the skim milk industry

[Guest guest]

Natural fats and heart disease - fact or fiction

Last Friday's issue of this paper showed an article by Jim Algie about Schmidt, the Durham-area farmer who has been invited to the International Film Festival in Italy relating to the documentary film about raw milk. The film is titled " Schmidt - Bio-terrorist or Organic Hero". He is to be congratulated for his perseverance.

Several months ago I wrote a letter to The Sun Times [ Owen Sound Ontario ] of support for how well Schmidt has been fighting an uphill battle just to be able to provide raw milk to many allergen families that require his product. It was intended as a wake-up call to demand certified raw milk.

This column is intended to put an emphasis on the importance of "natural foods."

The rise to popularity of fat-free or skim milk has been engineered by clever advertising and brainwashing. Here are some results from research conducted by E.R. Kuck, the early administrative director of ide Research Labs. His early research started in 1937, a year after the latest report of undulant fever in dairy cattle. He was considered the world's foremost authority on milk and the dairy industry at the farm level. He was honoured by the French Academy of Agriculture.

Most animal disorders are caused by mineral deficiencies in soils that produce the principal food supplies for animals. By starting with a complete quantitative analysis of the animals and quantitative analysis of the milk, it is possible to control the usual disorders affecting dairy cows.

The farms where he did his research had no cases of bloat, milk fever or white scours - a usually fatal condition of young calves.

It was discovered then that skim milk was a drug on the dairy market. Farmers poured it down the sewers to get rid of it, since they were paid according to the fat content of the fluid milk and/or cream they sold to the creameries and processors.

Moguls of the dairy industry decided to create a market for a near waste product - skim milk. Their success (if we can call it that) has resulted in almost 90 per cent of the milk sold to consumers is skim milk or modified skim milk with up to three pounds of fat to each 100 pounds of skim milk.

It was not difficult to do this. They capitalized on certain unproved statements relating to fats in natural foods causing overweight, elevated cholesterol, hardened arteries and eventually heart disease. Few stopped to realize the differences - the vital differences - between fresh, clean raw milk as produced by nature and the liquid white stuff delivered to the supermarkets. Here are some interesting comparisons. Skim milk will not support life and natural whole fat milk is not fattening providing it is consumed as produced natural in its raw form.

Skim milk is robbed of its vital nutrients particularly fat-soluble vitamins A,D,E and K.

To produce skim milk, whole milk is run through a clarifier, then a separator, to remove all the natural fat, then pasteurized at high temperature followed by homogenization. Such processes remove not only all of the fat-soluble vitamins but enzymes, minerals and natural hormones as well or altered or destroyed so as to render the end product sterile. Consumers actually buy the carcass of the milk carried in about 90 per cent water - it's dead as any corpse.

Natural fats as produced by nature, supply the most efficient and lasting sources of energy - more than twice as much as from proteins and carbohydrates. They aid in proper utilization of proteins and carbohydrates and are essential for the metabolizing of fat-soluble vitamins.

Fats have been used as the whipping boy in the promotion of the sale of skim milk and skim and/or low fat milk products. Cholesterol emerged as the villain and heart disease the victim.

Throughout nature's domain she has created foods with a consistent level of fat. Nature foods were meant for direct feeding, including milk. Obesity would defeat nature's prime law - of "survival" and is not tolerated except in certain hibernating animals where it serves the purpose of survival.

Modern man now demands meat from over-fattened animals so that to enjoy top price, farmers must cater to the demand in order to make a living. Castration in cattle causes characteristic changes - docility, laziness and rapid weight gain. Synthetic hormones added to fodders promotes more weight in less time but even though it is not healthy weight, the steaks are tender.

Highly processed over-refined foods are huckstered everywhere from prepared cereal to gourmet desserts. Of all of the foods available to homemakers today, some 70 to 80 per cent were not even known 30 years ago. The affect of this rapid changeover from natural foods to those of virtual synthetic composition, fractionated, altered is frightening - they are incapable of supporting life. Is heart disease the number 1 killer due to natural fats in foods? Do natural fats cause excess fat and elevated cholesterol? The answer is clearly no.

Let's take a look at "Bossy" the 1,000-pound Jersey cow who eats about 40 pounds of food containing less than one pound of fat, yet she produces 80 pounds of milk a day, which is five per cent fat, or a total of four pounds of cream. Where did the extra three pounds of fat come from? Or take an 800-pound fattening steer that gains three pounds a day from a 30-pound diet providing a quarter-pound of fat. The obvious answer is that the body organism metabolizes more fat than is consumed in the daily diet.

Natural fat is needed vitally to process what we digest. Cholesterol must be regarded as a servant of the body. Without it we would die. Let's go back to the intelligence of nature rather than depend of the intellect of man who warns against four per cent of fat in milk while advertising ice cream with 18 per cent butterfat. Let's fight for our right to clean raw milk just as it comes from nature's dairy - Bossy the cow, and if we can't get it this way let's get the next best thing. Get powdered skim milk. It is not instantly soluble for convenience but it is the least processed and gives us the most nutrients other than raw milk itself.

If there is to be a hero and a happy ending here, consumers must do their own homework!

Any questions? Please send me an e-mail at gormac@...