Raw Milk Benefits for Gut Health (Episode 347)

Full Transcript: Episode 347

Lisa Hendrickson-Jack: Welcome to the Fertility Friday Podcast your source for information about the Fertility Awareness Method and all things fertility I’m your host Lisa Hendrickson-Jack I’m the author of The Fifth Vital Sign and the Fertility Awareness Mastery charting journal I’m a certified fertility awareness educator and holistic reproductive health practitioner with nearly 20 years of experience teaching women to connect to their fifth vital sign through menstrual cycle charting balancing hormonal health and optimizing the menstrual cycle without hormones I’m outspoken about hormonal birth control and its impact on fertility and overall health because you have

The right to know how your body works and how artificial hormones disrupt that natural process I host live coaching programs to help you achieve optimal fertility and health because it’s important to have healthy menstrual cycles regardless of whether or not you want to have babies I’m also a wife and mother of two beautiful boys I know I know I’m a busy girl but I managed to fit it all in this podcast is designed to empower you to take full control of your cycles your fertility and your overall health and I’m so excited that you’re here with us today I’m excited to share today’s episode with you in today’s episode I am sharing my interview with

Mark McAfee and for those of you WHO don’t know he is a raw milk producer in the united states the biggest that I’m aware of and so if you’re fairly new to the podcast milk and the concept of unpasteurized milk has come up on several different occasions and if you want to look back into some of the archives I’ll link my previous episodes with Sally Fallon Morell of the Weston A. Price Foundation and I’m sure the topic of milk has come up potentially in some of the episodes about period pain but just for those of you WHO this is a very new topic and it’s kind of like well why would this be discussed here I think that pretty much all of us are

Familiar with the idea that many people have issues with dairy there are many many people WHO can’t tolerate dairy and WHO stop consuming dairy products because of negative effects some digestive issues and things like that and so many people identify as lactose intolerant but it turns out that there’s more to this milk story so I talk about this extensively in The Fifth Vital Sign and I always talk to my clients like I know a little bit too much about milk but there’s several reasons why milk can be an issue for people so one of them is the protein in the milk and so if you’ve ever wondered why you know there’s children WHO can’t have regular

Cow’s milk but they can tolerate goats or sheep milk or even you know women with period issues WHO switch to goats or sheet milk and then see an improvement that can be related to the protein in the milk because different cows and different animals produce different proteins in the milk that react differently and many people react very negatively to the A1 protein that is found in most of our conventional milk products so that’s one issue some people react negatively to the processing and so there are people WHO react differently to the warped proteins that are you know changed and denatured during the pasteurization process and so there are

People WHO actually find that if their milk is closer to the source that they can tolerate it better but that dives us into the controversy because there are many places where unpasteurized milk is illegal and there are places in Europe where you can get milk out of a vending machine so we get into the controversy and I’m thrilled to just be jumping right into it and talking about this interesting very interesting but also controversial topic on the show today so without further ado let’s jump into my interview with Mark McAfee let’s welcome Mark McAfee to the show he is the founder and ceo of Organic Pastures dairy company a leading California

And national brand of truly raw dairy producers including milk butter cream kefir and truly raw cheddar cheeses he is the founder and chairman of Raw Milk Institute and is an internationally recognized speaker and expert with an emphasis on raw milk production standards gut biome milk genomics nutritional benefits food safety and the medical benefits of raw unprocessed milk and milk products Mark is deeply involved with raw milk safety research and is associated with the international milk genomics consortium at UC Davis since 2018 two peer-reviewed research papers now identify the Raw Milk Institute standards training and testing protocols using

The raw mi effect since 2014 in the usa there has been a 350 percent increase in raw milk consumption with a decrease of 74 percent for reported illness associated with raw milk this positive effect has been associated with the advances in testing technology and the standards and training developed by raw mi and its phd board of directors thousands of farmers have received the raw m-I r-a-w-m-I training on how to produce raw milk for human consumption versus standards for pasteurization I introduced him already ahead of time but I’m really excited for this interview because this would be the first episode solely dedicated to the topic of raw

Milk I’ve had sally fallen morel on the show a couple of times and we’ve certainly touched on it but today we’re just going to dive in head first so thank you so much for being here with us today Mark

Mark McAfee: I am very very pleased to be with you and Lisa I’ve been in Canada many times it’s a favorite place to go yeah it’s I mean it’s a pretty lovely country it’s a beautiful place I really enjoy it

Lisa Hendrickson-Jack: Uh well you know before we jump into the the topic of the day I mean I think I’m curious and everyone’s curious most likely how did this become kind of the center of what you do so maybe share a little bit about what you do and and how how and why raw milk became the center of it

Mark McAfee: Well my first chapter in life I was a paramedic I was a medical educator for the health department I ran 16 000 plus or minus ems calls and I really met humanity in all of its interesting variations delivered 26 babies god knows how many gunshot wounds and car wrecks and plane crashes and everything else heart attacks diabetic you call 9-1-1 you got me for 16 years let’s put it that way so I really got very exposed to the human experience in all of its shades my grandparents passed away in the late 1990s and left a thousand acres of prime agricultural ground to my brothers and I and none of my brothers wanted to farm and I wanted to leave bms

It was exhausting 24-hour shifts and and the whole emotional thing is pretty exhausting and intense my wife’s also in medicine with her master’s in nursing so labor and delivery with that said I kind of approached farming I grew up on the farm I approached farming from a different perspective I wanted to be organic I wanted to be consumer connected I wanted to be whole food oriented so I did my research by going to farmers markets in los angeles and talking to mothers and fathers WHO would come to the farmer’s market table and say you know are you a farmer and and had that dialogue between the consumer and the farmer the farm to consumer connection

And I asked them I said what kind of food would you like well we’d like to have raw milk safe no GMOs no antibiotics we’d like to visit you we like to have a cows on pastures we’d like to have immune supporting food we’d like to have all the transparency you can have with unprocessed whole food and with that dialogue I came back to the farm and developed Organic Pastures dairy which is now the largest raw milk brand in the world we’re milking about 800 cows on our 500 acres of pasture here we’re milking twice a day all the milk comes to our on-farm creamery where we make butter cream cheese milk and kefir and deliver in our own trucks delivered

To the stores and farmers markets throughout the state of California about 450 stores and then 1200 stores for our raw cheese nationally so it’s been consumer driven and I mean that with all the intent of a loaded statement that is consumer driven it’s not processor driven it’s not policy from the government of the CDC are FDA driven it is consumer driven and that was my original intention when I started was to be consumer driven be consumer connected and responsible to consumers paid by the consumers have them tour the farm have a relationship directly with consumers and that is a very very very wonderful relationship to have because you get

Paid well you know you’re no longer in the dairy crisis anymore you’re getting paid much more than you would if you’re going to sell to a processor and you have a whole food and the stories that come back from consumers whether they be younger children older people middle people people trying to get pregnant uh all kinds of walks of life come to you and say tell share their story with you I’m also involved with the international milk genomics consortium which is an affiliation of consortium of phd researchers around the world that do research and study on breast milk and raw milk and all the elements found in the genomic level the proteolytics

Of proteonomics of all the different things going on at the genomic level at the very very microscopic level in milk and why it’s such an incredibly powerful food and I like to just start by saying breast milk is raw milk and when you think about raw milk think about breast milk think about the first food of life the first food of life a baby is born naked and wet just came through the birth canal what’s the first thing put the baby on breast the breast produces colostrum for the first few hours and days and that colostrum transfers immune system from mother to baby and then raw milk comes pouring out of lacteal glands and creates the gut biome

That did not exist before birth so the gut biome is the seed of 70 to 80 percent of the immune system at least that many cells lie in the intestinal lining the microbiome is the seat of the immune system it protects us it digests our food creates enzymes it is the seat of our immune system it protects us from getting sick a new research uh study just came out of China it’s talked about the fact that if you have coronavirus please breastfeed your children don’t stop breastfeeding your children because breast milk and the raw whey protein and other elements there’s all kinds of elements found in breast milk actually suppress a hundred percent of

The replication of coronavirus cells that’s in breast milk and they said that raw cows milk actually does 78 percent of the same thing because it’s in raw form and has the raw whey protein and all these living totally functional alive proteins and enzymes and bacteria and all these things put there by nature intentionally you won’t find that in in baby formulas you won’t find that in processed milks you won’t find that in any of the foods this is the first food of life engineered by a million years of evolutionary pressures selective pressures generation by generation to have the best food to give that baby the best shot at being healthy and

Survive at the weakest time in life so raw milk is a powerful food and the more they research it the more they realize how powerful it is in terms of having a good gut microbiome and the fact that your immune system is very powerfully supported by eating whole unprocessed milk and other foods as well so that’s kind of a preview of how I got to where I am today and I’m extremely excited because my next my son and my daughter have actually kind of taken over the business so I can do things like on I’m doing with you this morning Lisa because they are running the show and I do a lot more educational outreach with the Raw Milk Institute uh which

Is a nonprofit organization and and there’s a very important thing that I do and that is training farmers to do raw milk well in other words there’s two kinds of standards for raw milk raw milk intended for pasteurization which doesn’t really matter what you do with it because it’s all going to get cooked it’s going to get barbecued with heat so that there’s no living bacteria and everything’s denatured but raw milk intended for human consumption has completely different standards and you produce it differently and I do that training internationally in Great Britain in Canada I’ve been up there many times training in Canada all across the united

States and down in Australia as well and some work in Argentina so it’s an international scope so that’s kind of a little bit about me and why I’m so passionate and excited about what we do

Lisa Hendrickson-Jack: Well thank you for that there’s a lot of questions I want to jump into considering that you know I don’t know what percentage of my audience is really well versed in this concept of raw milk so there are plenty of listeners WHO are familiar perhaps they’re familiar with the Weston A. Price Foundation and they’re they understand where this all fits in but there’s plenty of listeners WHO are kind of like what do you mean are you talking about unpasteurized milk the kind that kills you right so let’s jump into some of those kind of the difference between the mainstream understanding of the pasteurization process and why anyone would want to consume

Milk that has not been pasteurized you started to talk a little bit about the difference between commercial milk production and how that has to be pasteurized I think I used a quote in The Fifth Vital Sign I had a little section on milk one in there and it’s kind of it was like uh I felt that it was really important to distinguish between commercial milk and raw dairy but on the different levels like from the level of pasteurization to homogenation homogenization to the level of the cows eating grass versus being fed can conventional feet like all the different levels to try to make a case for milk because there’s even a lot of people that

Will say you don’t even like human beings shouldn’t even be consuming milk so that’s like a huge load of stuff but I’m just going to pass that over to you

Mark McAfee: A couple of things let me quote dr Bruce German WHO is probably the foremost leading milk genomics leaders researcher in the world from UC Davis he said pasteurization is a answer to an 18th century problem and we can do much better so you know it’s interesting that in the 1800s yes there was a lot of people that died and children that died from consumption of filthy raw milk when cows were being taken into the cities out of the country environment into the cities where there was no fresh water there was no chlorine there was no stainless steel typhoid fever was rampant tuberculosis was rampant it was disgusting there was no rapid chilling there

Was no way to really convert commercially produce raw milk any way that would be sanitary like it was back on the farm with the right kind of environment with clean water and and green grass and sunshine you take a cow into the Boston Commons and you cover it with manure and dirt and the only thing that’s available to feed that cow is the byproducts of some brewery distillers grains and you had a very unhealthy set of conditions and in 1893 strauss brought in the pasteur boiler which is a pasteurization technology out of France and it was basically used in the beer and wine industry to get rid of bacteria so the yeast would grow and you brought

It in and you start cooking the milk and a lot fewer people died they still have problems because of water quality but that became kind of a commercial exploitation device and system to allow for trashy ugly milk production and that continues through today raw milk was very popular through the the 20s 30s 40 50s and 60s as a certified milk the american association of medical milk commissions which is international organization which had very high standards physicians supervised milk and the milk was recommended by doctors because it made for strong healthy babies and it was very expensive it wasn’t the cheap milk that could be just processed

So yeah raw milk had it was thriving for six or seven years after the 1880s and 90s but it became less and less important because after after world war ii it was all about the industrial solution it was about how we could bomb people to comply it was about how we would spray things to kill things it was about DDT being good for your skin and smoking being good for your lungs I mean it was all about making money and commercial into industrial solutions and less of a partnership with nature and now we understand that raw milk has been consumed for 12 to 15 thousand years and it always gave those ancient civilizations a competitive advantage because

They had a whole food that supported their immune system and they thrived because they could take their food with them the romans took cattle with them all the time when they were going to run around the world you know it was about having an animal that could eat grass and sunshine and water wherever you were and you had food today cheese butter cream milk and beef if you had to get really hungry you could eat the cow itself or goat or sheep or camel so it’s a long history of consumption of raw milk that recent populations of people have forgotten because for the last 75 or 80 years milk has been pasteurized for the most part and when you pasteurized

Milk it’s interesting if you go to the FDA website do a little google search there and you see what’s the most allergenic food in america don’t recommend or suggest what it is just ask the question number one is pasteurized milk or milk as they call it because all milk in their mind is pasteurized so when you pasteurize milk you make a very allergenic food because the bacteria are killed the enzymes are denatured the proteins are denatured everything is kind of destroyed your body doesn’t recognize it as a friend in fact it’s very allergenic and you create mucus and you have all kinds of reactions like asthma and mast cells degrading histamines

Are released and all kinds of issues cytokines go around telling all the wrong chemical messages so you created a reality in people’s minds where the only last three or four generations has all been pasteurized milk there’s no recent memory of the great grandparents that would tell you how fantastic raw milk was when it came from the family cow so we have this recency problem where everybody says oh milk that I get the store is really not good for me because I get gas I have digestive problems and it’s very allergenic so why would I drink that I drink my almond milk or soy milk or some other thing or no milk at all but those that have discovered

That clean fresh delicious raw milk is fantastic for your immune system and cuts through all that bs and gets to the real science of the history of milk and doing it properly are thriving and doing great so it’s a big educational challenge to cut through the bias that the FDA CDC and big processors have because processors hate raw milk they want to get it cheap and they want to get all the milk into their processing plant to make products to make money for them they don’t want a farmer to go from farm to consumer and cut them out so raw milk is a political nightmare for them it’s an economic nightmare for processors and the FDA stands with the

Processors not with the farmers so in California raw milk is legal in New York it’s legal you can’t buy it in the stores but you can buy it on the farm there’s about 20 states where you can buy it in some fashion on the farm or in a store and then other states you have to have a cow share or something else in Canada you can find raw milk but you have to know somebody it’s kind of a speakeasy moonshine running kind of a deal but those that want raw milk can vary because it’s illegal in Canada I just had to put that in there so in Canada you can smoke all the pot because that’s legal but the milk is illegal that’s correct and raw milk is illegal

Because of one thing and that’s a good bad thing the dairy industry has really got their act together to protect themselves in Canada they have a supply management program which will not allow anyone to produce milk outside of their system and they’ve not allowed raw milk to be part of the system and I’ve been up to Canada many times and there’s huge amount effort in Canada to try to allow a cottage or niche industry addition to their milk supply program in Canada pasteurized milk does very very well because they don’t allow overproduction and they control the price to make sure the farmers do well and they do very very well but what the farmers

Fail to realize is consumers have a hard time digesting and having issues with allergies with pasteurized milk they would do so much better if they recognize that they should allow raw milk to be part of their system and control it as well in terms of oversupply so Canada’s got a real problem that they’re disconnected from their consumers not listening to the end consumers very well and if they are they’re ignoring them so I would encourage the dairy men to realize there’s a huge opportunity to truly fully nourish your society by having clean fresh delicious tested raw milk which is fantastic so I was part of a documentary like a short documentary

That was done I forget the name of the channel but one of the kind of local channels probably more like Toronto and basically I mean it was interesting I was interviewed for like two hours she had all this footage and they took out everything I basically said and when I watched the documentary like basically they were saying that raw milk is dangerous because unless it’s pasteurized it is necessarily dangerous and the spin that they put on it was that anybody WHO fed it to their children or drank it themselves was basically playing Russian roulette with their lives so it was very very heavy-handed in the negative portrayal of it so you know in

Case people don’t know WHO we’re listening to the show I’m a consumer of raw dairy and our family has been for the past five years so we go to a farm and we get our milk we get it right from the cows and it is not pasteurized and we are still alive and we have had no issues

Lisa Hendrickson-Jack: I suppose there’s a couple questions that I kind of want to pose to you I mean I’d love to hear you address this concept that it’s so dangerous one of my one of my observations because until I had access to raw milk I had never even seen it you know I didn’t grow up on a farm and I didn’t necessarily spend a lot of time on farms either but a few of my observations as a consumer is that it’s not the same substance when you actually start interacting with raw dairy you realize that pasteurized commercial kind of ultra processed dairy is a glorified white liquid and one example that I’m sure you’ll appreciate is that if you leave your raw milk on

The counter for a couple of days it’ll clabber and turn into curds and whey so now I know what that is it’s not just like little miss muffet because now you can actually see so the curds are the solids and the whey is liquid and if you were to put that in a cheesecloth and hang it to drain out the solids you get cream cheese we all know what happens if we leave out pasteurized dairy it goes putrid and it stinks up everything and you have to kind of clean it with major cleaners so that’s just one example of the difference but I’d love to hear just your take on this concept because in Canada that idea is very much the line and that is the line

Of health Canada and that is what they say is the reason why they won’t allow it ten years ago there was a poll taken of the canadian dairymen eighty percent of them drank their own raw milk

Mark McAfee: That is a fierce a fear political device used to try to keep consumers from thinking about raw milk and keeping them consuming pasteurized milk and to suppress the raw milk movement there is absolutely no legitimate background for that at all in recent modern history in fact the Raw Milk Institute is proud to say that if you go to Raw Milk Institute.org there are two peer-reviewed articles that were published in the last two years one by Joanne Whitehead and the other one by Dr. Catherine Berge that showed that the Raw Milk Institute effect they gave us actually a lot of credit for training in the last 10 years for establishing standards where

Raw milk has literally had no outbreaks no illnesses and there was a British Columbia herd share program that did a bunch of research up there where they had a bunch of dairies that were micro dairies that were producing raw milk and the herd share program that tested their milk hundreds of samples of milk no pathogens found no illness involved remember that when you pasteurize milk you don’t care about pathogens all the salmonella listeria campylobacter and e coli you can go in the milk because they don’t care because it’s all going to get cooked right so why wouldn’t you use the fear factor that oh my god if you go to any dairy you’re going

To get this bad milk with all these pathogens that’s true if you just throw the manure in there and WHO cares so there’s two different standards for raw milk raw milk intended for pasteurization raw milk intended for people and when you apply the proper standards and you clean the udders properly and you have healthy cows you don’t see pathogens or if you do it’s extremely rare and this was shown in two peer-reviewed published articles that are now available at pubmed so the information is there it’s just that it’s an inconvenient truth to acknowledge that it’s there because it erodes your marketplace wherever you see raw milk being sold the

People will buy it at three times the price of the pasteurized milk because it’s so good for them it’s delicious and it’s a different food so it’s a political ploy it’s a bias it’s a tool used by those that don’t want to see competition to try to suppress the excitement about raw milk the studies the science is completely juxtaposed it completely shows that it’s not a true statement at all now if you go back to the 1800s and you had one kind of raw milk and it was all filthy and ugly and whatever it’s true if you go to pasteurized milk you look at the milk tank on some of the areas out there that don’t have very scrupulous systems and their programs

Are set up for pasteurization true you go to my dairy you go to dairies that are listed by the Raw Milk Institute you go to those dairies that comply with the local standards for raw milk which are very intensive not true at all so they’re ignoring the standards intended for human consumption and saying oh just use the old standards for pasteurization it’s completely a false paradigm you have to separate the two there’s two kinds of raw milk and two kinds of practices it’s not all the same that’s the big thing that’s the big hurdle they have to get over and it’s very convenient not to get over that if you have an agenda or a paycheck which depends

On protecting pasteurized milk

Lisa Hendrickson-Jack: Let me think of how to ask this question well I could start by saying that I did read the book The Raw Truth About Milk by William Campbell Douglas he’s a doctor and he talked about something he called raw certified milk and in that book it helped me to understand because like I said I’m not a farmer I didn’t grow up on a farm so the idea that you get from the media about milk is that it is inherently full of pathogens that it comes out of the cow just teeming with salmonella and e coli and you’re just going to die but what I learned from reading a book is that when you are intending as you said to produce raw milk for human consumption there’s

A few steps so even before you milk the cows you want to make sure that you’re feeding them a certain way you want to make sure that you’re taking care of them so they’re healthy and you know the whole point of getting raw milk is not to have hormone-laden or antibacterial-laden products so you’re talking about healthy cows eating their traditional kind of regular grass diet but also something that I learned and I think that he described cows as being like filthy dirty animals that always are kind of like in their own there’s manure they’re sitting in and all that kind of stuff so he talked about this process of cleaning the udders and making

It so that when you’re milking it’s pristine and he talked I think the part that clicked for me to help me understand was that he talked about you know when milk is contaminated now this is what he’s saying so I want to hear because you’re the farmer but he was saying that the milk is contaminated after so you milk it and then it’s then contaminated between it coming out of the cow and it getting to you that is correct

Mark McAfee: Milk from a healthy cow has very low levels of beneficial bacteria very low levels most of the bacteria that’s in milk is actually in the handling after the milk is actually out of the cow so a healthy cow actually produces a standard plate count of maybe 300 or 200 and a coliform level of like less than one and no pathogens at all

Lisa Hendrickson-Jack: Can you explain what that means the level of 300 because just so that we know what should be the total number of bacteria living bacteria in one milliliter of milk

Mark McAfee: One milliliter of milk maybe two to three hundred at the highest as low as 50 sometimes so it’s in a range because a lot of it’s in the resident bacteria in the teat canal itself or the surface of the teat not generally inside of the udder there’s not a lot of bacteria inside of the udder of a cow unless she has severe mastitis or inflammation of some kind and that’s true for all mammals that’s true for human females so it’s a very low bacteria food but the kind of food that’s inside the milk the lactose sugar the oligosaccharides support the growth of bacteria so that it thrives in the gut so it’s good prebiotics for the probiotics that are

There so whatever bacteria is there are supported in growth to actually grow when it arrives at its destination which is the human gut or whatever mammal baby is drinking it so it is not a true statement to say that milk coming out of a healthy cow is teeming with pathogenic bacteria at all I will say that the kinds of management systems that manage milk after milking the milk claw the milk filter the milk lines the chillers of the tanks can be teeming with pathogens if they’re not managed properly and there’s biofilms that are actually on the surfaces those biofilms can be rampant in a pasteurized environment because milk intended for pasteurization

Because you don’t worry about the bacteria because it’s going to get killed off and it costs money to keep those things clean you have to use cleaning chemicals you have to keep them clean you have to be conscientious and studious with taking care of your equipment so there’s two kinds of standards for raw milk raw milk for pasteurization raw milk for human consumption and they’re entirely different and the risk programs to manage those are entirely different as well and you’re paid differently for them and you have different customers the customers that consume it are consuming families right versus a processing plant where that milk is commingled

With everybody else’s milk and it’s all processed by pasteurization two or three times not just once and homogenization supplementation all kinds of other things that happen so all that pasteurization thing is really good for shelf life but not good for gut life and our gut is not a shelf it is a place that requires living whole foods and you know on point for your discussions today about fertility both mom and dad need a whole food diet a mediterranean-type diet lots of fiber lots of bio-available nutrients it needs a strong immune system less inflammation all those things are brought to you by raw dairy products powerfully so along with a whole

Food diet and it doesn’t have GMOs or roundup or antibiotics or other funky hormones and stuff just a whole food good from good soils unprocessed diet is what a mediterranean diet is including raw cheeses and raw milk and those diets support fertility they decrease inflammation they encourage the correct proper hormone production to allow you to produce the correct ovums to make sure your eggs are working around right and make sure that sperm are doing their things they swim fast enough and they’ve got the right genetics and that they actually get together and they implant properly and they carry the baby to full term and that the mother actually

Has the right ph interval track so that when the baby is born the right inoculum is on the skin so that they get ingested into the mouth and into the gut to create the right bifidobacteria area in the gut and raw milk being produced nutrition for the mom and then the next step levels for the baby to correctly create immune system for life comes from raw milk from the mother first and then from other cows or goats or sheep or camels around the world in the life process so that’s the way mother nature created it to be properly mankind has screwed it up so badly we can’t even recognize the immune system anymore and we have a real problem with understanding

What real food is and when we don’t eat real food and we eat a lot of sugar preservatives antibiotics we have an immune system destruction or hormones are a mess and we have a problem with fertility sperm count dropping like a rock young ladies can’t get pregnant it’s a disaster and it’s mother nature’s saying you’re going the wrong way turn around and go back or turn around and go some other direction it’s mother nature’s way of saying you got it all wrong we don’t want that to continue so we’re not going to give you babies we need you to do it properly so that you’ll have babies and those babies won’t have Asperger syndrome and ADHD and have

All kinds of problems with celiac and have to get colostomies and diabetes and asthma and you just go on down the line with chronic inflammation and colds and flus and it’s ugly mankind before the advent of modern medicine yes we had a higher mortality rate from various different things but we had a much stronger immune system to protect us so that we could thrive in spite of having all these pressures from nature we have modern medicine now which is a miracle and also a detriment because we are taught to do whatever we want go to the doctor when you get sick instead of prevent disease so you don’t need to go to the doctor and only go there on

A rare event that you need something extra special so we have to shift our resources into prevention through nutrition which means go to the farmer I mean not go to the doctor but go to the farmer so it’s the farmer you see not the pharmacy it’s just a complete different shift and there’s a lot of money that says don’t do that because so much money is made in the pharmacy in the doctors and that medical paradigm wants to continue to feed itself and farmers need to say wait a minute look at all these wonderful studies coming out of Europe look at these studies that show that when you have a strong gut microbiome from whole food nutrition that’s

Unprocessed whole natural foods you prevent disease you decrease inflammation you have a good functioning gut microbiome and you’re very healthy and raw milk is literally the king of that whole diet in terms of assuring a good strong microbiome

Lisa Hendrickson-Jack: Well I mean one of the things that came to mind as you were talking is kind of what works versus what doesn’t and so I think for a lot of women a lot of families you can do whatever you do and then when you start having children and maybe your children have certain issues like whether it’s allergies or different food sensitivities you really I think this stage of life prompts a lot of women a lot of families to then look at you know what works so if you’re and the trend that you touched on of so even I remember when I was in my early 20s so I can’t really have a lot of regular highly processed milk so in my early 20s I kind of identified as being

Lactose intolerant I never had a test but I knew that when I drank milk it sent me to the bathroom and so I finally had enough early 20s and then I decided okay so I’m just going to drink soy milk that didn’t work out so well for me because soy’s estrogenic and so it had obvious effects on my menstrual cycle I was charting every time I drink the soy milk my cycles get really long so then I switched to coconut milk and almond milk and all these different and it’s so interesting right that they can use that word call it milk because it’s not the same but basically what we’re seeing is this a lot of people are finding that it just doesn’t work and

Instead of understanding deeper that it’s not the concept of milk as a category that’s the problem but more of the pasteurization and I would say the the ultra processing of it any ultra processed product by definition is going to have less nutritional value and obviously a lot of the questionable issues so a lot of parents then find themselves turning to goat and sheep milk if the issue is related to and I’m not sure if you want to talk about the difference between the A2 and the A1 protein but also a lot of families even if they switch to the goats or sheep milk or even if they switch to organic still pasteurized maybe not homogenized milk

They may still find this is an n of one so it’s not scientific but what I found early on with my eldest son was we went for organic milk we went for sheep’s milk we did all of the things but he would have this kind of runny nose and he had this kind of just drip for like a year and then when we stopped when we actually found raw dairy and we started incorporating it that went away now again this is just an n of one this is just my experience I’m not saying that this is everybody’s experience but the point I’m making is that as a parent you and as a person you just do what works

Mark McAfee: Well let me add to that let’s change that n of 1 to n of 55 000 how’s that when you do the n of 55 000 the european studies kick in there’s major studies showing huge numbers of children that are evaluated that consume raw milk and the one big factor in their life that’s common is consumption of raw milk it’s not where they live or how they live it’s raw milk shows allergies being reduced dramatically less asthma less ear infections less colds less eczema all those things are that end of 55 000 so it’s not just you and your family and I would expand that to say multi-racial whether you’re asian you’re black or you’re white universally raw milk

Could be consumed by everyone including american indians WHO never drank historically raw milk because raw milk has in itself its own inoculum of beneficial bacteria which when it reaches the gut those lactobacilli bacteria and other beneficial bacteria create the lactase enzymes for you in your gut so they actually welcome the lactose sugar when it comes in and what do you know the lactase is available and you digest the lactose sugar no problem when you have pasteurized milk you don’t get that benefit so it’s we call it pasteurization intolerance not raw milk intolerance and I’ve got many asian and black friends and said I can’t drink that

Processed stuff but I thrive on yours and the bottom line is it’s a processing problem and many white people have the same problem as well because once you’ve been introduced to a lot of antibiotics in your life and preservatives in your life you lose those beneficial bacteria you’re going to have lactose intolerance as well so most all babies don’t have any problems with lactose intolerance because they nurse their mother’s milk and mother’s milk has plenty of lactose but it also has those incredible 700 different kinds of bacteria in the milk of the mother’s mouth breast milk from the areola it’s not a clean process it’s actually very much

A microbiome friendly living whole food with all this diversity of bacteria to quote dr Annette Shrader WHO is a foremost cancer researcher at UCLA she’s a phd researcher at UCLA in los angeles she said three things are needed to control inflammation in the body and inflammation is the major source of infection and disease including infertility and all kinds of problems inflammation chronic inflammation you need a diversity of beneficial bacteria you need a high load of them and you need the whole food that feeds them three things beneficial diversity of bacteria a load of them lots of them and the good food the whole unprocessed foods that feed

Them those three things will drop inflammation like a rock and we don’t do that in america we don’t eat whole foods we eat a lot of preservatives and sugars and all kinds of funky stuff which disrupts the bacteria growth we don’t have a diversity of bacteria because everything’s sterilized and nuked by pasteurization and we don’t get a load of bacteria because everything is actually a long shelf life product which doesn’t have a lot of bacteria it’s got sugar in it or preservatives or GMOs or roundup or something else so the triple whammy the trifecta is really affecting us greatly right now including coronavirus let me tell you what the raw

Whey proteins and all these other things found in breast milk actually could control coronavirus very effectively there’s a recent chinese study they’d be more than happy to share with you that showed that mothers that breastfed their children even when they were coronavirus positive themselves protected their own young from the fact that the raw whey protein was actually suppressing the growth of coronavirus in their babies so the world health organization strongly encourages breastfeeding babies when the mothers are coronavirus positive and they found that 70 percent of that same effect occurred from mammal’s milk goats camel sheep horses and

Also cows were referenced so there are innate things found in raw milk breast milk and the european studies the end of 55 I was talking about 55 000 I was talking about that show the decrease of viral infection in children the flu the viruses and colds by drinking raw milk so it’s very much a current issue here that we really vaccines would be nice but I tell you what a nutritional solution to the gut microbiome would even get better to prevent ourselves from all kinds of things and breastfeeding and raw milk are right there right in the core of it

Lisa Hendrickson-Jack: Well whenever you mention breastfeeding I mean there’s so much interesting research about how beneficial human breast milk is for babies and there’s some research showing that not only does mother’s milk provide healthy bacteria to help seed the baby’s gut it also provides food for the bacteria living in the baby’s gut so your breast milk is actually feeding your baby’s bacteria and breast milk changes throughout the day it changes based on the age of your child so obviously you produce colostrum at the beginning which you mentioned but the breast milk that you produce for your baby at two weeks and four weeks or eight weeks is different to the

Breast milk at three months and nine months so your body knows and adjusts accordingly so

Mark McAfee: If you really do study the science of milk the real stuff it’s really fascinating because as you said it is a living food a lot different to our understanding of milk and I find one of the most powerful things about breast milk that it just it makes hair stand at the back of my neck and that is the oligosaccharides oligosaccharide sugars are very specialized sugars that we just discovered what they were what service they were what purpose they were serving in breast milk just a few years ago by dr Bruce German that investigator at UC Davis and that was the oligosaccharides do not feed the baby they feed the bacteria in the baby’s gut selectively

Suppressing pathogenic bacteria and enhancing bifidobacteria wow so you have a food the baby is getting from mom the oligosaccharide sugars specialized sugars which suppress bad bacteria and encourage good bacteria in the gut of a baby changing the gut ph and all that stuff to bifidobacteria incredibly powerful directives from mom through the breast to the baby in terms of building the immune system so you’re absolutely right breastfeed breastfeed as long as you can and one of the things we’ve discovered is if you have a shortage of breast milk and you’re not able to produce enough for your baby the baby’s hungry and you can’t get enough drink

More raw milk yourself and you actually get more raw milk out of your breasts my daughter did this and we’ve had literally hundreds of if not thousands of people in California that had a challenge getting enough breast milk and we say raw milk in raw milk out because it encourages the hormones the bacteria everything going on all the elements you need to produce for your own breast milk are coming through from the raw milk you’re consuming and you’ll get engorgement in 24 hours it’s pretty powerful stuff

Lisa Hendrickson-Jack: One of the questions I wanted to ask you because so for the listener for whom this is all relatively new information and even having listening to a conversation with two people talking about unpasteurized dairy raw milk as being a healthy food and a beneficial food for a lot of folks listening this may be the first time they’ve heard a conversation like this so one of the challenges I would say is because not everywhere obviously in the world is it legal or is it regulated this is one of the challenges with kind of criminalizing or not making raw milk accessible to the consumer even though there’s always a demand everywhere you go is that then

You don’t necessarily have a standardization process one of the big parts of our conversation today was the discussion of how the process of creating milk for raw milk for human consumption is different and so one of the obviously hugely important aspects of what you’ve done is to create and then now teach a standardization process for farmers to be able to produce what we could call certified raw milk and so I’ll kind of bring this into a question but basically if you could share with us a little bit about that process but also help the person WHO’s listening because we can talk about the benefits all day but if you’re going to an individual

Farmer there it’s natural to be a little bit nervous especially because of all the years of this is bad for you you mentioned drinking raw milk when you’re breastfeeding and so a lot of women would kind of be like whoa right I spent my whole life being scared of anything that wasn’t pasteurized recommendations for pregnant women say stay away from anything that is not pasteurized so making that shift how can we what questions would we ask if one was seeking raw milk I’m kind of going on but there’s one other thing I wanted to say when I talk about raw milk with people they often think it’s just like this rogue back door kind of thing and when

I talk to them about how milk can be tested for bacterial counts like you said we’re not in the 1800s anymore we can apply modern science to raw milk so that we can be safe with it yeah so I’d love to hear you expand on that

Mark McAfee: Well first of all there’s a european study that actually showed that mothers that drink raw milk during pregnancy have a different cord blood in the babies when they’re born the cord blood actually has very high indicators for immunoglobulins which are antibodies protect the babies from allergies for life and asthma for life so drinking good safe raw milk from a trusted farmer during pregnancy is a powerful gift to the baby and gives baby more building blocks in terms of immune system that’s number one number two you have to understand the standards let me just quickly describe the standards for pasteurization under the pasteurized milk ordinance

And they’re about the same around the world they’re a little different here and there but for the most part they’re about the same number one you never test for pathogens bad bugs are never tested and you can have as many as you want in raw milk intended for pasteurization so there’s no discussion about pathogens because it’s going to get under a five log kill it’s going to come under heat or some other process it’s mostly heat right now they’re using high pressure processing but for the most part it’s heat 160 180 280 degrees temperature depending on the pasteurization process to kill bacteria you can have up to 750 to 1 million coliforms per

Milliliter which is an indicator of sanitation you could have 50 to 100 000 standard plate count per milliliter this is milk intended for pasteurization so 100 000 bacteria per milliliter 750 to 1 000 coliforms per milliliter and all the pathogens you want that’s standards for pasteurization now standards for human consumption for raw milk less than 10 coliforms instead of 750 to 1 000 so extremely clean and your standard plate counts are in the hundreds maximum maybe 5 000 pasteurization after you pasteurize milk they’re allowed to have up to 10 coliforms that are alive and you’re allowed to have 15 000 standard plate counts so it’s even cleaner

Than post pasteurized but nothing’s dead so that just tells you how filthy things are going into the pasteurizer it’s just a dramatic difference when you don’t commingle your milk with other farms the milk goes directly from your cow into your bottle and chilled immediately and then we do testing to assure that there’s no pathogens at Organic Pastures dairy which is the company that I own and founded we test every day with BAX PCR and the PCR test actually indicates within just a few hours if pathogens are present so it’s interesting that you can actually apply the proper technology now to actually indicate before the milk even leaves the farm

That in fact your milk is pathogen free the common standards and I use common standards in quotes are posted and published at the Raw Milk Institute and have been used now internationally to define describe the actual standards for raw milk for human consumption and it talks about all the processes you go through to achieve the less than 10 coliforms the less than 5000 standard plate count and pathogen-free milk so that milk can be fresh and clean and safe for consumers regardless of their status whether they’re immune depressed pregnant or whatever so the common standards are available they’re published and they’re used by farmers all over the

World not every farmer uses them but many do when they produce raw milk for human consumption and the technologies now like you mentioned are now able to be applied on the farm and in labs near the farm to actually ascertain the safety of milk so it’s no longer a question we know exactly what’s in the milk before it’s even consumed so the idea that raw milk is innately unsafe is absolutely untrue not true at all in fact it’s a lie it’s an intentional distraction to try to get people to be convinced that in fact it’s going to one drop is going to kill you it’s not true at all by your own life experience and by the life experience of hundreds of

Thousands of people if not millions of people in California they consume our products from 450 stores that thrive on it and have for 22 years and before that the american association of medical milk commissions the certified raw milk thrived as well for the preceding 60 years with alta dena and other producers from the 40s and 50s and 60s coming forward until we took over with the grade a standards with the common standards so we really have a kind of brainwashing they have to get away from to understand that sterilized foods are not good for you they are not good for your immune system we are bacterio sapiens the human genome project funded

By the FDA and the NIH and the department of energy showed that literally 95 percent or more of the genomics the genetics in our body that make us human come from bacteria in and on our body not from mom and dad this is human genomics 101 this is only 20 year old information but yet it conflicts so desperately so dramatically with the antibiotic concept to sterilize everything kill off everything well where’s that gotten us a place where we have colostomies 130 000 colostomies and Crohn’s going rampant and C. diff killing 23 000 people a year and chronic immune depression and chronic inflammation that’s not a good place to be turn this car wreck

Around let’s go back let’s figure out what’s going on here and embrace good bacteria and feed them well to have a strong microbiome and that includes fertility and immune system function inflammation all walks of life come through that process of having a strong microbiome which is fed by these things we’re talking about raw milk and living whole foods not highly processed foods

Lisa Hendrickson-Jack: Well one of the things that came to mind when you were talking about the difference between the requirements of bacteria when it’s sent for pasteurization so it’s a really important point I think that there’s a quote and I don’t think it might have came from you I feel like it might have been a quote from you that said something like pasteurization excuses filth it sounds like something you would say but it’s interesting because if you think about this and again this is I always say like I know way too much about milk how much do you want to how much do you want to get into but if you think about it if you are a raw milk farmer and you have a

Cow with mastitis so an infection of the udder and it’s like pussing and all kinds of problems like you’re not milking that cow you’re going to treat the mastitis and then you’re only going to use cows that are in optimal pristine health to milk but if you are a mass producer for just regular commercial dairy it actually doesn’t matter if the cow has mastitis or is sick because you can still milk the cow and put it in and I remember reading that some of these giant dairy producers they combine milk from thousands of cows and so then because it’s going to be boiled and pasteurized in the end then it really doesn’t matter if it has all of that

So if you think about then why is it that regular milk makes people sick I mean there’s a lot of different causes allergies and you know just the different issues with it I’m sure that there’s all of these different points but if you think about that if there could be pus and all kinds of stuff that’s then boiled but it’s still there that doesn’t sound right you know it doesn’t sound right whereas with raw milk it’s a different situation altogether because the milk is so clean it doesn’t have to be boiled and that’s kind of one of the things I was hoping to demystify if you will in this conversation between the two of us today is that there is

An actual difference between the two just so that you’re aware and the process as consumers demand kind of healthier options just in general this process of raw milk production is becoming more and more standardized and I would love to just hear your take on the fact that it’s not illegal everywhere there are places primarily I think Europe where it’s fully legal and you can even get raw milk from vending machines right

Mark McAfee: That’s correct raw milk is legal across the united states in many different states California Washington arizona New Mexico Pennsylvania Maine Connecticut you can all buy raw milk in a store and then there’s many many states where you can buy raw milk on the farm Texas and other places you can buy raw milk on the farm and then there’s states where you have to buy a part of a cow share like in Colorado but raw milk is universally available across the united states except for a couple of states Hawaii and Montana were almost illegal in any form but people still get it anyway in Canada raw milk is illegal but there’s raw milk all over the place

So it’s kind of one of those things where if you want raw milk you can find it but if it’s legal and there’s good standards applied then you will have a better understanding of what that milk is unless you have to do your own research to know what your milk is and that’s where you go to Raw Milk Institute.org and actually find out what the common standards are and ask the hard questions to your farmer to assure that he’s at least coming up to some of those standards or she is coming up to those standards to assure that the milk is relatively safe but yeah in Europe France Italy there are vending machines on the street to allow farmers to sell

Directly to consumers and they’ve had a couple of challenges here and there because it’s kind of hard to maintain that vending machine to assure that the milk is chilled kept cold and how you fill the bottle and not fill the bottle there’s all kinds of issues but they figured out most of it but it’s kind of an example of the fact that when you have that kind of transparency and that kind of availability that kind of normalcy that raw milk can be universally available and people are not dropping like flies they’re thriving and they’re enjoying it they’re loving it and it’s a local food so we really have to resolve in our minds that this whole

Suppression of raw milk is a political act to suppress the market because when raw milk goes directly from a farmer to a consumer the processors lose processors hate that they’ll do everything in their power including the forces of the united states government the CDC and NIH do all their bidding for them to suppress it any way they can it’s really sad but if you go to the social platforms and you talk to moms about their experience with raw milk you’ll get nothing but a glory story my god it’s the most fantastic thing that ever happened because when you give a baby raw milk breastfeeding first and then after that raw milk they sleep well they

Sleep really well they never get sick they poop well they behave great they have strong teeth they rarely go to the doctor if they ever do it’s just an enjoyment to have a child that’s not screaming their head off with gas cramps in their gut the kid is thriving and not getting sick and they’re having a strong immune system and pooping great so what a fantastic thing for a family to have is a healthy family mom and dad don’t ever get sick either or they rarely do and they have a strong immune system so it’s a wonderful family food to promote health for the family and again don’t believe everything you see coming from the government you have to

Do your own research and look at the peer-reviewed actual literature itself and it’s all over the place and talk to people WHO’ve had a real experience with raw milk versus those that are politically their paycheck depends on suppressing it somehow by telling a story from the 1800s

Lisa Hendrickson-Jack: Well I’ll make sure to link to your website and a few different places for more information one of the things that I know Sally Morell always says is that even if you don’t have access to actual raw dairy you in most places in the world if not all places in the world you can usually find raw cheese kefir is becoming a lot more prevalent and accessible and even with raw dairy you know I made kefir for years I think I let my grains die I should have taken better care of my poor grains I’m planning to start it again at some point but with the raw dairy when you ferment it for anyone WHO has any concerns about pathogens or things like that there’s

A lot of ways to consume there’s a lot of things that you can do with it and when you talk about the microbiome the research on kefir is fascinating showing that there’s so much more variety of bacterial species when the milk is then fermented with kefir grains so for anyone WHO is thinking about making that switch to less processed more real food kind of really understanding where their food is coming from and even participating in this process when you said talking to your doc talking to your farmer finding out where your food goes finding out what’s available locally I think just the experience of connecting with farmers and actually buying

Not necessarily everything local but really making that effort to find out WHO is producing food around you can really connect you to your community in different ways as well well Mark thank you so much for being here this was such an informative conversation that we had today can you share just a little bit about where the listeners can go to find you your website contact information all the good stuff

Mark McAfee: Let me give you three content pieces Mark at OrganicPastures.com I love emails from anybody I do a lot of educational outreach OrganicPastures.com will give you an interesting place to look at a commercial website where you can see all the information about raw milk and then Raw Milk Institute.org is an archive of all of the medical studies that all the research and everything else and our phd researchers that work with us the veterinarians WHO work with us all contribute to have that really wonderful archive library of resources for people WHO don’t have to look all over the place for it’s right there Raw Milk Institute.org if you want to have

Fun you go to farmers over pharmacies FarmersOverPharmacies.com and you actually look at video case studies of people that have recovered from severe illness using raw milk Crohn’s disease allergies asthma digestive issues all these case studies are there we’re not putting words in people’s mouths they’re just video interviews of people telling their story about how they recovered from a near-death experience because their gut microbiome was so sick so farmers over pharmacies.com Raw Milk Institute.org OrganicPastures.com and Mark at OrganicPastures.com and I’d be more than happy to reach anyone and talk to anyone about this

Lisa Hendrickson-Jack: Well thank you so much Mark this has been a fantastic conversation and I’m excited to share it

Mark McAfee: Thank you Lisa go get them

Lisa Hendrickson-Jack: Thank you for listening if you enjoyed today’s show please share with a friend you’ll find the show notes page for today’s episode over at FertilityFriday.com 347 I hope that you enjoyed today’s episode with Mark certainly eye-opening to discover how big of an industry this is I’m sure some of you don’t necessarily deep dive into the topic of milk on a regular basis and for those of you WHO are quite familiar maybe then it’s just nice to hear from the man himself WHO has been instrumental in really creating and standardizing the standards and protocols for raw dairy farmers across the us and also the world I think that this is an important conversation

To be had because I think that it’s helpful not to have a black and white milk is good or milk is bad because there can be a lot of different factors and many women are negatively affected by the regular A1 pasteurized highly highly highly processed dairy products that we find in our local supermarkets having the high inflammatory markers having the problematic A1 protein having the denatured proteins in the milk and all the different issues that can really contribute to inflammation and period pain knowing that switching to different alternatives whether you try goats or sheep milk or whether you look for an A2 producer or whether you look to

See if unpasteurized milk is available where you live and to really learn about the standardization protocols and all the different things that these farmers must do to ensure the safety of their products I think that if nothing more it is certainly an interesting and important topic to be aware of and for me I know that I was keenly interested in this topic when I had my first child because certainly we were looking for the healthiest possible options for him and we had tried goats and sheep dairy that was pasteurized different things and eventually we found a different source for unpasteurized milk and we saw some differences and changes in

Terms of his reactions runny noses improved things like that so so yeah it’s a very interesting topic and I’m glad to have had the opportunity to have Mark on the show to give us that deep dive so with that said I hope you have a wonderful week weekend whenever you are tuning into the show and of course until next time be well and happy charting