Ever wondered what happens to milk when it is pasteurized and homogenised and how it affects our body? being a health conscious person I like to find out the truth about the foods we eat on a regular basis and how it affects our health. Since we drink milk almost everyday in various forms and living in a city cannot get pure fresh milk we have to rely on commercial dairy milk. In the dairy milk is pasteurized and homogenised before we get it. So what exactly this means and is it good for us?
First of all let's look at what pasteurization is! In simple terms it is a process in which the milk is heated to high temperatures to kill any bacteria present. Fair enough... but the heating kills all the enzymes as well and these are vital components of milk! In fact, the 'death' of the enzymes is how they determine that the process is successful. When all the enzymes are dead, the pasteurization process is considered to be complete!
This process not only kills the enzymes and any bad bacteria but also friendly bacteria such as Lactobacillus. This means that the digestion of the various nutrients such as proteins, fats and sugars then has to be carried out by the body without any assistance from the naturally occurring enzymes and bacteria in the milk, and because of their absence additional undue stress is placed on the pancreas.
Raw unadulterated, unprocessed milk which is hard to find these days but our grandparents probably drank everyday was a 'living' food full of enzymes, beneficial bacteria, vitamins, minerals, fats, proteins and lactose, (a sugar). Leave a glass of this sitting at normal room temperature and the bacteria within the milk will ferment the sugars into lactic acid producing sour milk, which ironically is even more nutritious than the fresh milk because it is partly digested.
Bad hygiene?
So, why is the milk pasteurized in the first place? The answer to that one as you probably know is to make milk safer by killing any contaminants present. This is correct but it is not the true reason. The reality is that pasteurized milk is just as susceptible to contamination as raw milk.
Pasteurization has only come into 'vogue' in the last few decades as the commercialization of the dairy industry evolved. It is a cheap substitute for effective sanitization. If cows, dairies and workers were scrupulously clean, pasteurization would not be necessary... but that's too expensive and so the simple way is to 'kill' everything in the milk. There are some parallels to the increasing practice of irradiating meat... it's a lot cheaper to 'zap' it rather than avoid the contamination in the first place.
Milk which is pasteurized is an 'empty' food like so many other processed foods and people are unwittingly drinking it thinking that it is good for you, when the opposite is true!
But it gets worse...
What about milk which is pasteurized AND homogenized? This is the type of milk that is most prevalent in supermarkets today and people are unwittingly ingesting a lot of undesirable fat.
Our younger readers won't realize this but the good 'ole' milk always had a layer of cream which settled on the top of the milk. Homogenization is a technique used to make milk uniform in texture. It breaks up the fat in the cream fraction into very small particles. The tiny globules of fat which result from this process allows a deadly enzyme called xanthine oxidase to get into the body.
This enzyme can damage artery walls by causing lesions to occur on the lining. All milk fat excluding that from humans have this enzyme... but, it is not normally a problem as the fat globules that contain the enzyme are too large to pass through the intestinal wall and into the bloodstream. So, in non homogenized milk the enzyme will pass through the body without doing any damage. Not so however, after the milk has been homogenized because the particles are then small enough to squeeze through the intestinal linings!
Enough said!
Oop's... what about the growth hormones and antibiotics that are given to cows and present in the milk? No... I think that I'll give this issue a miss... have said enough!
First of all let's look at what pasteurization is! In simple terms it is a process in which the milk is heated to high temperatures to kill any bacteria present. Fair enough... but the heating kills all the enzymes as well and these are vital components of milk! In fact, the 'death' of the enzymes is how they determine that the process is successful. When all the enzymes are dead, the pasteurization process is considered to be complete!
This process not only kills the enzymes and any bad bacteria but also friendly bacteria such as Lactobacillus. This means that the digestion of the various nutrients such as proteins, fats and sugars then has to be carried out by the body without any assistance from the naturally occurring enzymes and bacteria in the milk, and because of their absence additional undue stress is placed on the pancreas.
Raw unadulterated, unprocessed milk which is hard to find these days but our grandparents probably drank everyday was a 'living' food full of enzymes, beneficial bacteria, vitamins, minerals, fats, proteins and lactose, (a sugar). Leave a glass of this sitting at normal room temperature and the bacteria within the milk will ferment the sugars into lactic acid producing sour milk, which ironically is even more nutritious than the fresh milk because it is partly digested.
Bad hygiene?
So, why is the milk pasteurized in the first place? The answer to that one as you probably know is to make milk safer by killing any contaminants present. This is correct but it is not the true reason. The reality is that pasteurized milk is just as susceptible to contamination as raw milk.
Pasteurization has only come into 'vogue' in the last few decades as the commercialization of the dairy industry evolved. It is a cheap substitute for effective sanitization. If cows, dairies and workers were scrupulously clean, pasteurization would not be necessary... but that's too expensive and so the simple way is to 'kill' everything in the milk. There are some parallels to the increasing practice of irradiating meat... it's a lot cheaper to 'zap' it rather than avoid the contamination in the first place.
Milk which is pasteurized is an 'empty' food like so many other processed foods and people are unwittingly drinking it thinking that it is good for you, when the opposite is true!
But it gets worse...
What about milk which is pasteurized AND homogenized? This is the type of milk that is most prevalent in supermarkets today and people are unwittingly ingesting a lot of undesirable fat.
Our younger readers won't realize this but the good 'ole' milk always had a layer of cream which settled on the top of the milk. Homogenization is a technique used to make milk uniform in texture. It breaks up the fat in the cream fraction into very small particles. The tiny globules of fat which result from this process allows a deadly enzyme called xanthine oxidase to get into the body.
This enzyme can damage artery walls by causing lesions to occur on the lining. All milk fat excluding that from humans have this enzyme... but, it is not normally a problem as the fat globules that contain the enzyme are too large to pass through the intestinal wall and into the bloodstream. So, in non homogenized milk the enzyme will pass through the body without doing any damage. Not so however, after the milk has been homogenized because the particles are then small enough to squeeze through the intestinal linings!
Enough said!
Oop's... what about the growth hormones and antibiotics that are given to cows and present in the milk? No... I think that I'll give this issue a miss... have said enough!
