What You Need To Know About Raw Milk, Dairy & Pasteurization | Christian Homemaking

Hey there, friend! Today, I’m sharing with you the truth about raw milk, dairy and pasteurization, my testimony with dairy, and what you need to know before trying raw dairy yourself! First, let me share my background with dairy and my testimony from being vegan to drinking raw milk and dairy for over four years now.

Welcome to Mama’s Fruitful Home! My YouTube channel and blog is inspired from Titus 2:3-5 and Psalms 128:3. Titus 2:3-5 says, “Older women are to be reverent in behavior, not slanderers, not slaves to excessive drinking. They are to teach what is Good, so that they may encourage the young women to love their husbands and to love their children, to be self-controlled, pure, homemakers, kind and in submission to their husbands, so that God’s Word will not be slandered.” Psalms 128:3 says, “Your wife will be like a fruitful vine within your home, your children, like young olive trees around your table.” My hope and prayer here is to grow in sweet sisterhood, that we may flourish together in Christ-likeness as daughters of The King, always encouraging with Scripture. I will share tips on homemaking, ways to care for our over-all health in our God-given design and cooking and baking from scratch. Whether you are a brand new homemaker, or you’ve been homemaking for years, my hope and prayer is that God may use me to encourage you in your journey of creating a fruitful home. I am so blessed to have you here!

My entire life, up until I got married in my early twenties, I was sensitive to every dairy and meat product. I always did my best to avoid it- as you can imagine, that was extremely difficult. When I was in high school, I spent an entire two years being vegetarian. On the day of my two year anniversary of eating no meat, I had my Mom make me tacos, my favorite food. I wanted to enjoy it so bad, but I felt sick after. Looking back, I know that was because of a few different reasons, such as not having a certain food in two years and then devouring many tacos, and having poor quality of food- in other words, pasteurization. I’ll get into more of that here soon. When I was in college, I spent three months being entirely vegan, so eating no dairy or meat. It honestly wasn’t too difficult for me, because I knew how I felt after consuming dairy and meat, and it was not a good reminder. Looking back at my teenage-self, I’m reminded of the immense discomfort I dealt with immediately after eating meat and dairy, my awful period cramps and my horrible facial acne.

Once my husband and I got married, we had already known that we wanted a ton of babies, so the week we got married, we found local farms to start supporting my body for a Lord willing child. That probably sounds crazy to most, however, we women need to be learning and teaching the next generation these things, such as preparing our bodies for fertility, and true nourishment. That first week of marriage, after my entire life of not tolerating meat or dairy well at all, we stocked up on a ton of organic and non-GMO, grass-fed meat and dairy. We took it home, I tried a little bit of each item at a time, to slowly incorporate it all, and I. Never. Felt. Any. Horrible. Symptom. I learned that meat and dairy that The Good Lord blessed our land with is not harmful to the body that He created. I learned that pasteurized food made me ill.

Many of us will say that we’re lactose intolerant. I said that about myself my entire life. “I can’t eat or drink milk, yogurt, cheese, sour cream or cottage cheese, and I can’t eat meat, either”- that’s what I told people. The truth is- we’re all lactose intolerance. Better yet, we’re all pasteurization intolerant. You could be hearing this and perhaps thinking to yourself, “I have no problem with those pasteurized foods.” If that’s what you believe, I would encourage you to look at possible signs showing up that you may have not yet tied to pasteurized dairy before. Some questions you could ask yourself are : do I have acne? Are my monthly periods very painful and/or bright red and/or last a full week or longer? Do I have a period every 28-31 days? Do I have rashes or skin bumps? Do I struggle losing or gaining weight? Is my hair falling out? Do my joints hurt? Do I have anxiety and/or depression? Do I have bad teeth health? Am I hungry first thing in the morning? These are all questions I had to ask myself, and I got down to every single one of them- and I’m gonna be learning and healing for the rest of my life, until The Good Lord brings me home one day, and I’ll live at peace and completely healed in my new creation with Him in Heaven.

All of those questions asked above are signs that our bodies are shouting for help. Not only are our insides in disarray, but our skin, which is our largest organ, is showing signs outwardly that something toxic within is needing healing. We also have a gut-brain connection. When our gut is struggling, so is our mental health and brain fog and loss of remembrance. When our gut is struggling and we have a deficiency in B-vitamins, which is a huge source in raw dairy products, our cortisol rises, leading to anxiety and depression. When we aren’t eating enough fat, what’s natural in all dairy products, we gain inflammation, and possibly even fat itself. Isn’t that funny? We’re told that fat makes us fat, but actually, fat makes us healthy- it’s the pasteurized dairy that makes us fat, and then we struggle losing that fat because our body is under-nourished, leading to stress, and stress clings to fat. When we are not nourishing ourselves with whole foods that The Good Lord blessed us with for our own health and well-being, we become in a state of fight-or-flight. Being in fight-or-flight means that we are under an intense amount of stress. It’s God’s given design to us to have a fight-or-flight response, however, it’s beneficial use is for example when an animal is trying to attack us and our minds become sharpened and our actions become quick and we flee from danger as quickly as possible. Unfortunately, people who stay away from meat and/or dairy feel some of these symptoms, and they think it’s a good thing. I thought it was a good thing when I was vegan. That’s because our body is doing its very best to keep us alive. Being in that state of fight-or-flight for long periods of time is extremely harmful to us. Our cortisol, which is our stress levels, is so high and in demand of every nutrient that we are feeding ourselves. If we aren’t nourishing ourselves well, we are putting ourselves in more danger than if we really were trying to flee from danger.

When my husband and I got married, I was only ninety-nine pounds. The healthy weight of a twenty-to-thirty-year-old is around one-hundred twenty to one-hundred thirty-five pounds. Even if we are in that range, it doesn’t mean that we’re the healthiest we can be. However, it can be a good sign. We conceived with our first child on our wedding night, also the same week we started eating from two local farms for all of our meat and dairy, and I gained fifty pounds in my pregnancy. Some may say that’s way too much and too quick in a nine month span. For me personally, I had never felt so confident in my skin and body or ever felt as vibrant as I did during that first pregnancy of mine. My lips got so full, after having basically no lips at all. My hair grew so long and so fast, and never fell out early postpartum like a lot of mamas struggle with. My acne completely disappeared- I literally get asked if I’m wearing makeup, and I haven’t even worn makeup since my late teens. I have naturally pink rosey cheeks now, whereas before, my skin was just pale. I had no roundness or plump to my face- it was scronny and little boy-like. I became the most feminine version of myself when I started nourishing my body with the whole foods that God created our earth with, without the pasteurization that crept in about a hundred years ago.

The word, “pasteurization” comes from a French man named Louis Pasteur. In the 1800s, he invented pasteurizing wine, however, it changed the flavor of wine, and wine is not still pasteurized today.

When folks with cows started moving to large cities in the 1800s, the cows had a much different environment than they had at their previous home with more land and a cleaner space. These cows now in the big city were put next to wine distilleries, where the cows were fed swill, which is leftover mash from the whiskey-making process. These cows were delivered boiling hot directly from the distillery to the cows, who were kept in cramped, dirty, urban sheds now. This then caused the once farm-life cows’ health to diminish. When a cow’s health is poor, they produce poor milk. This is when sterilization came in. People were dying and getting sick because the milk was contaminated from not taking a clean approach when milking, feeding the cows things that they should have never been eating in the first place, and living in environments that were way too confined for how much a cow needs to roam to stay healthy. The milk was also mixed with water to stretch it farther, and that water was contaminated. I used to live in Hell’s Kitchen, Manhattan, New York and Downtown Los Angeles, and I can picture this exactly. The smell of the streets, all the bajillion people, folks peeing in the street, oh my goodness and the smell in these cities is absolutely atrocious. You ever smell country air? That’s where these cows were from, and then were taken to these big cities where the environment was so un-clean and crowded. All of the sudden, the milk that people have been drinking for all of history before this point, was not the same milk anymore- it was a completely different product. Louis Pasteur came in and started pasteurizing the cows’ milk; the sick cows’ milk. He didn’t care about the cows’ health, since the pasteurization killed everything anyway. Pasteurization didn’t become a thing because raw milk had been un-safe for humans to drink for thousands of years- it became a thing once cows started being placed in toxic and un-clean environments, and therefore producing toxic and un-clean milk. Pasteurization was created for good reason at that time, so that folks could continue drinking what we’ve drank for all of history. However, this once real, alive and whole food became a dead food just like that, and we’ve continued pasteurizing our raw milk simply because of habit, not because our cows are in danger any longer. The same reason we began pasteurizing raw milk a little over a hundred years ago is not the same reason that we’re still pasteurizing it today. What happens in the pasteurization process is that the milk is heated to a minimum of 161*F for at least fifteen seconds, or 145*F for thirty minutes. Ultra-pasteurization means that the milk is heated to a minimum of 280*F for a minimum of two seconds. This process kills every single bacteria- good and bad.

Another reason people started wanting their milk pasteurized was because people would be upset if they got a milk delivered to their door that didn't have the same amount of cream-top as their neighbor, and they would say they didn’t want the milk with the less amount of cream on top. If you’re not familiar, because I learned this just a few years ago when we first started drinking raw milk, raw milk straight from the healthy cow’s utter separates in the jar- the milk is on the bottom, and the cream-top floats to the top. I understand wanting the most amount of cream-top, because the cream is the tastiest and creamiest part, and the purpose of it is to skim it off to add cream to coffee, make butter and do so many other things with it- I too choose my raw milk based off of how much creamy goodness has risen to the top! When milk is pasteurized, it becomes all one color and consistency, and also stays shelf-stable much longer. People like their products to last longer- they don’t like the inconvenience of having a cow themselves to milk for fresh milk, or going to get milk so often when they run out of it once it spoils in a couple weeks. The thing about this, though, is that we have then replaced our health with convenience. We want what we want when we want it, and we don’t care the cost.

On the topic of cost, you may notice the price difference in raw milk compared to store-bought pasteurized milk. Yes, in our experience, raw milk from our local Amish farm is far more expensive than the pasteurized milk we find at the grocery store. The reason for that is because there are more large organizations mass-producing unhealthy milk from unhealthy cows to unhealthily sterilize it and change it from alive to dead food, than there are family farms who are intentional and have integrity in raising healthy cows on healthy land to keep people healthy and alive. In 1800, ninety percent of people owned land and at least one cow. By 1900, that percentage dropped down to forty percent of people owning some land and at least one cow. Today, that percentage is so low that it’s not even considered on the charts anymore. That is devastating. Of course small, local family farms need to charge much more for a half-gallon or gallon of raw milk, compared to store-bought prices of fake milk in the grocery store. What these small farms are producing is real, it’s life, and it’s healing. When they are doing everything in their power to keep healthy land and healthy cows, feed them the nourishment that they and us deserve, and be intentional and thoughtful with cleanliness as they milk, jar and store raw milk for us, it makes sense that it needs to be more expensive. Things are more expensive when it’s not normal anymore- when very few people are farming dairy cows the right way, there’s only so many people that that specific farm can serve their raw milk to. Aside from our mortgage, our food is the most expensive thing that we pay for monthly, because we have made the intentional choice to choose heath, fertility, vibrance and nourishment first and foremost for our family and generations to come.

Let’s talk about the benefits of raw milk. B-vitamins are some of the most important vitamins for our human health, and raw milk’s got B2, B6 and B12. You know what those B-vitamins are helpful with? Anxiety and depression, just to name a couple. Most of us know that the rise of anxiety and depression has skyrocketed since the pasteurization of milk and other dairy. I have twenty-something years to heal from rarely ever eating dairy or meat, so I currently take a B-vitamin on top of about two quarts of milk a day. Replenishing and healing doesn’t just take days or months- it takes years and years. If I spent twenty-something years being so unhealthy, I’m not surprised if it takes me until my forties to finally feel well, the way The Good Lord intended. Raw milk also has folate. If you have MTHFR like our family does, we struggle digesting and absorbing vitamins already, cannot detox toxins and heavy metals properly, and cannot absorb folic acid, which is the synthetic form of folate. Folate is inactivated during pasteurization, and having MTHFR, we have seventy percent less folate in our bodies than people who do not have this gene mutation. This means that our family quite literally and physically cannot have dairy that has been pasteurized. Ya wanna know somethin’? Sixty percent of the U.S. has the gene mutation MTHFR, and many people don’t even know that they have it, but it could be their main cause to their health struggles, if only they knew about it and knew how to make the changes to whole, real food. Raw milk also naturally has good bacteria to help keep our gut healthy and fighting off toxins and viruses. Those healthy bacterias are destroyed completely when raw milk is pasteurized. This means that we then struggle to absorb our minerals.

Raw milk in itself carries all twenty-two minerals, and is a combination of each protein, fat and carb. This means that raw milk is a whole food. It will fill you up, heal your body, bones and teeth, and help you digest the entire glass of milk how God intended and designed. When raw milk is pasteurized, the enzymes to digest it well are all removed- this is where the issue of “lactose intolerance” comes from, meaning that one cannot have dairy without having issues and toxic side affects. Raw milk has an enzyme called “lactase,” which facilitates the digestion of “lactose.” That is destroyed when raw milk is heated above one-hundred ten degrees, and is then not allowing us to readily digest pasteurized milk, including other dairy, causing lots of harm to our bodies, including inflammation.

Now, all raw milk is not the same product. There are farmers producing raw milk from unhealthy cows living and being milked in un-clean environments still- spraying their grassy land with chemicals, not feeding their cows organic and non-GMO food when they’re not eating from pasture in the Winter, putting their cows so close to each other that they cannot move freely. None of those things are healthy. We really do have to meet our local farmers and the cows that we’re getting raw milk from. Raw milk and pasteurized milk certainly are two completely different “foods,” and even raw milk can be harmful if the cows are treated unfairly and not milked with proper sanitization. Know your source.

Raw milk has different laws for every state, unfortunately. In some states, it’s legal to sell raw milk in grocery stores. In some states, it’s illegal to sell raw milk in grocery stores, however, it’s legal to pay for a herd share, meaning you own a percentage of the herd and sign legal documents- this is our case. There are states that have even more ridiculous and controlling laws, like not even being able to drink the raw milk coming from your own cow that you milk with your own two hands. Look into your state and start finding a way to either get your hands on raw milk, or to speak to someone who has authority in possibly changing the state law on raw milk.

When looking into purchasing raw milk, here’s what I recommend from experience :

• Find a local farm that you can trust. Meet them at their farm, see their animals and ask lots of questions

• Questions to ask could include, “Do you feed your animals organic and non-GMO food when they are not on pasture?,” “How long are your animals on pasture for, and do you spray your fields with toxins?” and, “What’s your cleanliness protocol when the cows are being milked, when the milk is being jarred and when the milk is being stored until I get it in my hands?” If your farmer refuses to answer all of your questions forwardly, they’ve likely got something to hide, and I’d keep searching for a family farm until I find one that I feel safe and comfortable with, one where they want me showing up at their farm and having conversation with often.

• Don’t be afraid to try different milks until you become settled with one. Sometimes it takes days or weeks to really get the feel for what you enjoy. Keep in mind that raw milk does taste different in different seasons, and cream-top won’t be as creamy in the Winter months- The Good Lord really does have a purpose in His unique design.

• When you do start drinking raw milk for the first time, start off very slow, like a quarter of a cup your first day, skip a day, then half a cup the following day, and so on. Pay attention to possible symptoms, and don’t rush into it. My husband was so excited about raw milk the first tine we brought it home, that he chugged it for days and then threw up. Now don’t get scared. This is because raw milk is alive; it’s a probiotic. When our gut is in disarray, even the healthiest of foods can cause a bad reaction if not introduced slowly. He started back off slow, and it’s all our family has drank in over four years now. Whenever trying something new, start slow, as much as that can be so annoying sometimes. Our bodies need to heal from the inside out, and we need to treat what The Good Lord created gently and intentionally, not hastily.

  I hope this was informative and encouraging you towards bringing more whole, real, alive foods into your every day life! What’s one reason you love raw milk? I would LOVE to know in the comments below! Your encouraging engagement in the comments strengthens me in my walk with God as He leads me in encouraging you to create a fruitful home. It also blesses those who may be craving sisterhood community and encouragement in homemaking. I would love for this to be a safe place filled with righteous conversation. If you enjoy content like this, please consider subscribing, liking and commenting- it really helps my channel grow! If you click the little bell, you’ll get notified directly when I post! I post every Friday mornin’ here on my YouTube channel and blog! I also just launched my Mama’s Fruitful Home Instagram recently, if you’d like to go follow me over there! Bye, friend!