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Dairy has been labeled as inflammatory and unhealthy for years — but is it true? Is milk bad for you? Does dairy cause inflammation or aggravate autoimmune disease?
Most store-bought dairy today has been processed for safety and appearance (ie. ultra pasturized milk vs pasturized milk vs homogenized cow milk). And with these changes, we’ve seen skyrocketing rates of dairy intolerance.
Yet, traditional dairy products like yogurt, kefir, and cheese have nourished cultures for thousands of years. So, why does dairy now cause so many to experience digestive discomfort and other symptoms that ultimately prompt them to seek dairy alternatives instead?
I’ve talked about the dark side of vegan, plant-based milk industry, highlighting the ethical and environmental concerns most people aren’t aware of.
To help us understand why people wonder, “Is dairy bad for you?”, Dr. Bill Schindler joins us back on the podcast. He’s an internationally known archaeologist, primitive technologist, and chef. He explores the role of technology in our ancestral dietary past by combining archaeological research with global ethnographic fieldwork. He founded and directs the Eastern Shore Food Lab with a mission to preserve and teach ancestral dietary approaches to food to empower people to live a more nourishing, ethical, and sustainable food lifestyle.
Bill and his wife, Christina, operate the Modern Stone Age Kitchen, a restaurant designed to provide nourishing food created using ancestral approaches, maximizing safety, nutrient density, and bioavailability.
If you’ve ever felt torn about whether dairy belongs in your life, this episode will give you the clarity you’ve been missing.
Or, listen on your favorite app: iTunes (Apple Podcasts) | Spotify | Stitcher | TuneIn | Subscribe on Android
In This Episode:
- How mammals (including humans) naturally process dairy in the body
- What enzymes break down milk in infants vs. adults
- Is milk bad for you (and why could it trigger inflammation)?
- Lactase intolerance vs. lactase persistence: what’s the difference?
- Which is better tolerated? Raw fermented dairy or ultra pasteurized milk
- What dairy processing is (like homogenized cow milk and ultra pasteurized milk) and how it changes the structure of dairy
- Is ultra pasturized milk a good option? (And why organic milk often has this label?)
- Ethical and nutritional concerns of plant-based vegan dairy products
- How to make yogurt and kefir at home
Quotes
“Pasteurizing milk does not make bad milk good. Pasteurizing milk means that you've taken bad milk and made it not lethal.”
“The reality is, 60 to 70% of adult humans around the world are lactose intolerant.”
Links
Find Dr. Bill Schindler + the Modern Stone Age Kitchen | online | Instagram | Instagram
Get Dr. Schindler’s book, Eat Like a Human, HERE!
Healthy Skin Show ep. 379: Is Sourdough Bread Gluten Free + Healthy? (Sourdough Bread Benefits + How To Tell If It’s Real) w/ Dr. Bill Schindler
Healthy Skin Show ep. 294: Dairy vs Non-Dairy Milk: Which Is Better For You, Your Skin + The Planet? (PART 1)
Healthy Skin Show ep. 295: Dairy vs Non-Dairy Milk: Which Is Better For You, Your Skin + The Planet? (PART 2)
Healthy Skin Show ep. 296: Dairy vs Non-Dairy Milk: Which Is Better For You, Your Skin + The Planet? (PART 3)
393: TRUE or FALSE: Is Milk Bad For You? w/ Dr. Bill Schindler {FULL TRANSCRIPT}
Jennifer Fugo (00:17.413)
It is such an honor to have you back on the show, Bill. People loved your episode on, we talked about sourdough and the history of agriculture in the human race, and how that has played into the fermentation of things. I'll definitely link up that episode. But thank you so much for being back as we dive into the world of dairy, and fermented dairy, and all things dairy (like is dairy bad for you), that you have explored on your various travels with your wife Christina, to learn more about this whole topic.
Bill (00:51.222)
Thank you so much for having me back, and thank you so much for hitting these topics in such a deep way, because we could have talked about fermented dairy and sourdough and all these different things in one 45-minute segment, and it wouldn’t have scratched the surface. So thanks for having me back.
Jennifer Fugo (01:03.309)
Well, I love to really have deep conversations about things like is milk bad for you. I mean, honestly, if it was up to me, I would have conversations that would last two to three hours long, but I don't know if everybody would be up for that.
Bill (01:16.748)
Yeah.
Jennifer Fugo (01:31.938)
So anyway, this is one of the nice things where we can kind of break things down, stay really concise. And I did want to ask you about dairy the last time and ask is milk bad for you, and I was like, no, no, I got too many questions about gluten, and sourdough, and all sorts of things. So let's talk about the dairy topic because I feel like dairy is, to some degree, to many people, very controversial. Because we hear on one hand we should not be consuming dairy, dairy is meant for baby calves and baby animals. And yet our, I don't know who or when, so maybe you can give us a little bit of a history lesson here, but yet at some point our ancestors actually did start to consume dairy. So, how did that happen?
Bill (02:01.624)
Well, let me say one thing very quickly first, because I think this will help frame it really well.
Jennifer Fugo (02:04.005)
Please.
Bill (02:27.022)
We humans make decisions about food in very complicated ways. What we're going to eat, and a lot of it, and it's beautiful that we have the opportunity to do this, but some of it's for ethical reasons, some of it's religious reasons, some of it's for nutritional reasons. Quite often, it's a combination of all these things at the same time. But in order to understand what your approach is, you really need to sit back and take stock of, you know, what is it? How am I approaching my food, what are the things that are important to me? Because until you do that, you're sort of just cherry picking things and listening to people, and so many people probably feel this way. As soon as they hear somebody, if you don't have a firm grounding in whatever your approach is, then anytime somebody on Instagram or TikTok starts to pull you in one direction, you start making a whole bunch of other decisions, and you feel like you're just getting pushed back and forth.
So, one way people decide on what they should be eating is, okay, what is designed for humans to eat? Like what is on the planet for us to eat, and then on the other hand, what are we designed to eat? I think this is, especially with dairy, this is very important. If we really think about it, there's only two foods in the world, two resources in the world, that are produced for something else to eat it. Two. One is milk, and one is fruit. That's it. Anything else we put into our mouths are part of another biological process of another organism. You know, if it's a stalk of asparagus, that's a stalk that's going to eventually hold leaves, it's going to engage in photosynthesis. If it's the root, it's a place, like a potato, that's there, that's an area that's getting stored, a whole bunch of carbohydrates are getting stored, so that plant can overwinter on it like that. If it's a rib-eye or a liver, my gosh, that’s part of another animal's lifeblood, right?
I'm not suggesting we should or shouldn't eat those things. But if we're really making decisions on what we should be eating based upon what is on the planet for us to eat, there's only two things. Milk is produced by mammals to nourish their young, and it is the perfect food for their young. And the other thing is fruit. A ripe fruit is there to attract an animal to eat a mature seed and deposit in a pond or somewhere else. That's it. Now we can have a long, maybe another episode we’ll talk about whether we should be eating fruit or not. But milk, we should. As infants, we are perfectly designed to consume milk. So the intersection for humans and other mammals is, here's a food that's perfectly designed for us, and when we're infants, we’re perfectly designed to consume it, and that's brilliant.
Bill (04:45.654)
Everything else, other than fruit, I would make the argument that it isn't there for us to eat, and we are not naturally designed to safely and efficiently derive as much nutrition as possible from that food without some sort of assistance. So if that's the approach, what I like to say is, we can think about animals. Animals play a very large role in our diets, whether we understand it or not, whether we're vegetarians or vegans or carnivores, or whatever our approach is. We might have discussed this briefly in the other episode, but animals, we can get nutrition from the outside world in one of two ways, in the plant world especially. Either we take an animal that's perfectly designed to consume that plant and allow it to eat that food that’s perfect for that animal, and then transform it through their digestive tract into blood, fat, organs, meat, milk, whatever it is that we then can easily derive nutrition from safely. Or we replicate what happens inside of that animal's body, and do it to our resources before we put it into our mouths and allow it safely. So that's that.
Now, with that approach, which is what my approach is, and that was the approach of our ancestors, when we look at dairy, one thing we have to understand is that we, as baby infant humans, are perfectly designed to consume dairy. Perfect. Millions of years of evolutionary pressures have designed that perfect model. The question, then, is, or the reality is, when we get weaned off of our mothers, just like every other mammal, we lose the ability to safely and efficiently digest that dairy to its maximum potential. So some people stop there and say, okay, as soon as we're done drinking milk from our mothers, since we no longer can consume it safely and efficiently as we could, then that means we shouldn't be consuming it.
But I just mentioned, we shouldn't be consuming almost everything we put into our mouths without some kind of assistance. And the way that we overcome that, and the way we've overcome it for millions of years, is by replicating a natural process that happens, and so sourdough bread is a fantastic example. If I gave you a handful of raw grains, at best it would give you a stomachache. You definitely wouldn't get any nutrition from it, the anti-nutrients would rob your body of nutrients, and there's a very good chance you'd get very sick.
Jennifer Fugo (06:44.923)
Mm-hmm.
Bill (07:06.032)
But if we replicate what happens inside of a duck, or a goose, or a granivorous bird, and soak it, and sprout it, and ferment it, and do all these wonderful things, we can detoxify it and release those nutrients. When it comes to milk, it's even easier. We're not even looking at another animal. All we need to do is replicate what we naturally could do as baby infant humans to digest that milk as safely and efficiently as possible. So here's what happens, and I'm so glad, I'm so glad that we're able to talk about this. This is what happens. Everybody listening to this, when you were drinking milk from your mothers, or what happens when a baby rat drinks from its mother, or a baby whale drinks from its mother, it's the same process. The milk and every one of these steps is going to be very important to our conversation for the rest of the time that we have.
So everybody listening, please pay close attention. Number one, the milk inside of the mother mammals is teeming with live bacteria. Now, there's a mechanism inside of the mothers that prevents that milk from fermenting while it's in her body, but as soon as that milk leaves her body, it begins the process of fermenting. As soon as it leaves her body, like, as it's going into the baby's mouth, it starts the process of fermenting. The other thing that's very important is that that milk is at body temperature. The bacteria that are in the milk are perfectly designed to operate best at body temperature. So the Lactobacillus bacteria responsible for all these amazing fermentations we'll talk about in a minute are naturally present in the milk, and they operate best at body temperature. So for the sake of this, say 100 degrees.
As soon as the infant mammal takes in the milk, it starts fermenting. The baby's body is a very close temperature as a mother's body, so that process continues in a very efficient way. And the baby infant mammal is producing a whole bunch of different things, including enzymes that help break that milk down and allow them to make the most efficient use of it in a very safe way. So things like lipase, which is the enzyme that breaks down the fats of the lipids in the milk, lactase, which is the enzyme that breaks down and processes the sugar lactose in the milk, and all mammals produce, and depending on the mammal it's a little bit different, but a protease enzyme that denatures the proteins in the milk and coagulates them. In most animals, it's chymosin, and in humans and some other animals it’s something different, but it achieves the same thing. And what happens is, when that milk is going into our body, these enzymes are breaking it down and getting it into smaller parts so our body can actually do something with it and get nourished.
Bill (09:34.674)
One of the problems that had to be overcome is, if an infant or anything is just drinking pure liquids all the time, it passes through the digestive tract too quickly to fully break down and also for our body to absorb all the nutrients from it.
So what nature has figured out is, if they can coagulate the milk, I mean it makes sense to come out of the mother in a liquid form, come into the baby in a liquid form, but as soon as it gets into the body, if it can get coagulated and turn into a semi-solid in the stomach, it'll get worked on a little bit more in a physical way to break down. It'll stay in there longer because it's a little bit thicker and can continue to ferment, and the chemical processes can continue to occur, and then when it goes into the small intestines, it stays in there a little bit longer so the nutrients that are now in the right state can get absorbed by the baby. Now, that process is coagulation, and actually what's happening is, all mammals are literally making cheese in their stomachs. That's what they're doing.
Jennifer Fugo (10:16.037)
So wait. Making cheese in their stomach. Okay, so wait, I just need to back up one second because my mind has exploded slightly in this explanation. So you're saying, so stomach acid in the stomach of the being, we'll say, that consumes the liquid milk, right? When we make cheese and when you add an acid, right? Is that how you ferment?
Bill (10:43.884)
No, actually that's a great point. Let me back up for just a second. Forget the stomach acid for a minute, and forget acid in the production of cheese. We can bring that up later.
Jennifer Fugo (10:46.947)
Sure. Okay.
Bill (11:03.692)
For this particular example, forget that part, it is the enzyme, this protease enzyme, that baby mammals, infant mammals produce, that coagulates the milk. It denatures the proteins, so denaturing means just taking out of a natural state.
Jennifer Fugo (11:11.034)
Right.
Bill (11:33.588)
An example, if you crack an egg into a hot frying pan, the egg whites turn white and get firm. That's because the heat denatured them. So in this case, it's a chemical reaction that denatures them and turns it into a jello-like substance. So truly, like when a baby spits up on your shoulder when you're burping it and it looks like cottage cheese and it smells like provolone cheese, it's because it actually is cheese. I mean, it literally is cheese in some form.
Jennifer Fugo (11:35.397)
This is neat and slightly gross at the same time, and it's fascinating.
Bill (11:39.906)
But in a world where we so easily just replicate, you know, all we think about is, oh, that baby's getting milk, so then we can just instead replicate it with baby formula, and the baby formula is going through. The baby formula stays liquid the entire time. What we need to understand is that it isn't, an infant mammal, an infant human, drinking milk is not in any form the same thing that's happening when we drink milk. Whether we're lactose intolerant or not, we'll get to that in just a minute. But it's not the same process because biologically we are different, our digestive tract is different.
What's really interesting is all mammals, when we get weaned off of our mothers, all mammals lose the ability to produce all these enzymes that we need to safely and efficiently digest that milk. So one reason that other animals don't consume milk as adults is because they literally can't do it. And I know, everybody who loves their cats, fine, love your cats, give your cats milk. The reality is, cats are actually lactose intolerant.
Jennifer Fugo (12:39.173)
That is true.
Bill (12:39.85)
Not as terrible as humans, but they actually are. What's crazy about humans is that thousands of years ago, in two different pockets of the world, one pocket in Europe and one pocket in Africa, there were actually independent genetic mutations in populations that heavily relied on dairy, and that genetic mutation produced what we call lactase persistence in adults. So in other words, they didn't become lactose intolerant when they became adults.
I grew up in this little tiny town in New Jersey, Shrewsbury, New Jersey, Monmouth County. Kindergarten through eighth grade grammar school, not a ton of kids in the school, but everybody in my school was pretty much of European descent, in this little pocket of the world, in my world that at that moment was like the entire world. And I knew one kid that was lactose intolerant. So to me, and again this is my third grade brain, forgive me for a minute, but in my third grade brain, hey that's the one weird kid who's lactose intolerant, lactose intolerant must be the weird thing, and all other humans are fine.
Jennifer Fugo (13:37.829)
Sure.
Bill (13:38.412)
The reality is, 60 to 70% of adult humans around the world are lactose intolerant. It's 30 to 40% of us can fully tolerate lactose as adults. Now again, does that mean we should or shouldn't drink milk? Not necessarily, because again, we shouldn't eat grains, we shouldn't do any of these things without the proper processing. So what do we need to do, I think, is the larger question. It isn’t should or shouldn't we, it's, if you're going to consume dairy, what's the way to do it in the safest and most nourishing way possible?
Jennifer Fugo (14:06.555)
Yeah.
Bill (14:11.866)
And number one, make sure the milk itself is of the highest quality. Because again, the milk that we drink from our mothers and the milk that we have in the grocery store, other than being from different animals, there's a thousand other differences that make one of them nourishing and one of them not the same food. So one of them is the highest quality milk possible, and we'll talk about that in just a second. But the other is, what do we do with that milk, because we don't produce the lactase, we don't produce the lipase, we don't produce the chymosin or any of those things anymore.
Jennifer Fugo (14:34.811)
True. So wait, is this what has inspired you? Because maybe, if people followed you, they've started to notice that you and your wife, Christina, travel quite considerably. And you go, like you were just in, I think it was Norway or Sweden, in search of making brown cheese or something like that. And I've seen you eat all sorts of things, as I like stalked you before I really like met you in person and had you on the show. So, is this why you have sought out these different traditional ways? Like this is the underpinnings of the why that brings us to fermented dairy.
Bill (15:21.966)
100%. And I will also add, when I started fermenting, and Christina and I are celebrating our 25th wedding anniversary this summer.
Jennifer Fugo (15:29.275)
Congratulations.
Bill (15:39.614)
Thank you very much. In the early part of our marriage is when I really started fermenting things, and Christina loves things being neat and tidy. And in order to ferment properly, it meant that there were all sorts of things being left on the counter in the kitchen overnight. Like it's not the kitchen gets put away, the kitchen gets put away and there's still these mason jars bubbling all over the place, and all these things bubbling all over the place. And I was trying at the same time to ferment everything that I could. I was doing sourdough, and I was fermenting all these different things. And she finally, listen, she finally gave in. She's like, okay, I get it, I'm going to have to come to terms with all this nonsense on the countertop. Little did we know it was going to be our future.
But, I just love cheese. Can you just please make cheese? Because I literally was fermenting everything from like fish guts, and then all now. So I took that to heart. And what I also love about cheese is that, not only does it turn regular milk into something that is more nourishing, and it smells better, in most cases it tastes better, it has all those things, but the human element in that is so incredible. We were at a cheese store, or actually it was at a place in Berlin. We were doing some cheese research for this cheese called white cheese, I forget the word for it, Milbenkäse. And we had to go to a village in Germany, there was one guy that still knew how to make this medieval cheese with cheese mites in it, his name was Helmut.
But we went to this beautiful, humongous, what do you call it, like a department store in Berlin, and an entire floor was the cheese shop. Like, the largest cheese shop I've ever been in my life, cheese from all over the world. And the crazy thing is that, I mean, there were some cheeses that had things put in it, but almost all that cheese, thousands of different cheeses, that had the same ingredients. Milk, and salt, and rennet. That's it, milk, salt, and rennet. Rennet's that chymosin enzyme. But it is how an individual group or family controlled temperature or time.
Jennifer Fugo (17:36.795)
Wow.
Bill (17:37.132)
Or certain things that manifested in a completely different cheese, and I love that. It's such a great insight into culture
Jennifer Fugo (17:44.592)
Wow, that is so cool. Like I said, I find this whole conversation fascinating. Especially, for those who had listened to the show probably about two years ago, I did a whole three part series on dairy because, I would say, I think the long story short of why I find this topic fascinating, A, obviously you guys know I work with people have chronic skin issues predominantly, and they always have other issues going on under the surface, but there's been a lot of like, oh, dairy is bad for you, dairy is bad for skin. It's inflammatory, right, in the wellness world, it's always been categorized as inflammatory foods, and we shouldn't be eating it for these reasons. And I started to question that because I was a non-dairy person and wondered does dairy cause inflammation, I was doing all the vegan boxed milks, and trying to make my own almond milk, and cashew milk, and everything from at home.
And then I started to sit with how far those ingredients had come, and the type of footprint they had, and how the laborers were treated. I mean, most people don't know that people that shell cashews are extremely impoverished, mostly women, and they have horrific, caustic, painful burns that last for life on their hands because they shelled us our cashews. And I really started to sit with that, and I was like, you know, dairy's one ingredient. Like it's one ingredient that you can actually drive in the United States, not that far, and find dairy cows. Or goats, or sheep, or whatever. I don't know, I just started to really sit with a lot of things. And then, people don't know that there are farm workers that die in the metal containers that hold all the oats and everything because they get crushed under the oats.
So again this idea that the vegan milk – listen, you do you. I understand if people have dairy allergies or they have alpha-gal or something like that, where they can't consume it, it's totally fine, I get that. But I also think that the conversation has been so skewed for so long towards dairy being bad. I literally never heard this, that when, not that I want to actively just drink milk, but this is such a fascinating way to understand why milk is not necessarily the wrong food for us to eat, for the reasons that have been shared over the last probably 10 to 15 years.
Bill (20:23.258)
And you just made a very good point because the approach you had before, that mindset, was based on this term dairy. And what I would suggest, just like with our previous conversation when it was focused on sourdough, is you just can't say bread. Because within that category, there's things that should never go into a human mouth. And there's things that I could make the argument can safely, relatively safely, provide nutrition and a whole lot of pleasure. I mean, that's part of why we eat as well. And I love cheese. Christina loves cheese.
Jennifer Fugo (20:49.147)
Sure. I love cheese, I admit it.
Bill (20:52.926)
So, this is what I think we need to understand, is that all dairy, like everything else, is not created equal. And unfortunately, dairy just happens to be white, in a beautiful jug with a beautiful label, and is a part of the grocery store that, the way that it's set aside, it says dairy, the way that it's promoted, suggests natural. But the only thing you can't find in the dairy section of a grocery store, a typical American grocery store, is actually milk. You can't find real milk. All of it has been adulterated in some form.
Jennifer Fugo (21:21.455)
Yeah.
Bill (21:22.8)
And I know we're diving deep, we don't have a ton of time, but I want to make sure that everybody has an opportunity to have some really important takeaways that are very easy to understand. So number one, understand that the milk that comes out of a cow or a goat or a sheep, that by the time it makes it to a grocery store, typically it would be cow's milk in this country, has been through a number of different processes. Some of them are legally required, some of them are not legally required, and a lot of it has to do with what state you live in. I will say, I am a humongous, huge raw milk advocate. And high-quality raw milk is an amazing food. High-quality raw milk that has been fermented, for me, is even better. So high-quality raw milk is awesome, but again, for most of us, for all of us humans, adults, humans, we don't have the ability to do everything to that milk that we could when we were babies. But if we ferment it, we're not substituting, but we're replicating a lot of those processes that would have happened inside of our bodies before it actually touches our lips. And in addition to increasing the safety, the nutrient density, the bioavailability, we're enhancing flavor, and texture, and aroma and doing all of those things as well. It's a win-win-win across the board. And it's very safe to do at home.
So raw milk is good, fermented raw milk is even better. But I don't, in a world, and this is why I love that we're able to sit down and have a conversation, in a world that's become so polarized, and in a food world right now that’s become so politicized, we don't have the opportunity to really talk about some of these nuances. Good raw milk is an amazing food, but there can also be bad raw milk. Like, we're not having this conversation. So bad raw milk is bad raw milk. One of my suggestions is forget labels, forget somebody else telling you what you should or should be eating. I don't think anybody should be buying raw milk anywhere without having met the farmer and going to the farm.
Jennifer Fugo (23:24.699)
Mm-hmm.
Bill (23:25.326)
Like you, not you, anybody, somebody listening to this, you have an understanding enough to know what a clean farm looks like, to know what a farmer who cares deeply about their animals, and how well they're being treated, and how they're being fed. You know, the farm that, where you come, the farmer's like, hey, come see my cows, hey, I know this cow by name. Those are some of the filters you should be looking through to understand whether or not that's a place you should be buying raw milk from or not.
Jennifer Fugo (23:51.451)
Yeah.
Bill (23:54.082)
So please understand, great raw milk is great, bad raw milk is bad. Now, then we get to the other options in most of our grocery stores, homogenization, pasteurization, all this. One thing to understand about pasteurization is pasteurizing milk does not make bad milk good. Pasteurizing milk means that you've taken bad milk and made it not lethal. That's a completely different thing, right? And there's a lot of reasons why in the late 1800s and early 1900s we started pasteurizing milk. It was a much cheaper and easier way to deal with a lot of issues that was in the milk industry at the time without transforming the entire milk industry. This milk is really bad, it's going to make somebody sick, it could possibly kill them, hell, boil the milk and then wash your hands of it. Doesn't make the bad milk any better, it just makes it not kill you. Which again is a good thing, but there's other options for many of us.
As far as pasteurization is concerned, there's different levels of pasteurization. There's pasteurized milk, there's ultra-pasteurized milk, and then there's ultra-high temperature pasteurized milk. Ultra-high temperature pasteurized milk is the stuff, like Parmalat, you can go into the store and find it on the shelf that's not refrigerated, it lasts five years.
Jennifer Fugo (24:57.723)
Oh, in a box, okay.
Bill (25:02.67)
In a box. There's zero reason ever, there's no nutrition in that whatsoever, it doesn't have any taste, doesn't have any flavor, and doesn't have any nutrition. Ultra-pasteurized milk is, unfortunately, what most organic milks have turned to because it increases the shelf life. Organic milk is very expensive to produce, and they want to make sure it has the shelf life to sit on the shelf. Unfortunately, ultra-pasteurized milk means you've taken, you've killed off all sorts of things in the milk, and you've denatured those proteins to the point where they're unrecognizable to the human body.
Jennifer Fugo (25:17.147)
Wow.
Bill (25:32.616)
So I never will drink ultra-pasteurized milk, would never use it in anything. In fact, the proteins are so screwed up that you can't make cheese out of it. Remember, if making cheese is replicating the natural biological process that went on in our bodies when we were infants, if I have a dairy product that I can't even put through that process, I question whether or not it should ever go into our bodies. So there we're left with just pasteurized milk.
There's two different categories of pasteurized milk. One of them is called vat pasteurization, which is the one that you want. If it says vat pasteurized on the label, now I'm talking legal milk in most of the states, vat pasteurized milk means they take all the milk and put it in a big container and gently bring the temperature up, keep it for a certain amount of time, and then bring it down. The proteins are treated, it's a lot more gentle on the proteins than the other form, which is where they have a little tiny tube, a pipe, that the milk goes through, and as it's going through this pipe, gets flash hit with a whole bunch of heat and it's much more damaging to the protein. So if you're going to have pasteurized milk, go for the one that says vat pasteurized, or if it doesn't say anything at all, at least that it just says pasteurized. That's telling you that it's at the lower temperature as opposed to the higher temperatures.
Then the other part is homogenization. People can make the argument that pasteurization is important, and if your choice is to either drink bad milk or pasteurized milk, bad milk pasteurized, then obviously the pasteurization would make sense. Again, the gold standard would be really high-quality, amazing raw milk, but pasteurized, I can get some of that argument. There is zero reason from a safety perspective, a food safety perspective, to homogenize milk to make homogenized cow milk. The only two reasons milk is homogenized, and that means, cow milk especially, the fat molecules are so big, they float like boats.
Jennifer Fugo (27:21.605)
Yeah.
Bill (27:27.664)
There's two things that happen. One is, you have to actually shake the milk before you pour it on your Cheerios in the morning, which people are lazy, they don't want to do that. But more importantly, what the food industry figured out was, years ago, when we were a little bit more connected to our food, we weren't so scared of fat. And we realized that in the spring, really good cows produce milk with a lot of fat in it. And you go into the grocery store, this is when milk was all still being sold in glass bottles, you could see that fat cap and say, that's the milk I want because that's the higher quality milk. And there's a lot of money in fat. There's a lot of money in cream. They tried to sell us skim milk, but then they turn around and sell us butter and sour cream, and all the other things, and ice cream. There's a lot of money in that fat, so they're skimming it off, skimming it off, skimming it off. They didn't want the consumer to see how much fat was actually taken out of the milk, so they started to homogenize it.
Jennifer Fugo (28:10.361)
Wow.
Bill (28:11.212)
The fat molecules, to make homogenized milk, they have a steel plate with microscopic holes, and they force the fat through this steel plate and physically explode the fat molecules into something that our body cannot recognize. Most people suggest that homogenized milk is actually more problematic for humans than the pasteurization. Zero reason to homogenize milk. Please if you do, so from a legal, if you live in a state that has raw milk, high-quality raw milk from an amazing farm is the gold standard. If you either don't want to go that far or you don't live in a state where you can get it, then the next best option, legal option, would be that pasteurized, non-homogenized milk. They also call it creamline milk. That is the gold standard.
The other, and I know we're starting to run out of time, and I want to say one other thing before you go to your next question. The other thing that's crazy about the milk industry is two things. Most milk says fortified with vitamin A and D. The crazy thing is, milk that comes out of a cow has vitamin A and D in it. It's destroyed through the pasteurization. So what they're not telling you is, this milk had vitamin A and D, we've destroyed it through the pasteurization, we're artificially putting it back in.
Jennifer Fugo (29:20.869)
We added it.
Bill (29:43.364)
But the craziest part is, then they try to sell us the skim milk, right? So one of the weirdest things in the world is vitamin A and D fortified skim milk, because not only did they kill the vitamins, they destroyed them, put them back in artificially, they're both fat soluble vitamins, and they're trying to sell you something that has no fat in it, and your body isn't gonna absorb them properly if you don't have the fat intake the same time. I mean, it really is a complete scam.
Jennifer Fugo (29:46.02)
Yeah, I've noticed too, just on the clinical nutrition side, if people are low in vitamin D, because it's harder to get a doctor to look at vitamin A levels, they just don't, most of the time, even if we ask the client to request it. If they're low in vitamin D and they don't consume many, especially if they're totally dairy free, I'm like, I'm just gonna go ahead and assume you're probably deficient in vitamin A as well, because they're a lot of times in the same foods. So anyway, sorry for that aside, but that being said, okay, so if you're saying that if you get milk that is not homogenized, that is the milk that you would have to shake before you use it.
Bill (30:32.684)
Yes. Well, you don't have to shake it, but you're gonna get a cup of cream if you don't.
Jennifer Fugo (30:36.279)
Okay. So and then the heavy cream, so I see, like if I go to a farm stand, sometimes I've seen heavy cream, I've seen buttermilk, which I think buttermilk, is that slightly fermented? And then is the cream from the separation? What are the different options?
Bill (30:55.054)
Okay, so heavy cream is, I think it's 40%. So milk comes out of a cow at a certain fat, or different animals, at different fat percentages. Like I think a whale has the highest, or maybe it's a walrus, has the highest fat percentage. Cows, depending on the season, the breed of the cow, how often they’re milked, all these different things impact it, but it's in the 4s or the 5% fat. Whole milk is 3.2% fat. So you can bet every dairy producer, there's a massive amount of money in the cream for butter, for all those. So they skim off everything they can off to get the 3.2%. So I know we're all fat-scared, we shouldn't be.
Jennifer Fugo (31:28.634)
Yeah.
Bill (31:41.536)
Dairy fat is amazing, butter is one of the best foods in the world. But we see something like whole milk, and all of a sudden we’re like, whoa, because we've been trained to think we want 1% or 2%. The reality is whole milk is like 97% fat-free.
Jennifer Fugo (31:50.564)
Wow.
Bill (32:19.696)
Like there is zero reason, then there's the 2%, then there's the 1%, then there's the skim milk. So whole milk has already had some fat removed. So first off, always whole milk. I would never get anything but whole milk. So, knowing those numbers, 3.2% is what whole milk is in this country. Heavy cream, heavy whipping cream, I think, is 40% fat. Again, don't just look at milk for the homogenization. It's also, cream is quite often homogenated as well, because remember it's 40% fat, but there's still some milk in there as well, and they want that to sit there together. So I would also suggest looking for your cream and your heavy cream that is non-homogenized.
And then buttermilk, so when you take that cream, the proper way, the ancestral way to make butter, is to take that cream and ferment it for 12 to 24 hours, and then you have crème fraiche or fermented cream. Then you churn that, and then when you churn it, the fat molecules smash together, they break through a barrier and they clump together, and you have the fat on one side and on the other side you have gorgeous buttermilk. If you've made butter that way, yes, that buttermilk has been fermented and it is acidic, and that's why when you put it into something like pancakes, the baking soda and the acid from the buttermilk make these gorgeous fluffy pancakes.
But most of the butter in this country today is what we call sweet cream butter. So they literally just take the cream and shake it up, put in a butter churn, and the fat molecules come together. Then you have the buttermilk on the other side. And that buttermilk is almost useless because it isn't fermented whatsoever. So a lot of the buttermilk that is actually produced in the grocery store is actually just milk that has gone through a slight bit of fermentation process or has become acidic in another way.
Jennifer Fugo (33:54.309)
Interesting.
Bill (34:13.38)
All of these things make a lot of sense. I'm telling you, if you love cheese, if you love yogurt, if you love kefir, any of those things, start making it at home. We have classes here, we have online classes. It's one of my favorite courses to teach. I'm teaching a cheese-making class in a minute to a group, we taught one in Baltimore last week. I love it because it opens up your eyes and you understand, literally now you walk into the grocery store and you're like, oh, that really isn't that, that really isn't that. And you can do more in your home than I legally am allowed to do here on a commercial scale to sell to you.
So very quickly, here's a great example. So we talked about fermented dairy. Really high-quality fermented dairy products that are in my diet all the time, and I think are the healthiest versions of dairy, really high-quality yogurt, really high-quality kefir, really high-quality, especially, raw traditional cheeses. These are fantastic, amazing foods. They're foods that not only you can feel good about, but they're actually very, very good for you and they're pleasing to eat.
But in this country and in many countries, you're not allowed to do something that we've been doing for 8,000 years, and it's called backslopping dairy. So if you've ever made yogurt, what you typically do is you take some yogurt over here that you've already made and you put it in the milk over here, stir it up and depending on the kind of yogurt you're making, you keep it at a certain temperature for, you know, 8 to 12 to 24 hours and then it thickens, right? And if anybody makes kefir at home, you have all these kefir grains, right? And then you've made the kefir in the jar overnight, and you dump it out, you strain out the kefir grains, you put them in the new batch of milk, and then a day later, you have kefir. Both of those things are considered backslopping. Taking something from the old batch and putting it in the new batch. It is illegal to do on a commercial scale. So every single bite of yogurt that you buy at the grocery store or have in a restaurant, or every single sip of kefir that you take, I don't care if you buy it at the best Whole Foods, you know, and you spend $40 on it. Every one of them has been made from a freeze-dried culture from a lab somewhere, and it's a one-time fermentation. It's a different product.
Jennifer Fugo (35:38.555)
Wow.
Bill (35:42.392)
At home you can do this, you cannot buy it that way. But all these things are incredibly easy to do, and I'll give everybody a quick hint. You love yogurt? There's two different temperature ranges that yogurt, depending on the strain of yogurt, they ferment at. Most, that we're used to, if you buy a yogurt maker, holds the milk at 110 degrees. Almost all the yogurt in the grocery store is that, it's called a thermophilic yogurt, that's how it's made. But some of the most traditional yogurts in the world are mesophilic, which means they ferment at room temperature. The most famous yogurt in the world is from the Republic of Georgia, called Matsoni. And all you do is literally take a little bit, put it in the milk, leave it on the table, and the next day you have yogurt every single day. You don't have to do anything else.
Jennifer Fugo (36:22.263)
Oh my gosh.
Bill (36:23.783)
So if you want to start making yogurt at home, get a mesophilic yogurt culture. We sell them here, they're fantastic. You can go to Cultures For Health online, get an heirloom mesophilic yogurt culture, and you're off to the races with 30 seconds of input on a daily basis.
Jennifer Fugo (36:33.166)
Wow. Oh my gosh. All right, first of all, thank you for this. This has been mind-blowing. Second of all, I really do hope that people, if they didn't from your previous episode, all about sourdough, but maybe now, they will go check you out. It's modern, is it modernstoneagekitchen.com? Is that the website?
Bill (36:56.255)
It's modernstoneage.com is the website address, and then the Modern Stone Age for Instagram and Facebook.
Jennifer Fugo (37:02.531)
Yeah, and your bakery is amazing, located on the Eastern Shore and outside of, well, in Chestertown, Maryland. It's like two hours from Philly, and I love going there. But we're gonna have to talk about cheese some other time, I feel like it just keeps, and the fat, we have so many things. I have so many questions for you. But I appreciate your time today, and I'll make sure to share all of your links in the show notes. And thank you so much for this.
Bill (37:28.782)
Thank you. Well, my pleasure. Always good to see you, and thank you so much. Yes. Let me know if you want to have a follow-up conversation anytime.
Jennifer Fugo (37:34.659)
Absolutely.
Bill (37:35.821)
Thank you.
