Milk: Raw or Pasteurized?
It's almost a vicious cycle: you drink milk to be healthy, but if the milk is contaminated, you're only making your health worse. Raw, unpasteurized milk is growing in popularity and with some good reasons. After all, the heat used to pasteurize milk kills many dangerous forms of bacteria, but it can also kill some of the healthy enzymes and immunity-enhancing properties. Raw milk does not use heat processing at all.
The down side of that, of course, is that while raw milk leaves good bacteria intact, it also leaves the dangerous germs in the milk. So which is better? It's largely a matter of situations and confidence and scale.
Situations: if you know the farmer who is producing raw milk, chances are good that you'll have no problems. Problems happen, but they happen in all industries. There's really no such thing as 100% safe food. The larger the dairy, the greater the likelihood of contamination issues.
Confidence plays into that as well. If you're able to buy raw milk at a natural foods store, do you have confidence that the milk is properly handled by every person, every step of the way? Commercial dairies and commercial retail stores have strict rules, but smaller operations don't necessarily have the same requirements.
Scale is again all about how you're able to buy your milk. Super-1 Foods sells on a large scale in many stores to thousands of shoppers. Our scale is large and we are not legally or ethically allowed to take possible risks with our milk supply. Pasteurization is how we can be assured of safe milk for our shoppers. Even pasteurized milk has many beneficial properties, and drinking it is a great way for people to get nutrients, calcium and protein.
In an ideal world, we wouldn't have to worry about germs. We'd all get our milk from a neighbor farmer who maintains sanitary conditions. But real life doesn't allow many of us to live that way. We shop in supermarkets and we have to be assured that the milk we receive is safe from contaminants. Because we're not in the pioneer days any longer, we give up some aspects of that. But we also give up the risk of milk contamination, too. It's a trade-off. This is the world we live in…and the world we have to work with.
Published 01/28/10
