My friends is into unpasteurized milk

[tom]

My friends is into unpasteurized milk, so he gets raw milk from some of the local farms here in NJ.

This is a site where you can find some info and locations to purchase real milk.
http://www.realmilk.com/

What is your opinion about this?

[nauthiz]

I get impression that both the purported health benefits and risks of raw milk are overblown. That's about all I can say for myself, though; milk isn't really on my gastronomic radar.

I have some friends that used to sell raw milk from their farm. They drank it because they said it tasted better, though I believe they did switch back to pasteurized when they found the wife was pregnant just to make her doctor happy.

[GreenGoddess]

I'm all for consuming raw foods, but unpasteurized milk can be a tad dangerous. The act of pasteurizing help to eliminate the many germs that come from the cow's body and helps eliminate any sort of conditions or diseases that could be extremely harmful to people of every gender and every age. In short, I wouldn't recommend drinking it unpasteurized.

[debchoosesfreedom]

I have never heard of anyone becoming ill from consuming unpasteurized milk from a farm that was milked in a sanitary way (i.e. not by mass machinery in a factory environment) but I suppose it's possible. Of course Food Inc. pasteurizes everything (from fruit juice to butter) just because it's not profitable to have high standards of sanitation.

As far as the benefits of drinking raw, non-homogenized cow's milk as opposed to the stuff in the store's, here's what I've read:

Homogenized milk has had its chemical structure altered to keep the cream from rising to the top. This is proven to lead to artery damage that causes plaque (fatty-tissue and cholesterol) build-up on the artery-lining. This is the main cause of high cholesterol and the reason why the countries that drink the most milk (United States followed by Finland) have the highest incidence of heart disease. No matter how healthy your diet is and how often your exercise, if you drink consume homo milk products daily you're going to have high cholesterol, whether the drug companies like me revealing it or not.

Raw milk products from grass fed cows contain far more CLA (3-5 times more according to an article I read on raw-milk-fats.com) than homo milk. CLA is an omega 6 fatty acid with numerous and considerable health benefits including increased metabolic-rate and muscle growth and a decrease in belly fat and insulin resistance.

And, last but not least it's usually from non-drugged/vaccinated cows, which means you're not not drugging/vaccinating yourself!