Title: Please give us our real milk back!
Nowadays opinions are divided as to whether milk is good or bad for us, but when I was a cute innocent little boy quite unlike what I am now, not many people spoke ill of milk. The benefits of milk are all too well known as we’ve heard them so many times before - such as strengthening bones and teeth, preventing osteoporosis, and many other benefits not mentioned here.
However, the milk that is being sold in the supermarket now is not something you would call ‘milk’. It changed so much from two fatal processes that it is already something quite different from what has been squeezed from cow’s udder. I won’t say every food processing is bad, but the two processes in this case irreversibly turn nutrition-perfect milk into poison.
Fatal process no.1 is pasteurization. The goal of pasteurization is to kill off bad germs and make milk safer to drink by heating it at a high temperature over a short period of time. Well-intended indeed, but there is a problem with this high temperature heating. This process indiscriminately kills off good germs, too. These guys not only serve as a natural defense against bad germs, but they also help with digestion of milk.
You know, my stomach goes rock n roll on me like nobody’s business whenever I eat dairy. But I’m fine with yogurt. I think it’s thanks to good germs abound in yogurt, and it seems that the same story applies to milk that did not go through high temperature heating.
The other processing which is the greater of two evils is ‘homo-ka’. (-ka is a Japanese suffix for ‘to turn into‘ or -ization’) Since for this invention of term I took the liberty of doing a slapdash borrowing from the English word ‘homogenization,’ I’m not exactly sure how exactly you’d call it in Japanese, but in short, ‘homo-ka’ (homogenization) refers to the process in which milk is shot against a filter at super high pressure to break milk fat into pieces and thereby more evenly dispersing them within the milk. All it does is making milk fat particles smaller, but this entails serious health problems.
In milk there are many kinds of hormones and enzymes which are, in excess amount, harmful to us. Since they are fat soluble, they are dissolved in milk fat. Fat particles in unhomogenized milk are big enough that they exit our system mostly unabsorbed. However, fat particles in homogenized milk have become one tenth of its original size and thus our body absorbs most if not all of them. The hormones and enzymes which are absorbed in such excess amount irritate artery walls and cause arteriosclerosis (hardening of artery walls) and accelerate the growth of abnormal cells, increasing the possibility of cancer.
I have said this before, but there are diverse opinions out there concerning milk and I do not intend to say that my opinion is the absolute truth. However, people should not have their choices taken away from them. The milk situation in Japan is a little better as low-heat pasteurized milk is readily available and even raw milk can be obtained legally, which is illegal in Canada. For this reason, I want to tell the Canadian government the following, if given the chance: “Please give us our real milk back.”
