Wow, does this produce some interesting reactions.
There are so many possible "pros" and "cons," it is difficult to know where to start writing.
We are the only mammal that a) drinks milk after weaning, and b) drinks the milk of another animal regularly and deliberately. (I stress the regularly; kittens will gladly lap up cow's milk straight from a pail, puppies will do the same with milk and cream, etc. Orphaned kid goats can be given cow's milk, the list kind of keeps
going.)
We probably started this weird thing of drinking the milk of another species with sheep or goats. Our 'cattle' at the time were most likely the aurochs, which could best be described visually via their modern descendants, the Spanish Fighting Bull, only the auroch was probably quite a bit bigger and meaner. (The last true auroch known died in a private game preserve in 1627 in Poland. How sad.)
Most likely as they penned the aurochs in, gradually they were able to slowly tame them, or breed them for tameness, and someone somewhere got the bright idea that since we are drinking the milk of the goats, and these are milk producers, we can drink their milk, too.
- In actuality, we can drink the milk of any mammal. Virtually every mammal that we have domesticated, we use some form of milk product. Yak milk in Tibet, buffalo milk in Italy (mmm, mozzarella!), horse or llama milk in the Andes, reindeer milk in Lapland. Whether it is to our 'taste' or not, is another story.
- Did you hear about the guy that started the dolphin farm? He drown milking one.
And really, the reasons why we do not drink from all mammals are practical, more than anything. The only areas where there is widespread lactose intolerance, are Asia and the Horn of Africa. There are tribes in Africa that exist on milk, blood, and the cattle both of them come from. (they also have the lowest incidences of coronary heart disease, which should tell you something is wrong with meat = heart disease, but I digress.)
"Oriental" countries' largest domesticated mammals were the horse and the pig. Pigs are reportedly quite difficult to get any 'supply' of milk from. It is more a matter of quantity, rather than quality. High Steppes cultures have the mighty Yak for their milk, and they make use of every single inch of that animal.
So, there is no reason why we couldn't drink the milk of any of our fellow mammals. Quantity becomes the largest problem, although taste probably runs a close second, when you consider that what the mother eats dramatically effects how the milk tastes. So, line up a tiny stool and milk a rat. Grab your SCUBA tank and grab that whale teat! (That would probably not be a problem of quantity.)
What about the poor platypus? Milk away! (But not the male of the species, which has a spur that produces venom. Then again, if you are trying to milk a male you may have other problems from the get-go.)
Milk is something that is designed to help create life. As such, it is supposed to be eaten, one of the very few things on our planet meant for that. Most things are there to reproduce themselves; tomatoes are not there to become salsa, they are there to make more tomato plants. Milk is designed from the start to be drank.
Sigh.. so this is where it gets dicey.
From a practical point of view, our 2nd chromosome is where the gene that expresses 'turning off' the production of lactase, the enzyme that aids the digestion of lactose, the sugar that is only found in milk (trivia-- it is also found in yellow forsythia blossoms in the spring. weird, eh? Too lazy to find independent scientific evidence of that, though.) is found. There are some very interesting debates about this.
It appears that if your ancestors drank milk, (The World minus Far East and parts of Africa,) you have a higher likelihood of that gene expressing in favor of producing lactase. In fact, that gene expressing in favor of producing lactase is the dominant expression of that gene. So once you have a genetic history of it being turned on, it will tend to be turned on.
This makes quite a bit of sense, with recent (last 20K years) evolution. Once we figured out that it made more sense to milk the females of the species, and let the animal live, instead of slaughtering her for meat which would spoil quite soon anyways, we would rapidly develop an evolutional bias towards being able to continue digesting milk. Why not, when it could keep us alive?
Adding to that, we probably rapidly developed age-stable milk. Yogurt... cheese... especially cheese. Cheese can age for upwards of 2 years; try THAT with your normal milk. But talk about nutrition on 'the go!' You could store cheese from your animals, and have a stable food source for the inevitable partial famines that are our historical norm.
But is it healthy for us?
Well, in a word, yes. Yes, even cow's milk. But, it depends on what you mean by milk.
That milk you buy in the store is not 'milk.' It is an industrial product. It has been homogenized (a process which does stop the cream from separating, but totally changes the way that the milk tastes. Having had both, homogenized milk tastes slightly rancid to me. It also hides or masks the taste of the dead bacteria floating in there from pasteurization. Yup, for realz.)
It is also highly likely that it comes from a cow that is milked 3 times a day by a machine, a cow that is fed grains to keep her milk production up even though the grain kills her from the inside, trapped in a stall next to 500 other cows on a production line, standing over a river of your own manure that collects in a toxic lake, automatically injected with antibiotics due to all of the above. Here is that cow--
Yup, that is pretty much where they spend their lives. How 'cow' is that?
So I am stealing the next picture off the website from my friends at Golden Guernsey. Which animal would you rather be, and which would you rather have providing life giving sustenance?
Back to milk....
Without the enzyme lactase, drinking milk causes nausea and diarrhea. "Lactose intolerant" people know that feeling!
What is interesting, is that raw milk has lactase in it. After all, when a baby (of any species) is born, it takes a little while for that digestive system to kick into full swing. The milk has to provide its own means of digestion (after all, the baby is not getting the milk in the womb, it is getting nourishment from the placenta.)
So raw milk is a complete package for nourishment. It seems as though milk proteins evolved alongside the genetic tolerance increase near northern European dairy settlements some time about 8,000 years ago. Coevolution; As we were able to drink more milk for longer periods, the cows evolved to provide our protein requirements.
So since milk comes with it's own digestive system, why are people intolerant of milk?
Most likely, it is because they are drinking pasteurized milk. The pasteurization process kills off the lactobacilli, so YOU are not making lactase, and the milk's food enzyme activity has been killed off. You don't have sufficient lactase to break down the milk sugar (which is a 2-part sugar; lactose is glucose and galactose, making it a disaccharide. There, you've learned something,) and viola, here comes the G/I discomfort. Most people who are 'intolerant,' but can eat cheese or yogurt (where microbes during the fermentation process have consumed pretty much all the lactose,) can handle raw milk easily, and there is a good chance that even people who are 'completely milk' intolerant can handle raw milk, especially from Guernsey or Jersey cows.
The other end of the milk intolerance is a mild allergy to casein, the protein in milk. Guernset and Jersey cows have a higher amount of Casein-b, which has a lower allergic reaction. Casein survives the pasteurization process, but the jury is out on UHT pasteurization (which I have heard that Oberweis uses. Boo on them.)
During homogenization, milk is pumped at high pressure through a mesh screen, and it reduces the milk fats to tiny particles that cannot coalesce back into their former selves. It solves a problem in that it makes the milk more stable for shipping, you don't have to deal with the cream separating from the milk, and it solves a cosmetic problem; When you pasteurize the milk, dead bacteria and white blood cells sink to the bottom of the milk. Homogenizing the milk spreads this throughout the milk. Makes you say yum, doesn't it?
Homogenization also completely destroys the natural flavor of milk. It breaks up the fats into smaller molecules, which produce a rancid flavor and actually make the milk sour faster. This is because the fat particles are smaller and coated with milk protein, where normally they are mostly separate.
But drinking milk is immoral (the vegan argument.)
-- Go away... If you hate me for drinking milk, what will you think when I slice into a steak? "Ethical vegetarian" is completely ridiculous. we're omnivores. Thanks.
We don't 'need' to drink milk.
-- We 'don't need' to do many things. Milk is a complete protein food (it has all the amino acids.) In addition to that, it is convenient, stores well, and has a good dose of everything you need for proper nutrition. If you are trying to lose weight, you should be cutting sugars out of your diet, so milk should be off the list anyways until you get to where you want to be, but there is no real reason not to drink some of it. And it's soooo good.
More in part II!
No comments:
Post a Comment