PASTEURIZATION

Pasteurization is the process of heating a liquid to a temperature high enough to destroy any microorganisms present that would otherwise eventually multiply enough to result in outright contam­ination, causing spoilage. In the case of milk, pasteurization is ac­complished by one of three methods. The low-temperature holding method heats milk to about 145T for thirty minutes. The high-temperature short-time method heats milk to about 161°F for at least fifteen seconds. The process of ultra-pasteurization heats milk to 280°F for at least two seconds. The temperature in this last method is well past the boiling point of water (212°F), a temperature that will irreversibly alter or denature protein and affect its nutritive value. All three pasteurization methods have significant destructive effects on the nutritive value of the milk.

The best practical demonstration of the negative health effects of this nutrient destruction was provided over fifty years ago in a study conducted by Francis Pottenger, M.D.⁴ From 1932 to 1942, Dr. Pottenger examined the nutritive effects of raw versus cooked foods on the health of cats. As part of this study, he also examined the health effects of raw milk versus pasteurized milk versus two other types of processed milks. This part of the experiment demonstrated substantial negative effects not only on the initial test population of cats, but also on the next two generations of cats born to that initial population. All of the cats received as one-third of their diet raw

74 Optimal Nutrition for Optimal Health

meat and organs, as well as cod liver oil, to prevent too profound a depletion of nutrients in the test diet. However, the other two-thirds of the diet consisted of either raw milk, pasteurized milk, evapo­rated milk, or sweetened condensed milk. This divided the cats into a total of four different feeding groups. These different patterns of feeding were maintained through two more generations of cats.

Dr. Pottenger found that cats fed pasteurized milk as their prin­cipal dietary item developed skeletal abnormalities and lessened re­productive efficiency. He also noted that the offspring of these cats showed progressive constitutional and respiratory problems. In the cats fed the evaporated milk, the negative effects were more pro­nounced. And in those cats fed the sweetened condensed milk the negative effects were most pronounced. These cats developed much heavier fat deposits, showed substantial skeletal deformities, and demonstrated extreme irritability in their behavior. It would appear that the pasteurization process did its own substantial damage to the health of the cats, and the increasing amounts of sugar in the other milk preparations only worsened the damage initiated by the pasteurization. The bony abnormalities promoted by these milks in Dr. Pottenger's experiments are especially ironic findings since pas­teurized milk is consistently promoted as being vital to the devel­opment of strong, healthy bones in people. For those wanting more detail, a full accounting of this work of Dr. Pottenger is available from the Price-Pottenger Nutrition Foundation in San Diego (see Appendix II). Many of the changes experienced by the cats and their offspring while on the different feeding schedules were even recorded on videotape, providing an even more graphic and dra­matic accounting of how pasteurized milk with varying amounts of sugar can wreak havoc with the general health.

Pasteurization also profoundly affects the bioavailability of the calcium content of milk. In wholesome food, calcium is present in a bioavailable form that serves to strengthen bones and teeth, while supplying enough ionic, or dissolved, calcium to meet the normal

Milk: A Good Food Made Toxic 75

metabolic needs of literally all the cells in the body. Calcium should NOT be depositing diffusely throughout the body in rocklike de­posits. Yet this is exactly what happens in the habitual drinker of pasteurized milk. To make it worse, the added vitamin D that is rou­tinely added to milk and so many of the other multivitamin prepa­rations that milk drinkers take only further aids this abnormal deposition of calcium in the body's tissues. In fact, supplemental vitamin D can easily aggravate the dreaded calcium loss from bones, while increasing calcium absorption from the gut, both of which serve to provide greater amounts of calcium for this abnor­mal precipitation.

The bioavailability of the calcium in milk relies primarily on the integrity of unheated protein carriers found naturally in milk. The heat of pasteurization is enough to denature these proteins, mean­ing they have been physically altered enough by the "cooking" process of pasteurization to keep them from delivering calcium to the tissue sites where it is supposed to go. The three-dimensional configuration of these denatured proteins is completely changed by pasteurization, and the new configurations are just incapable of per­forming this vital calcium delivery function. But calcium is never­theless absorbed, even though it is not properly delivered, and so it accumulates in the wrong places throughout the body.

What do these abnormal calcium accumulations do? Quite sim­ply, they cause or facilitate virtually every degenerative disease known. The calcium deposits out in a rocklike form. The classic manifestation of this deposition occurs in the blood vessels, notably in the coronary (heart) arteries. The deposits either block these ar­teries or serve as a starting point for other artery-blocking sub­stances to accumulate. When the artery blocks off completely, a heart attack is usually the result. This deposition of calcium in the coronary arteries represents another mechanism by which pasteur­ized milk promotes the increase in heart disease mentioned at the start of this chapter.

76 Optimal Nutrition for Optimal Health

In following the hair analyses of many people who were treated at the clinic of Dr. Hal Huggins in Colorado Springs, abnormally elevated hair calcium levels consistently correlated with the drink­ing of milk and the taking of calcium supplements. Most of the pa­tients under seventy years of age had elevated hair calcium levels. However, as a rule, the people over seventy years of age who came to the clinic almost always had normal or low calcium levels in the hair. The conclusion that seemed to make the most sense was that the "high-calcium" patients simply did not survive past seventy, due to the increased rate of heart disease, cancer, and other degen­erative diseases facilitated by the chronic and excessive ingestion of nonbioavailable calcium.

This conclusion received unintentional support in the medical lit­erature. Otto et al. published a study showing that aortic sclerosis, a condition in which the lining of the aorta (the main artery coming out of the heart) is rigidly inflexible and pipelike, is associated with a 50 percent greater chance of death from heart attack and heart-related causes.⁵ In this condition, excessive deposits of calcium are present in the wall of the aorta. This gives some additional support to the concept that people with diffusely deposited calcium throughout their bodies just don't live as long as their noncalcified counterparts. In a review article, Doherty et al. seem mystified as to where the epidemic of calcified coronary arteries could be coming from.⁶ In my opinion, the enormous consumption of milk, in com­bination with the widespread ingestion of calcium supplements (discussed further in chapter 8), accounts for this epidemic of body tissue calcification quite nicely.