Just emotions Margaret.
Milk is designed for baby calves. I makes them gain 200-300 lbs. weight in just a few short months.
NOT good for human babies.
In fact people do not gain tolerance to milk as you suggest. The starving Africans and Asians have no lactase and get very sick with milk.
Sorry.

Second interesting item is Dr. Pottinger’s Cats. He was investigating diets and found that cats fed a large percentage of their diets as pasteurized milk had severe health problems in a few generations; this did not happen in cats with raw milk diets. There are some issues with his data/methods that critics have pointed out. I would like to see if his results could be duplicated under more controlled conditions, and then there is the issue of relating results in cats to people…..

Sunshine, where did you get your information?
What about the epidemics (actually endemic) of killer Brucollosis from milk?
What about the epidemic/endemic of TB? (as a med student, I was still seeing bodies rotten from TB caused by raw milk on farms)
It’s bovine TB and no question of where it came from. Tuberculin testing of cattle herds was a great step forward in preventing deaths.
Why do you think Pasteur and Claude Bernard (who were colleagues, whatever you read from stupid websites) both worked on the development of pasteurization?
Just for fun? Because there wasn’t a problem?
They did it because milk was killing millions.
Also, if you have followed me as you say, you must have missed my take on osteoporosis:
milk is almost the whole cause of osteoporosis. Elderly Chinese women, who drink no milk, have never heard of osteoporosis.
US women, with the highest dairy intake in the world, have the highest incidence of osteoporosis.
Fracture of the femur kills more women in the USA than breast cancer.
Facts, Sunshine. Facts, we can only talk facts, not prejudices.
There is safety in facts. Mine is not an opinion. It’s facts. Prejudices kill.
BTW you can download my booklet on osteoporosis free from this link: http://www.informed-wellness.com/osteoporosis2.pdf

Prof Keith, I don’t think that Jane is being naive. I am troubled by some of your responses to your readers. I am thinking that you may need to tone it down just a wee bit. We appreciate your research. However, if it’s a fact, as you say, that pasteurization has only been taking place for approximately the last 150 years, then I have a question. What happened to all of the millions of folks who drank raw milk for the thousands of years before pasteurization came on the scene?

It stands to reason that we must take a balanced and more thorough look at this issue. The fact is, it wasn’t an issue before pasteurization came about. I think way more is being made out of this than is necessary, according to the facts. The truth is, a “one size fits all” attitude toward dairy, be it raw or otherwise, and any other food for that matter, is definitely not scientific nor prudent. Different things work for diffrent people. Our bodies are not all the same. It could be that modern practices are some of the very reasons that there are issues with dairy, for some, in the first place. The point is safety first. If safe practices are being properly used, then what are the issues with this, I mean really? The truth is that there have been people who have used raw milk for millenia and there has never been any documented epidemic from people consuming it. Now that is a fact. There are and have been deadly microbes in many types of foods, including vegetables and fruits. Cleanliness, the diets of the animals and safety first is key. Thank God that after you may have consumed the raw milk that was delivered to the farm you grew up on as a child, that you are still with us. We still love your articles. Keep em coming.

A bit naive Jane,
I remember the milkman. In cities they only delivered pasteurized (named for Louis Pasteur, it’s been around for 150 years).
I was raised on a farm in the country and there we had raw milk delivered.

Having said all of the above, I don’t even drink milk, lol, but I don’t like to discount other people’s experiences. I think raw milk drinkers would be doing themselves a favor by limiting their consumption of it as well as other animal products, as high-quality as they may be. But if their bodies are better with animal products as Dr. Nicolas Gonzalez has found in a subset of the population he treats with leukemia and some other cancers. I would like to know what the Prof has to say about grass-fed butter and cream? Good topic overall. thanks.

Pasteurization came about for the convenience of the centralized (no longer small and local) BIG DA IRIES today so that their milk can stay on the supermarket shelf as long as possible. Sure, there’s always a bigger chance of infection with any animal food (whether it’s milk, eggs, or meat), which is why clean hygiene practice is hugely important.

Even pasteurized milk goes bad if it’s out of the fridge for too long, and infection and death can follow. If there’s a big following of raw milk drinkers who say they are good with it, I tend to believe the truth of their many, cumulative experiences, rather than believing any one “expert.” Does that “expert” drink raw milk or have they, or is it just reading papers, not looking outside the ivory tower?

I found this article on the Farm-to-Consumer Legal Defense Fund website. It is enlightening on the CDC’s use of raw “dairy” statistics. Never forget Mark Twain’s comment that there are lies, damned lies & statistics. This article makes me think that the CDC is using questionable statistics by attributing health problems caused by the soft raw cheese, queso fresco, to raw milk & thus “proving” that raw milk is unhealthy.

“http://farmtoconsumer.org/defending-raw-milk-against-cdc.htm?utm_source=FTCLDF+Digest+2012-03-13+March+blast&utm_campaign=Digest+2012-03-15&utm_medium=email”