Sally Fallon Morell (center in the photo, olive skirt) is president of the Weston A. Price Foundation, a nutrition education and research group that recommends the consumption of full-fat, unprocessed, unpasteurized raw milk.During a protest in Washington on Monday to campaign for the the legal movement of raw milk across state lines, she said:
“Children who start out on raw milk are very healthy children. They don’t have asthma, they don’t have allergies, they don’t miss days at school, they don’t get sick, and they don’t have digestive problems. Raw milk is a magic food, and we are here to defend that magic food.”That's an unusual argument for the head of a science-based organization to make.
- Milking A Hill Rally For All It's Worth, National Journal, May 16, 2011
Thanks to Bill Marler.
6 comments:
I find the comment to be very strange and even irresponsible. Milk is pasteurized for a reason , not just to make someone rich. The health risks from drinking unpasteurized milk are well known.
Raw milk is not a magic food - and apparently this woman is not much of a scientist.
Many years ago when I was growing up in Wisconsin milk was called the the "perfect food". Great marketing! I even remember my mother repeating "milk is the perfect food" to me. Even as a child I thought the claim was a bit dubious. Of course you might expect this claim since Wisconsin is the Dairy State. Oleo (a.k.a. margarine) was also outlawed for sale in stores, too. We used butter for everything. People would buy oleo when they went to Illinois because it cost less.
So, Sally Fallon Morell isn't the first one to be exaggerated or false claims about milk either raw or pasteurized. She probably won't be the last. Got Milk?
That it was a marketing gimmick is the best explanation yet. Because ... I think she understood the weight of her words. She did it on purpose.
I would be very disappointed if I heard a vegetarian, maybe Campbell or Barnard, say that broccoli was a magic food. Although, if they did, I suspect legions of vegetarians would start a run on broccoli. It's the power of words, like "swiftboating" with a positive spin, or like, as you say, "Got Milk?"
Even when unpasteurized milk was a major cause of shockingly high rates of infant mortality, there were lots of people who vehemently opposed pasteurization.
http://nabc.cals.cornell.edu/pubs/nabc_13/HOTCHKISS.pdf
While some of Fallon's ideas are good (I have one of her books), overall I think she's an extremist. Nonetheless, there are a LOT of folks in PA (where raw milk is [or has been] legal) who swear by its health benefits. Not drinking milk, I wouldn't know.
Milk from pasture raised cows is a healthy food. There are more food-borne illness from pasteurized milk from the CDC's own statistics. And there's more food borne illness from commercial meats and veggies.
@Laurie - High rates of infant mortality resulted from consumption of raw milk from swill cows. These were cows in early industrialized New York, Boston, Philly. These cows were given the waste from liquor production and lived similarly like CAFO cows of today. Wouldn't drink raw milk from those either. It provoked a response for both "certified raw milk" from farms(not urban operations) and pasteurization.
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