make you fat and kill you. It inspired the dairy industry’s ‘Naughty but Nice’ advert, an attempt to keep up the sales of cream, not by challenging the ‘science’ (which was publicly unchallengeable at the time) but by encouraging people to indulge themselves in a harmful but pleasurable vice – and then no doubt feel guilty about it afterwards. They were the same tactics the drink and tobacco industries used. By implication, resisting the urge to eat animal fats and dairy produce and turning to man-made products like margarine would be virtuous.
Till the Cows Come Home Page 14