Unhealthy dogma means unhealthy food

Part 2: Milk: from healthy to harmful

In the 1930s, Sir John Boyd-Orr recommended that we drink more milk to improve our health. He was talking of full-cream milk, of course; skimmed milk was fed to pigs. Since then, milk and dairy products have been heavily promoted for their health-giving properties. However, although cow's milk is still enthusiastically promoted as the perfect health drink, providing adults with ‘essential' vitamins and minerals, after COMA introduced us to ‘healthy eating' in 1984, the dogma about fat causing heart disease has transformed milk from healthy, fresh whole milk to a product which is utterly denuded of most of its essential nutrients — the most important of which is the fat in its cream.

How milk is processed

When I was young, milk was collected from the local farm, cooled and then the raw milk was delivered in large metal churns to houses by horse and cart. At the door, the milk was measured out with a half-pint ladle. The cream floated naturally to the top of the churn; the delivery man had to stir it to make sure that everyone benefited. But my mother had three young children, so our milkman was careful to ensure that we got a bit more cream by ladling the creamier milk off the top. The milk was no older than the previous evening's milking. We were healthy in those days.

Today, raw milk is collected from farms daily for delivery to dairies by tanker for processing. At the processing plant it is cooled to a temperature of no more than 6°C for storage.

To make the milk ‘safe for drinking' the raw milk is then heat-treated to a variety of temperatures to kill any bacteria and increase its shelf life. The lowest temperature is used in pasteurization; the highest is UHT (ultra-high temperature). Most of the milk sold in Britain is pasteurized.

After pasteurization, milk to be sold as liquid milk is separated from its cream in a centrifuge spinning at some 7,000 revolutions per minute. With the cream separated from it in this way, we are left with skimmed milk. The cream is then blended back into the skimmed milk in measured amounts to produce whole milk (3.3% fat) and semi-skimmed milk (1.7% fat). Excess cream is sold separately as cream or used to make butter.

During the blending process the fat globules in the cream are usually broken up and dispersed throughout the liquid milk to give the finished product a more uniform texture. This process, called homogenization, also prevents the cream from rising to the top. Most whole milk sold is homogenized.

After the entire process is complete, the milk is heat treated yet again and then cooled before being packaged and sold to retailers.

Other than the addition of the cream back into the milk, every step in this process makes the finished product less and less healthy for consumers, as we will see in the next Parts.