Home On the Range Farms

By Dr. Mercola

Dr. Don Huber is an expert in an area of science that relates to the toxicity of genetically engineered (GE) foods.

(Alternative terms for GE foods include genetically modified (GM), or “GMO” for genetically modified organism.)

His specific areas of training include soil-borne diseases, microbial ecology, and host-parasite relationships.

Dr. Huber also taught plant pathology, soil microbiology, and micro-ecological interactions as they relate to plant disease as a staff Professor at Purdue University for 35 years.

In part one of this interview, Dr. Huber discussed the shocking discovery of a brand new organism in genetically engineered (GE) crops—an organism that has been clearly linked to infertility and miscarriage in cattle, horses, pigs, sheep, and poultry that are raised on GE feed.

In part one we began the discussion on the hazards of glyphosate, the active ingredient in Monsanto’s herbicide Roundup, and its contribution to a new phenomenon referred to as “Sudden Death Syndrome” (SDS).

Here, we continue the discussion on glyphosate.

The “Biodegradable” Weed Killer that Wasn’t…

The public’s appreciation of the toxicity of glyphosate is rather limited. The fact that Monsanto marketed Roundup as “environmentally friendly” and “biodegradable” may have quite a bit to do with this general lack of insight. (In 2009, a French court upheld two earlier convictions against Monsanto for false advertising.)

Glyphosate is actually, in many ways, similar to DDT, which is known to cause reproductive problems among other things.

“There are some similarities,” Dr. Huber says. “… I am familiar with DDT, and the fact that it’s a very difficult compound to degrade. It’s biologically degraded primarily by a process we call co-metabolism… [T]here are very few organisms that can utilize this as a direct nutrient source.

There are a few organisms that can utilize glyphosate as a direct nutrient source, but again, most of the degradation appears to be by co-metabolism. In other words, an organism just happens to produce the extracellular enzymes that will degrade it, rather than the organism really getting any benefit from it.”

Glyphosate Persists in Soil, and Promotes Disease-Causing Pathogens

According to Dr. Huber, glyphosate can accumulate and persist in the soil for years. Persistence is determined by biological activity, soil PH, clay content, and how firmly it’s sequestered or absorbed in the soil. This is bad news, because glyphosate not only decimates beneficial microorganisms in the soil essential for proper plant function and high quality nutrition, it also promotes the proliferation of disease-causing pathogens.

“The organisms that are stimulated are the pathogens,” Dr. Huber says. “…all of the natural biological control organisms are very sensitive to that concentration of glyphosate. What we see with the fusaria, which causes sudden death syndrome in soybeans, is that it can be stimulated by glyphosate… so we find [up to] 500 percent increase in root colonization by this fungus. It’s a very serious pathogen, not only on soybeans. Fusaria on most of our crops is a major disease organism that we have to deal with.”

This 500 percent increase in root colonization of the fusaria fungus occurs even on Roundup-ready crops, because the technology does not ‘cancel out’ the effects of the glyphosate in the plant in any way.

“All it does is make it possible for that plant to survive and to accumulate more glyphosate. We still change the soil ecology, microbial ecology, and… our intestinal microbiology.”

To quickly recap what we discussed in part one of this interview, while glyphosate promotes the growth of more virulent pathogens, it also kills off beneficial bacteria that might keep such pathogens in check—in the soil, and in the gut of animals or humans that ingest the crop.

“[W]ith glyphosate, we also see an additional stimulation of virulence, so we see increased ability to cause disease, as well as the loss of the natural biological controls,” Dr. Huber says.

It’s important to understand that the glyphosate actually becomes systemic throughout the plant, so it cannot be washed off. It’s insidethe plant. And once you eat it, it ends up in your gut where it can wreak total havoc with your health, considering the fact that 80 percent of your immune system resides there and is dependent on a healthy ratio of good and bad bacteria.

Glyphosate—The Most Abused Chemical in the History of Man

Interestingly enough, when asked which toxin he would prefer to use if he had to make a choice between two evils, Dr. Huber says he’d take DDT over glyphosate any day.

“A lot of these materials can have a very beneficial use. I’m certainly not anti-chemical. But we have to use some common sense. What we have with glyphosate is the most abused chemical we have ever had in the history of man,” he says.

“… When future historians write about our time, they’re not going to write about the tons of chemicals that we did or didn’t apply. When it comes to glyphosate, they’re going to write about our willingness to sacrifice our children and jeopardize our existence, while threatening and jeopardizing the very basis of our existence; the sustainability of our agriculture.” … It doesn’t mean that it’s not reversible… But it means that we need to recognize what the concerns are, what’s happening, and then we need to change.”

According to Dr. Huber, we’re now seeing the results of a massive experiment based on flawed science and failed promises. We jumped in without the basic understanding of what these products do, and this was done just to support the bottom line of a few large companies, such as Monsanto. That’s madness!

Assumptions, Presumptions, and Flawed Science—All Potentially Deadly

As explained in part one of this interview, glyphosate is a strong chelator, meaning it immobilizes critical micronutrients, rendering them unavailable to the plant. As a result, the nutritional efficiency of genetically engineered (GE) plants is profoundly compromised. Micronutrients such as iron, manganese and zinc can be reduced by as much as 80-90 percent in GE plants.

Didn’t anyone know this could happen? Part of the problem goes back to the fact that Monsanto’s scientists were really only looking for a mechanism that would kill weeds. That’s what happens when you assume and refuse to double-check your assumptions…

“As I read some of the early documents, it stated that it ‘inhibits the EPSPs enzyme. Actual herbicide mode of action unknown.’” Dr. Huber says. “In 1984, it was very well-documented that the way it kills weeds and plants is by compromising the defense mechanisms, making them very susceptible to these soil borne organisms… It’s a debilitating type of situation, more like AIDS than a direct killer…

Also, since humans and animals don’t have the shikimate pathway, it was assumed that this is a pathway that exists only in plants and microorganisms. Therefore, it’s going to be safe for us. It was also assumed that the foreign proteins – whether it’s BT; the protein from glyphosate; that new EPSPs gene from the Agrobacterium – would readily be degraded in the gut… It’s a flawed science.”

The Unfulfilled Promises of Genetically Engineered Crops

The situation is equally disturbing with respects to the genetic engineering of the crop itself. Many experts have admitted that we really do not yet understand genetics enough to dabble in this way and release it into the wild. Because what we do know is that when you insert a foreign gene, you alter not just one feature—you’re altering multiple things, and you can end up with some highly unpredictable and unforeseeable results.

Most of the biotech industry’s promises have turned out to be false with respect to genetically engineered (GE) foods. For example:

• GE crops are supposed to be more drought resistant, but the opposite turns out to be true. Says Dr. Huber:

  “It takes twice as much water to produce a pound of a Roundup-ready crop soybean plant treated with glyphosate, as it does with soybean plant that’s not treated with glyphosate.”

• GE crops are supposed to be nutritionally “better” or at the very least “equivalent” to conventional foods, but they’re not. On the contrary, they’re nutritionally inferior due to glyphosate’s chelating mechanism, which blocks absorption of micronutrients. GE crops contain about 50 percent less manganese, and up to 70 percent less zinc. They also contain less copper, iron and magnesium, just to name a few. This affects the overall health of the plant, and its reproductive ability, and when you eat this nutritionally inferior food, you’re not getting the micronutrients your body needs for proper function either. All animal products are similarly affected when raised on GE soy- or corn feed.

Has it Gone Too Far, or is There Still Time to Turn it All Around?

Glyphosate was first introduced as a weed killer in 1974, prior to the introduction of genetically modified crops. According to Dr. Huber, it has been so overused for the past 30 years that many essential soil organisms have been eradicated.

“Typically… when we would apply an herbicide, we would tell our growers, “You rotate the chemistry, just like you rotate the crop.” Therefore, when you had an effect on a specific group of organisms, you have an opportunity for nature to rebalance and to reestablish that beneficial and functional relationship. We haven’t done that with glyphosate. We just continually hammered for 30 years in one direction on those beneficial organisms… They no longer exist in the environment! We see that we have to start adding them now in order to increase crop productivity and nutritional value.

Dr. Huber has spent about 20 years researching how to remediate the damage caused by glyphosate. Fortunately, Dr. Huber believes we can turn it all around, but we MUST make changes. We cannot keep going the way we are.

“We have to start looking now at mineral supplementations and seed treatments,” Dr. Huber says, “because our soil biology isn’t going to provide it. The whole system has changed. If we want to change it for the better, we have to recognize what that change is and be willing to change again to compensate or to rectify.”

If we continue in the same direction, dousing our crops with ever increasing amounts of glyphosate, we will soon start seeing the same effect on human health as Dr. Huber is seeing in plants and animals. In fact, we may already be seeing the effects of the genetically engineered diet.

“… [W]e’re just starting to see the impact on reproductive fertility,” he says. “Also the disease potential… You can hardly pick up the paper anymore without seeing that a human disease is involved… We had to recall 20 percent of our total egg production here last year or early this year because of salmonella.

You have to say, “What’s changed?”

The newspaper said that when they looked at the egg-producing facilities “they had chicken manure and they had rodent droppings.” … I have never seen a chicken coup that didn’t have chicken drop. They have manure. Any time you have feed, even with three or four cats around and whatnot, you’re going to have some rodents. That’s NOT the reason.”

Glyphosate May Play a Key Role in Deteriorating Food Safety

Dr. Huber goes on to discuss a German paper that shows certain pathogens such as E. coli and some others have a high tolerance for glyphosate compared to their natural biological controls. What this means is that it may not be the presence or absence of pathogens per se that determines the safety of our food supply, but rather the presence or absence of the natural control organisms, which are effectively destroyed by glyphosate.

“Salmonella, Clostridium, and a lot of these disease organisms are ubiquitous. They’re everywhere. Our health is dependent on keeping them in check,” Dr. Huber warns.

This is truly important in light of the ongoing war against organically-grown foods, which are often targeted first, when there’s an outbreak of foodborne illness. If we can educate those in charge about this, then they would perhaps begin to understand why organic foods are FAR LESS inclined to be the culprit, because the beneficial soil bacteria present in organically farmed lands—as they do not use glyphosate or other chemicals on their fields—actually hinders pathogens in and on the food from multiplying out of control.

“If we’re eliminating that check, either through residues in our food or through direct impact in our environment, we’re going to continue to see what we’re seeing today. Look at Alzheimer’s, thyroid problems, autism, Parkinson’s – any of those diseases that have a tie with either the endocrine system or the nutrient availability—we’re going to see those increase.”

Are Genetically Engineered Foods Affecting Your Mood and Behavior?

Dr. Huber recently spent some time in Australia, where he had the opportunity to review an ongoing study into genetically engineered foods.

“It’s a continuation of a study that was conducted in Iowa with pigs and cattle. The [Australians] are doing it with mice so that they can define what the toxins are… They’re using these one or two-pound, big, white rats that some people call pet rats… You can reach in to the non-GMO-fed rat cage and pull one out. Put it on your lap and it can be patted just like a cat.

But try and reach in to the cage where the rats are being fed the genetically engineered feed. Here they have limited it to one [rat per cage]. The rats are irritated. They don’t get along together. They always go off into their own little world. They do backflips. They crawl up and run around the cage. They can’t get any peace; can’t settle down. That is very typical of what you’d see with autism. Then you start looking and say, “Well, are there any other similarities?”

Dr. Huber also recently met with a doctor in Germany who specializes in working with autistic children. Interestingly, there appear to be many correlations between the rats fed genetically modified feed and autistic children.

“[When] you look at the stomachs of the GMO-fed [animals], they have all of the severe allergy responses, the inflammation and the reddening… When they looked at the intestine, they said that the intestinal lining is deteriorating… The smell of the intestinal contents is very rank. The biology has been drastically changed.

This [German] doctor said, “That’s exactly what we’re seeing with our children with autism.

We need more research, but certainly, the indicators are there. The research up until very recently hasn’t been done, and those who wanted to do it have been prohibited from publishing, or from doing that research. We see those that have dared to come out and raised some concerns have been very severely impacted professionally, as well as in their own personal lives, in that persecution that they’ve had to endure.

We’ve got to change.

We’ve got to recognize that what we have now isn’t normal. We got to get back to safe, sufficient, and sustainable production and health for our agriculture community, if we’re going to be healthy in that process also.”

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control have long claimed that between 1998 and 2008, there were two deaths from raw milk.

This number is often used in media reporting about raw milk.

But those illnesses actually appear to have come from a form of cheese that isn’t legal under current FDA regulations, called queso fresco.

In December, Mark McAfee, the owner of Organic Pasture Dairy, challenged claims on the Centers for Disease Control web site stating that raw milk is dangerous.

The agency actually agreed to make some slight changes to its language on the site, but did not change a reported death from Salmonella Typhimurium in California.

But the state was not reporting that death.

He did not receive a response from the CDC until he threatened to file a Freedom of Information Act request. At that time, he discovered the death was from that same form of cheese mentioned above, queso fresco.

According to Health Impact News Daily:

“Why is this important? Because statistics have become important weapons in the war over food rights. When the CDC says there have been two deaths from raw milk between 1998 and 2008, that statistic carries a powerful message: you can die from drinking raw milk…

If it turns out that the two people it says died from drinking raw milk didn’t, in fact, die from drinking raw milk, then the CDC has lost an important weapon in the government’s campaign of fear around raw milk. If no one died in that 11-year period, suddenly, raw milk isn’t quite the danger it has been made to appear. “

The CDC defends the use of mercury in vaccines and fluoride in your water, yet tells you to be afraid—be very afraid—of raw milk. Does this make sense?

No!

What the CDC is telling you about the dangers of raw milk is completely upside down from the truth. The truth is that the risk of foodborne illness from many other foods (such as pasteurized milk, mass-produced meat and poultry, and bagged greens) is much greater than from raw milk, provided the raw milk comes from a dairy that adheres to proper standards. The CDC and the FDA both continue to misuse, manipulate and suppress data in order to frighten the public.

Secrets, Lies, and Raw Propaganda

The CDC’s bias against raw milk is not new. A 2007 press release by A Campaign for Real Milk (part of the Weston A. Price Foundation) shines a light on the CDC’s concealment of the truth. The article came on the heels of a cautionary reminder to the public by the FDA and CDC that raw milk is “dangerous.”

The article states:

“The joint FDA /CDC reminder claims that between 1998 and 2005, raw milk was implicated in 45 outbreaks, 1007 cases, 104 hospitalizations and 2 deaths. Yet the reference cited, CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report for the week of March 2, 2007 (MMWR for 03-02-07), provides no such information; nor is any such information found in any other FDA or CDC document. Numerous requests to the FDA for clarification have not been answered.”

So, not only were the two deaths NOT due to drinking raw milk, but according to Sally Fallon (president of the Weston A. Price Foundation), the FDA and CDC have never provided a single reference to support the claim of widespread illness from raw milk during that seven-year period. Fallon stated:

“Reports of individuals becoming ill after drinking raw milk do exist, although none were cited in the recent CDC and FDA Reminder. But even these reports do not usually provide proof that raw milk caused illness. When someone who drinks raw milk becomes ill, these agencies immediately report an ‘association’ with raw milk, ignoring other vectors of disease and subsequent tests showing the milk to be clean. FDA and CDC definitely have a double standard when it comes to raw milk.”

Pasteurized milk is responsible for far more illnesses and deaths. For example, according to RealMilk.com, the United States’ largest recorded outbreak of Salmonella resulted from pasteurized milk, but alarmingly, the CDC never issued a specific Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report for this outbreak.

The incident, occurring between June 1984 and April 1985, resulted in 200,000 illnesses and 18 deaths. This and other outbreaks of illness resulting from the consumption of pasteurized milk somehow evade the public’s eye, escaping warnings from both the CDC and FDA. In fact, they have never issued a warning against commercially pasteurized milk! So, it isn’t terribly surprising that Mark McAfee was given the cold shoulder by CDC. This is just one more example of the CDC’s ongoing bias against raw dairy products.

Raw Milk is a Healthful, Living Food

High quality raw milk has a mountain of health benefits that pasteurized milk lacks. For example, raw milk is:

• Loaded with healthy bacteria that are good for your gastrointestinal tract
• Full of more than 60 digestive enzymes, growth factors, and immunoglobulins (antibodies)
• Rich in conjugated linoleic acid (CLA), which fights cancer
• Rich in beneficial raw fats, amino acids, and proteins in a highly bioavailable form, all 100 percent digestible
• Loaded with vitamins (A, B, C, D, E, and K) in highly bioavailable forms, and a very balanced blend of minerals (calcium, magnesium, phosphorus, iron) whose absorption is enhanced by live lactobacilli

It is not uncommon for people who drink raw milk to experience improvement or complete resolution of troubling health issues—everything from allergies to digestive problems to eczema. It is also common for people who have “milk allergies” to tolerate raw milk just fine. Pasteurized milk is a completely different story.

Pasteurization Creates a Dead, White Liquid That is NOT Beneficial to Your Health

Pasteurization turns milk into a dead white liquid whose health benefits are largely destroyed. Consider what pasteurization does to milk:

• The price of killing the pathogenic bacteria is that you also kill the good bacteria which helps digest milk and make it such a nourishing food
• Proteins and enzymes are completely destroyed or denatured, made less digestible and less usable by your body
• Immunoglobulins, metal-binding proteins, vitamin-binding proteins, carrier proteins, growth factors, and anti-microbial peptides such as Lactoferrin are destroyed
• Many vitamins and minerals are rendered biologically unusable
• Fats are damaged and destabilized

Additionally, the bacteria killed by pasteurization are not removed, so their dead carcasses remain in the milk to ignite immune reactions in those who ingest them, which is one major cause of milk allergies. It isn’t really an allergy to the milk itself, but to the organic cell fragments it contains.

Making matters worse, cows in CAFOs (confined animal feeding operations) are routinely given drugs in an effort to counter the ill health and immune problems caused by their poor living conditions. Feedlots are breeding grounds for all kinds of harmful bacteria. So the cows are snowed with antibiotics. This milk HAS to be pasteurized, because it is simply loaded with bacteria—and not the beneficial kind.

Researchers using a highly sensitive test to determine what drugs and hormones might be present in your pasteurized milk found some startling results. The drugs and hormones they detected included the following:

While all types of milk tested positive for chemicals—even breast milk—cow’s milk contained the highest levels. Some of these drugs and hormones were given to the cows directly, while others were likely ingested from the cattle food or contamination on the farm. When you drink raw milk from these massive commercial dairies, you might indeed be risking your health. But this is a far different product than raw milk from smaller farms where the farming practices are more natural, sustainable, clean, and humane. Raw milk from these cows is clean and nutritious and loaded with good bacteria—the kind you need for a healthy gut.

WHO’S Your Dairy?

Why is the CDC still determined to hide the facts and prevent you from access to this beneficial food? If safety isn’t the REAL issue, then what is? If raw dairy really caught on, wouldn’t the dairy industry simply follow suit and begin producing raw products to meet the demand?

They would if they could, but it would be virtually impossible. In order for conventional dairy farms to produce safe raw milk, they’d be forced to clean up their production practices, raise healthier cows (and likely fewer cows), and give them access to pasture. This would cost them money—and lots of it—if it were even possible…and that’s a big “if.” Their business DEPENDS on pasteurization, and that is why their powerful lobbyists will stop at nothing to persuade government agencies to keep raw milk bans in full force.

Manipulating or outright lying about statistics is just one means of accomplishing this.

The CDC and others who argue that raw milk is unsafe do not differentiate between REAL raw milk, and raw milk produced under the suboptimal conditions often found in CAFOs. Small dairies that are raising “happy cows” that are allowed to roam on pasture, feed on grass, and are raised without the use of antibiotics and hormones, produce raw milk that is loaded with nutrition and free of pathogenic bacteria and other contaminants, the way milk was produced decades and centuries ago.

The good news is, Big Dairy’s worse fear is coming true—raw dairy IS catching on! Raw milk has been gaining popularity for years now.

Take Massachusetts, for example. The number of dairies licensed to sell raw milk grew from 12 to 23 in just two years, while the Northeast Organic Farming Association stated that dairies are selling more raw milk than they were five or six years ago, and consumers are calling in increasing numbers looking for advice on where to find it. The conventional dairy industry, realizing this, has redoubled their efforts to stifle raw milk sales, making every effort to prevent it from becoming mainstream, where it could begin to threaten their very livelihoods.

Presidential candidate Ron Paul has taken up the battle to protect your rights for access to raw milk by introducing House Bill HR 1830, which authorizes the interstate traffic of unpasteurized milk and raw milk products that are packaged for direct human consumption. On May 13, 2011, this bill was sent to the House Subcommittee on Health. This bill would make it legal for farmers to sell and distribute raw milk across state lines.

I cannot urge you strongly enough to support Ron Paul’s bill, HR 1830, and inform everyone you know. This issue has nothing to do with whether or not you want to drink raw milk, and everything to do with whether or not you want the right to chose what you feed your family. If we allow the U.S. government to remove our right to raw milk, who knows what could be next?

The Farm-to-Consumer Defense Fund has created a petition page for HR 1830 that also automatically faxes your message to your U.S. Senators and House Representative. You can even choose to send your message to your nearest daily newspaper.

I urge you to take a moment to sign the petition right now!

How YOU Can Protect Your Health Rights

By joining the fight to protect access to raw milk, you’re not only standing up for raw milk, but you’re standing up for your freedom of choice. No one, and certainly not any government agency or dairy lobby, should be able to restrict your access to pure, unadulterated food.

There are a number of things you can do to make your feelings known on this issue, such as signing the petition described above.

The following is a list of resources that can help you become better informed:

• Organizations like the Weston A. Price Foundation and the Farm-to-Consumer Legal Defense Fund are working toward true freedom of choice for American consumers, and I urge you to get involved in their causes.
• I invite you to listen to my interview with Mark McAfee, the founder of Organic Pastures, one of the largest producers of raw milk in the United States. There is also great information on his website, www.OrganicPastures.com.
• Consider reading The Raw Milk Revolution by health and business journalist David E. Gumpert, as well as watching his videoabout the history of pasteurization and its exaggerated health benefits.
• Finally, consider watching Farmageddon: The Unseen War on American Family Farms, a documentary by Kristin Canty that may just make your blood boil.

Raw-milk crusader Michael Schmidt finally got to meet with Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty last month after a 37-day hunger strike. But the Premier told him the government had no plans to change the law to legalize raw milk sales, and that it would rely on the best advice of medical experts.

But what is the best advice of medical experts? Perhaps the better question is what is it today — as anyone who closely follows medical news knows, what’s considered healthy one week is often feared, or dismissed, the next. Forty years ago, for example, women were told to perform a self-exam every month to check for breast cancer. Last month, experts retracted that advice: Breast self-exams “have no benefit and should not be used.”

Dramatic reversals of expert opinion like this are not unusual. Decades ago, approximately 90% of children underwent tonsillectomies; now, only 20% do. Today tonsils are recognized as important organs in children’s immune systems. Prior to 1994, experts at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) forbade health-food marketers Durk Pearson and Sandy Shaw from putting this statement on fish oil supplements: “Consumption of omega-3 fatty acids may reduce the risk of coronary heart disease.” Pearson and Shaw challenged the FDA’s ruling in court, and after seven years of litigation, the FDA finally capitulated.

During those seven years, a million Americans suffered sudden-death heart attacks, some of which might have been prevented if consumers had been given the information that is now considered established science. Health Canada’s website, for instance, now says consuming omega-3 fatty acids may have not only cardiovascular benefits, but also beneficial effects on diabetes, depression, cancer, lupus, asthma and rheumatoid arthritis.

Sometimes the about-face comes much more quickly. The drug Avastin was approved by Health Canada for treating breast cancer in February of 2009, but approval was withdrawn last month, because its side effects include the increased risk of death from heart attacks and strokes.

Politicians may find it convenient to sidestep difficult issues by deferring to “the experts.” But nobody on Earth is more expert than the individual at answering the crucial question that arises repeatedly in every person’s life: What risks am I willing to accept?

Statisticians can tell us the risk associated with skydiving, smoking cigarettes, travelling by airplane or driving a car. What they cannot tell us is whether any particular individual should prefer to accept or reject the risk of those activities. Each individual must consider, and balance, the variables they deem important: How pleasurable will this be? How frightened will I be? How necessary is this? How much will it cost? What alternatives are there? Only the individual is sufficiently expert in each of those areas to reach the proper conclusion for their specific case. If one person decides to travel by airplane while another decides to travel by car, neither of them is wrong. Their values and preferences simply lead them to accept different risks.

Government experts testified at Michael Schmidt’s trial that drinking raw milk can expose people to the risk of sickness or death from various pathogens. The people who wish to drink raw milk, or to feed it to their children, are well aware of these risks — the publicity surrounding Mr. Schmidt’s prosecution guaranteed that. But the risk of death is actually quite low: No one has died from drinking raw milk in the United States in the past 11 years, even though sales are legal in 26 states.

On the other hand, a study of 8,334 school-aged children in Germany, Austria and Switzerland was published in the Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology in August, 2011. It reported that children who drank raw milk were less likely to have asthma and allergies than those who drank pasteurized.

Asthma kills approximately 500 Canadians annually. It is not irrational for parents to want to minimize the risk of asthma for their children. And many people have observed from personal experience that they, or their children, cannot digest pasteurized milk, but have no trouble digesting raw.

So every individual can weigh the risks and decide what he is willing to accept. Some will choose pasteurized, some will choose raw. Neither group is wrong.

What Premier McGuinty fails to understand is that the real experts will speak for themselves, one by one. If expert opinion is to govern, individuals should be free to implement the advice prescribed by their own unique expertise about their own unique circumstances and risk tolerance.

National Post

Karen Selick is the litigation director for the Canadian Constitution Foundation and is Michael Schmidt’s lawyer.

Raw-milk crusader Michael Schmidt finally got to meet with Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty last month after a 37-day hunger strike. But the Premier told him the government had no plans to change the law to legalize raw milk sales, and that it would rely on the best advice of medical experts.

But what is the best advice of medical experts? Perhaps the better question is what is it today — as anyone who closely follows medical news knows, what’s considered healthy one week is often feared, or dismissed, the next. Forty years ago, for example, women were told to perform a self-exam every month to check for breast cancer. Last month, experts retracted that advice: Breast self-exams “have no benefit and should not be used.”

Dramatic reversals of expert opinion like this are not unusual. Decades ago, approximately 90% of children underwent tonsillectomies; now, only 20% do. Today tonsils are recognized as important organs in children’s immune systems. Prior to 1994, experts at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) forbade health-food marketers Durk Pearson and Sandy Shaw from putting this statement on fish oil supplements: “Consumption of omega-3 fatty acids may reduce the risk of coronary heart disease.” Pearson and Shaw challenged the FDA’s ruling in court, and after seven years of litigation, the FDA finally capitulated.

During those seven years, a million Americans suffered sudden-death heart attacks, some of which might have been prevented if consumers had been given the information that is now considered established science. Health Canada’s website, for instance, now says consuming omega-3 fatty acids may have not only cardiovascular benefits, but also beneficial effects on diabetes, depression, cancer, lupus, asthma and rheumatoid arthritis.

Sometimes the about-face comes much more quickly. The drug Avastin was approved by Health Canada for treating breast cancer in February of 2009, but approval was withdrawn last month, because its side effects include the increased risk of death from heart attacks and strokes.

Politicians may find it convenient to sidestep difficult issues by deferring to “the experts.” But nobody on Earth is more expert than the individual at answering the crucial question that arises repeatedly in every person’s life: What risks am I willing to accept?

Statisticians can tell us the risk associated with skydiving, smoking cigarettes, travelling by airplane or driving a car. What they cannot tell us is whether any particular individual should prefer to accept or reject the risk of those activities. Each individual must consider, and balance, the variables they deem important: How pleasurable will this be? How frightened will I be? How necessary is this? How much will it cost? What alternatives are there? Only the individual is sufficiently expert in each of those areas to reach the proper conclusion for their specific case. If one person decides to travel by airplane while another decides to travel by car, neither of them is wrong. Their values and preferences simply lead them to accept different risks.

Government experts testified at Michael Schmidt’s trial that drinking raw milk can expose people to the risk of sickness or death from various pathogens. The people who wish to drink raw milk, or to feed it to their children, are well aware of these risks — the publicity surrounding Mr. Schmidt’s prosecution guaranteed that. But the risk of death is actually quite low: No one has died from drinking raw milk in the United States in the past 11 years, even though sales are legal in 26 states.

On the other hand, a study of 8,334 school-aged children in Germany, Austria and Switzerland was published in the Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology in August, 2011. It reported that children who drank raw milk were less likely to have asthma and allergies than those who drank pasteurized.

Asthma kills approximately 500 Canadians annually. It is not irrational for parents to want to minimize the risk of asthma for their children. And many people have observed from personal experience that they, or their children, cannot digest pasteurized milk, but have no trouble digesting raw.

So every individual can weigh the risks and decide what he is willing to accept. Some will choose pasteurized, some will choose raw. Neither group is wrong.

What Premier McGuinty fails to understand is that the real experts will speak for themselves, one by one. If expert opinion is to govern, individuals should be free to implement the advice prescribed by their own unique expertise about their own unique circumstances and risk tolerance.

National Post

Karen Selick is the litigation director for the Canadian Constitution Foundation and is Michael Schmidt’s lawyer.

Londoners will be able to buy un-pasteurised milk from a department store from today after Selfridges became the first retailer in Britain to stock it.

Previously, those wanting “raw milk” - which is sold untreated - could only buy it from a farmers’ market or over the internet. But now it is on tap from a dispenser in Selfridges Food Hall.

It is widely available across the Continent, particularly in Italy where there are hundreds of distribution machines. But it is illegal for shops in England and Wales to stock it.

Drinkers prefer raw milk to pasteurised for its fuller taste and claimed health benefits. It is said to alleviate eczema, hay fever and asthma and help those with low immunity and be good for lactose intolerant people.

Selfridges is able to bypass the ban by allowing the farmer to sell it - legally - from the store. Andrew Cavanna, Selfridges’ fresh food buyer, said: “We first noticed the trend at the farmers’ markets we visited. The taste of organic raw milk is second to none.”

The product comes from Longleys Farm in Hailsham, East Sussex, and is delivered to Selfridges in a sealed stainless steel tank, ice cold, each day. Customers get a recyclable glass bottle which they fill up from the dispenser, at a cost of £3.50 a litre or £2 for half a litre.

Farmer Steve Hook said demand was up four-fold. “We started selling raw milk in 2007, as we felt customers were looking for an authentic, unprocessed product that retains many of the health benefits that pasteurisation can destroy.”

But Dairy UK, which represents producers and processors of 85 per cent of milk sold in Britain, wants it banned. Technical director Ed Komorouski said: “Raw milk can have a high food safety risk. It could have organisms that are harmful to health.”

Taste test

Considering I grew up in Sussex no more than 10 minutes’ drive from the farm where this product comes from, I am a little embarrassed to admit that this is the first time I have tried unpasteurised milk.

So as I approach the machine in Selfridges’ Food Hall, insert my money, press the start button and wait for my glass bottle to fill up I am a little uncertain.

But within seconds of my first sip I am an instant convert. The taste is fresh and creamy and definitely has a hint of something about it that confirms that it has come straight from the cow.

It is full-fat, but unlike pasteurised milk it does not leave a cloying film in your mouth and - to the disappointment of the Evening Standard photographer who is always looking for a picture opportunity - it does not give you a white moustache.

It also does not have the watery taste of skimmed or semi-skimmed. While I’m not entirely convinced of the health benefits, and at £3.50 a litre it’s not cheap, I am definitely willing to give it a go because the taste is so good.

http://www.vancouversun.com/news/Digesting+meaning+food/5772320/story.html

Filtered, homogenised, standardised, raw, full fat, low fat - what is milk? Sheila Dillon teases out this seemingly simple question with Professor Peter Atkins, author of Liquid Materialities: A History of Milk, Science and the Law, who charts the changing stuff that we call milk.

Today’s milk reflects today’s interests, charted by Mintel in their most recent intelligence report on milk and cream, particularly the success of filtered milk Cravendale (Arla), and the 1% pioneered by Robert Wiseman Dairies, and widely copied since. Sheila visits the Arla Dairy in Stourton, Leeds, to find out about the many processes today’s milk goes through to suit our current tastes.

The success of the 1% milk has been driven by the FSA campaign to reduce saturated fats. But as Professor Ian Givens Director of the University of Reading’s Centre for Dairy Research explains, the evidence connecting milk consumption with cardiovascular disease shows a slight reduction in higher milk drinkers from lower milk drinkers.

Raw milk, despite being banned in Scotland and sold with a health warning in England and Wales, has seen sales growth recently, a result of farmers markets, online sales, and the beliefs of many that raw milk straight from the cow is a fundamentally different substance. Dr Natasha Campbell McBride advocates raw milk for many of her patients for a range of conditions, including lactose intolerance. To find out about modern raw milk production Sheila visited Hook & Son, who sell online and through farmers markets.

Producer: Rebecca Moore.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00yhv32?mid=53

From Kevin Brooker, in the Calgary Herald:

Ontario raw milk advocate Michael Schmidt at last week’s “Milk and Cookies” protest at FDA headquarters in Maryland. Photo courtesy of Kimberly Hartke.
“I don’t know about you, but lately, I’ve been getting a powerful thirst for a nice, cold glass of farm-fresh milk.

You’re a news reader, though, so you might only know that product by what amounts to a dirty word on the lips of a large class of bureaucrats in Canada and the U.S.: raw milk.

As a city mouse, I’ve never had the pleasure that farm folk have been praising for centuries – moo juice straight from the cow, albeit cooled and filtered. They speak rapturously about its flavour and texture, and their sense that it forms a clearly beneficial foundation to their nutritional life.

Heck, yeah, I want some of that.

Alas, since only 1991, the government of Canada says I may not purchase such a product. In their vast scientific wisdom, they decided that a practice as old as history has no place in the bright tomorrow of irradiated foods and patentable, genetically modified plants and animals.

Like most urbanites who will never touch a cow’s teat, I failed to notice the initial banning. It’s only been over the past few years that I’ve come to understand the well-intentioned folly that it has become, thanks to people like Michael Schmidt, the Newmarket, Ont., farmer who is bravely fighting to restore sanity in the dairy chain.

Schmidt, sometimes called the Milk Warrior, used to sell the good stuff from his heritage farm, and persisted in doing so in defiance of the raw milk ban. In 2006, 20 police officers raided the farm and slapped him with an equal number of charges.

Though eventually acquitted, the Ontario government appealed and, in September, the acquittals were overturned. On Sept. 29, Schmidt began a hunger strike, vowing to stay on it until he could have a faceto-face meeting with Premier Dalton McGuinty.

This is dramatic, to say the least, and surely a measure of his conviction. But he’s not alone out there in the realm of civil disobedience. Perhaps you read last week of the self-described “caravan of criminal mothers” who transported fresh milk across state lines and drank it defiantly in front of the Food and Drug Administration headquarters in Maryland. Though there were no arrests, it did bring attention to the impetus for their protest: the predawn raid on the tiny dairy farm of an Amish man in Pennsylvania, where they had previously bought their milk.

It is vital to note that neither that product, nor Schmidt’s, has ever been found contaminated. That is the principal reason, of course, why the Canadian government decreed that the high-heat process of pasteurization is a requisite to milk consumption. But these farmers insist, and it seems sensible, that on their small-scale operations, they practise a form of grass-fed, drug-free husbandry which, combined with obsessive cleanliness, renders contamination highly unlikely.

In short, they claim that the matter could be dealt with not with a ban, but with a sticker reminding consumers of potential risks, and letting them decide for themselves what they will ingest. This is exactly how it’s done across Europe and in some states, where it is correctly understood that routine food safety measures will continue, and that there is a powerful commercial disincentive to poisoning consumers.

Meanwhile, there is a supreme irony in that it is not illegal to drink raw milk in Canada, only to sell it….”

Michael Schmidt’s 37 Days Of A Hunger Strike Came To An End Today

Following A Meeting With Premiere McGuinty In His Queen’s Park Office

“This hunger strike was about starting a dialogue with the leader of this province,” states Farmer and Raw Milk Advocate Michael Schmidt. “I have been on this human journey for 17 years looking for constructive dialogue, and I have been dragged through the courts for a crime that has no victims.

My aim was simple: to take this to the top and to begin a conversation with our leader, one-on-one. To meet, as equal human beings, not as Premiere and Farmer. It was because of this that I undertook my hunger strike. And this morning, I met with Premiere McGuinty, in his office, and we have begun our dialogue, and because of this, I am ending my hunger strike today.

I have always had my hand outstretched in an offer for dialogue and feel that today, for the first time in 17 years, this hand has been taken and dialogue at the highest level has finally begun. I truly hope that the government will refrain from any further attacks on farmers until this dialogue has had a chance to take its proper course. We will be working closely with MPPs over the coming weeks to table a private
member’s bill.”

Premiere McGuinty thanked Michael for his grace and for the way he conducted himself through this hunger strike.

The Canadian Press

Date: Friday Nov. 4, 2011 12:14 PM ET