Death By Supermarket (22 page)

The hearings resulted in legislation called SB 201 that would empower the CDFA to start a new program called Raw Milk Program (RAMP) for
the HACCP. RAMP would include aggressive pathogen testing and other food-safety-focused objectives for California raw milk production instead of measuring coliforms, which are not pathogens and don’t cause illness. These new standards would further enhance raw-milk safety for the California markets and consumers. RAMP would be the gold standard for raw-milk production in California—a standard that the rest of the world would likely follow.

The hearings were, according to Mark, “a landslide victory for raw milk and a huge embarrassment for the FDA, CDFA, and the Big Dairy processors, who could not offer up any reasons why kids get sick on pasteurized milk but get well when they drink raw milk. After hearings, calls to the Assembly and senators poured in. Mark recalls the day that he “got a call at my office begging me to call off the faxes and phone calls coming in not just from California, but Italy, France, England, Australia, and Canada. The world was fighting for California raw milk.”

The legislation resulting from the hearings provided the general outline for the Food Safety program for the production of raw milk. SB 201 passed both houses of the state legislature but was vetoed by Schwarzenegger. It was a devastating blow to Mark, to consumers, and to all raw milk farmers whose farms and ideals were resting on Mark’s victory in Sacramento. Ultimately, Organic Pastures rallied by putting their energies into figuring out how to pass the low bacteria count standard. Less than 10 coliforms is hard to pull off, Mark told me, especially when milk is tested on finished product not from the bulk tank. Milk that comes out of a healthy cow has coliforms fewer than ten. When raw milk is exposed to air and surfaces (even sanitary ones), the level of coliforms rise quickly. Agitation or pumping increases coliforms. “In raw milk coliforms are beneficial and inhibit bad bugs from growing,” Mark said. “Coliforms kill pathogens.” Organic Pastures eventually passed by taking away steps from the cow to the bottle and by developing new cleaning systems. “We spend fortunes on cleaning. But bad bugs don’t come from milk lines, they come from unhealthy cows. Less than ten coliforms doesn’t measure those kinds of bacteria.”

Of his battle, Mark said, “We oppose the FDA when they say that only a drug can cure or improve an illness with their ‘pill for every ill’ policy system, which protects companies’ profits. We work hard every day to teach how foods heal and foods prevent disease, which the FDA can’t say about the drugs they support that kill hundreds of thousands of people every year. We fight alongside our consumers every day. And in the dying words of Weston A. Price, ‘you teach, you teach, you teach.’”

Natural milk, meat, and eggs that come from well-treated animals are healthy, historically consumed foods that produce the vibrant good health that Dr. Price documented throughout his research on indigenous peoples. On a balanced diet of real, organically produced food, including natural animal products, Americans could quell our unnatural hunger and achieve our genetic gifts, and thus become as tall, attractive, cheerful, robust, sexy, and fertile and as relatively free from mental, dental, and degenerative diseases as our genetics predispose us to be. But we have been actually discouraged from eating natural foods. The vendetta against raw milk is one example. And Mark—a true American hero of the real-food movement— and his fight to provide real food to consumers, is a microcosm of what is happening in the fight between factory-food producers and real-food farmers and ranchers.

A huge part of this battle is the fact that corporate agribusiness has gobbled up all federal farm subsidies so that small farmers and ranchers have been driven out of business and off their lands, making natural food either very hard to find or more expensive than factory food. As a result, we have been indirectly encouraged to consume the diseased and drug-and hormone-infused animal products that are produced in CAFOs by these mega-corporations.

While the government endeavors to prevent us from drinking natural milk, there are health professionals who discourage the consumption of milk in general. The standard argument is that humans are the only species to drink milk past infancy and the only species to drink the milk of other species. I have never seen back-up research for those statements. Yet as I’ve said, I’ve seen 1,000-pound steers nursing from their mothers and cats and
dogs lapping saucers of cow and goat milk. And we’ve all gotten the cute animal emails with photos of wild baby animals rescued by humans and nursed by their family cats and dogs.

Another argument is that animal milk was not a food of hunter-gatherers and thus is too “new” for modern humans to have adapted to. S.C. Gwynne writes about the hunter gatherer Comanches in
Empire of the Summer Moon: Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches, the Most Powerful Indian Tribe in American History
, “Buffalo was the food the Comanches loved more than any other… If a slain female was giving milk, Comanches would cut into the udder bag and drink the milk mixed with warm blood. One of the greatest delicacies was the warm curdled milk from the stomach of a suckling calf.” We also know that elsewhere in the world and much earlier in history, once easy-picking food supplies began to dwindle and hunter-gatherers began to dabble in domesticating plants and animals for food, animals that produced milk were of immediate interest. According to Jared Diamond in
Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies
, a domesticated animal is defined as one whose breeding and food supply are controlled by humans. Writes Diamond, “Milked mammals include the cow, sheep, goat, horse, reindeer, water buffalo, yak, and Arabian and Bactrian camels. Those mammals thereby yield several times more calories over their lifetime than if they were just slaughtered and consumed as meat.”
²³⁶

If you can’t obtain raw milk, there are many organic milk suppliers who operate humane dairies and pasture-graze their cows, although all organic milk is pasteurized and many are ultra pasteurized (sterilized of enzymes as well as bad and good bacteria). Keep in mind that just because milk is “organic” doesn’t mean their cows were treated humanely or fed species-appropriate food. Horizon is a very good example. Once a stellar example of an organic dairy, Horizon was bought out by Dean Foods, the largest supplier of milk in the country. Although the cartoon cows look happy on the carton, the truth is that the living cows are kept in feedlots and likely don’t see a blade of grass. Just as with the food-industry-speak that has brought us factory food under the guise of “natural,” the same
twisted semantics are now bringing us pseudo “organic” milk. If you are ever in doubt about a food supplier, the Internet is a great resource, as there are people out there who are more than happy to tell you if a food provider is misrepresenting healthy claims or hiding something—like not letting their cows lie down in grass or eat their natural diet of grass, weeds, and shrubs.

You can find out if your state allows the sale of raw milk on realmilk. com and locate dairies on
eatwild.com
. In states that have outlawed raw milk sales, it’s possible to purchase a share in a cow from which you are legally allowed to share in its milk production. However, just because someone has a backyard cow doesn’t mean that they are properly versed in handling raw milk. I asked Mark for some guidelines. “There are a few things to look for if a family is going to source their milk locally. I suggest looking at the standards found at
rawusa.org
. Raw milk can be very safe if given a modicum of Mother Nature’s care mixed with a little testing technology.” If you are interested in defending the right of farmers, like Mark, to exist and want to buy their products, you can join the Farm-to-Consumer Legal Defense Fund,
farmtoconsumer.org
.

In the game of thimblerig—also known as the shell game—a swindler uses sleight of hand to shuffle an object between three cups. The player must then guess the location of the object. But the game is always rigged to defraud. Since the year 1900, an unhealthy symbiotic relationship has developed between our medical establishment, our government, the food, diet and pharmaceutical industries, and us, their fat, sick customers. We have been encouraged to consume the profit-rich products made with laboratory-concocted ingredients—processed, refined white sugar, refined grains, high-fructose corn syrup, MSG, aspartame, industrially processed soy, and processed polyunsaturated fats—as well as factory- animal products. Like shell game players, Americans believe the promises of good health, beauty, and satisfaction issued about these substances. But since these products both lack the life-sustaining nutrients necessary to maintain healthy metabolic processes and are mostly foreign and toxic to human physiology, we end up sick and fat.

PART SEVEN
Dieting Always Fails

IN GREEK MYTHOLOGY SISYPHUS
was a heartless king of Corinth condemned for eternity to roll a boulder up a hill only to have it roll back down just before he reached the top. Sisyphus’ plight is analogous to dieting. Because every time you diet, you fail and must diet again. The main problem with diet books, programs, systems, products, and factory-made diet foods is that the focus is on losing weight through starvation (dieting). But no matter how hard you try to reach a weight-loss goal by starvation, you will end up failing. Although the weight-loss-by-starvation failure rate is high—we’ve rolled that same boulder up the hill many times—like Sisyphus, we get up and do it again… even though 95 percent of diets fail
²³⁷
and the vast majority of dieters understand that low-calorie dieting doesn’t produce results. The truth is that dieting is a modern aberration that perpetuates malnutrition.

Current conventional wisdom points at the volume of food people consume as the reason people are overweight and sick. If only we had better portion control. In 1960, a serving of McDonald’s fries contained 200 calories; in the early 2000s, a super-sized portion contained 610 calories. Then Morgan Spurlock’s 2004 Sundance Film Festival award-winning documentary
Super Size Me
, which brought worldwide attention to the deleterious effects of eating an exclusive diet of McDonald’s, shamed McDonald’s into phasing out their super-size products. Has it made a difference in our collective weight? Not really. Today diet experts urge people to eat less
fast food, fewer fries, and smaller portions of factory foods. Even Dr. Phil said in his book
The Ultimate Weight Solution
, “Another way to decrease your exposure to foods you buy for your kids is to purchase these foods in smaller packages. Rather than get a jumbo sack of chips that you’re likely to scarf down in one sitting, why not buy smaller, single-serving sizes? With this approach, you’ve got automatic portion control.”
²³⁸

Are we really to believe that Americans could reduce body fat and maintain a healthy weight by simply, as Dr. Phil suggests, eating smaller bags of chips?

Low-calorie dieting has been around the longest, and it makes sense intuitively. Most physicians firmly believe in the calorie in/calorie out theory. We are told that you must restrict 3,600 calories, or 515 calories per day to lose one pound per week. Despite recent low fat and low carb tangents, Americans will always return to counting calories. That’s why
The South Beach Diet
, which is billed as a low carb diet but is really a low calorie diet, has sold 22 million copies to date.

One hundred years ago, a hardworking man ate 6,000 to 6,500 calories and a hardworking woman ate 4,000 to 4,500 calories per day. Today an average woman needs 2,000 to 2,500 calories and an average man needs 2,500 to 2,800 calories. On the first day of the South Beach Diet, by my calculation, you’re allowed 1,167 calories, which is 800 to 1,333 calories less per day than an average woman needs, and 1,333 to 1,163 less calories than the average man needs for optimal metabolic function. Still, you may be convinced that a low-calorie diet is the way to weight loss, because you have heard people say, “I lost thirty pounds on the South Beach Diet!” But losing weight is not the end of the story. It’s what happens next that you need to consider.

There are five reasons why a low-calorie diet is counterproductive to weight management. The first reason is that human beings in the twenty-first century have the same physiology as our Paleolithic ancestors. In prehistoric times food was not always plentiful. People gorged when they had food, then went without eating when food was scarce. Prehistoric human
physiology evolved an “insulin-directed” fat-storage system enabling them to survive to this “feast and famine” lifestyle. The hormone insulin, which is secreted from the pancreas when food is eaten, directs nutrients into the cells. In times of famine, prehistoric humans’ pancreases adjusted, so the next time they gorged during a plentiful season, their insulin secretions were higher and more food could be stored as fat.