The Facts About Pasteurization and Homogenization of Dairy Products

Wednesday, April 09, 2008 by: Jo Hartley
Tags: pasteurization, health news, Natural News

(NewsTarget) The popular milk campaign has been very successful in reversing declining milk sales in America over recent years. Common teaching is that milk is a "perfect food," for building strong bodies in children and preventing osteoporosis as we age. The modern dairy products that are available in most supermarkets are nothing like the unpasteurized, unhomogenized milk of yesteryear, however. Today's milk looks the same, but it is not the same product.

Pasteurization was discovered by Louis Pasteur in the mid-1800s. Pasteurization compromises your milk. It destroys vitamins and interferes with calcium absorption. When you boil a liquid, you kill any bacteria and make that food sterile. In the process, you can't help but affect the taste and nutritional value of that food. Pasteurization is the process of heating a liquid to a high enough temperature to kill certain bacteria and disable certain enzymes. Milk can be pasteurized by heating it to a temperature of 145 degrees F for 30 minutes or 163 degrees F for 15 seconds (called flash pasteurization).

Ultra High Temperature (UHT) Pasteurization completely sterilizes a liquid. This process is utilized for the "boxes of milk" that can be shelved at room temperature. For UHT Pasteurization, milk is heated to 285 degrees F for a second or two.

Homogenization is a more recently invented process and it has been called "the worst thing that dairymen did to milk." When milk is homogenized, it is pushed through a fine filter at pressures of 4,000 pounds per square inch. In this process, the fat globules are made smaller by a factor of ten times or more. These fat molecules then become evenly dispersed throughout the milk.

Milk is a hormonal delivery system. When homogenized, milk becomes very powerful and efficient at bypassing normal digestive processes and delivering steroid and protein hormones to the human body (both your hormones and the cow's natural hormones and the ones they may have been injected with to produce more milk).

Homogenization makes fat molecules in milk smaller and they become "capsules" for substances that are able to bypass digestion. Proteins that would normally be digested in the stomach are not broken down and instead they are absorbed into the bloodstream.

The homogenization process breaks up an enzyme in milk which in its smaller state can then enter the bloodstream and react against arterial walls. This causes the body to protect the area with a layer of cholesterol. If this only happened once in a while it wouldn't be of big concern, but if it happens regularly there are long term risks.

Proteins were created to be easily broken down by digestive processes. Homogenization disrupts this and insures their survival so that they enter the bloodstream. Many times the body reacts to foreign proteins by producing histamines, and then mucus. Sometimes homogenized milk proteins resemble a human protein and can become triggers for autoimmune diseases such as diabetes or multiple sclerosis.

Two Connecticut cardiologists have demonstrated that homogenized milk proteins did in fact survive digestion. It was discovered that Bovine Xanthene Oxidase (BXO) survived long enough to affect every one of three hundred heart attack victims over a five-year time period. Even young children in the U.S. are showing signs of hardening of the arteries.

Historical Summary

1600s and 1700s: Each cow yielded approximately one quart of milk per day. Cream was churned into butter and was stored to help provide nourishment during the hard winters.

1908: Pasteurization was introduced to reduce spoiling and the growth of bacteria

1919: Homogenization begun to prevent the separation of fat

1932: Synthetic Vitamin D first added to milk

1964: Plastic milk containers are first commercially introduced

1994: Monsanto Company develops the genetically engineered growth hormone (recombinant bovine somatotropin (rBST) or bovine growth hormone (BGH)) to boost dairy yield

The bottom line is that today's milk may contain assorted drugs and antibiotics, pesticides from treated grains, bacteria from infected animals, and genetically engineered growth hormones, in addition to being chemically altered into something that is incompatible with our bodies.

About the author

Jo Hartley
Wife, Mother of 8, and Grandmother of 2
Jo is a 41 year old home educator who has always gravitated toward a natural approach to life. She enjoys learning as much as possible about just about anything!
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