Think outside the cow

Well, so much for worrying about my brain being toasted. So I drop a stitch now & then. So what. I have been reading scientific articles for 3 days now and they make perfect sense to me -- except some of the statistical stuff, which is pretty arcane.

Due to a characteristically long & zigzag train of thought, I wound up looking into the properties of milk from various species (including human.) Fascinating stuff.

Just so you know ... pasteurization and microwaving puts the kybosh on most of what I'm going to mention here. Those raw foodies are right about milk.

Important notes: Enzymes are a type of protein. So are antibodies and hormones. (Protein is a very generic word.) Protein can be denatured (broken, bent, or otherwise altered) by heat and acidity. If you can see the protein, the change is apparent, because the protein's physical properties change. (When you boil an egg, it turns hard and white inside because its protein is denatured. When you put vinegar & lemon on raw fish to make ceviche, it becomes opaque as the acid denatures the protein in the fish.)

Back to milk.

Milk in its natural state contains far more than water, protein, sugar, calcium, and fat. It carries enzymes and antibodies that stimulate the growth of "good" intestinal flora (like Bifidus) and that inhibit or kill bacteria, viruses (including influenza and Hep-C!), fungi, amoebas, and even cancer. (Blows my mind.)Each species has a distinct profile of how much of each kind of nutrient and enzyme is in its milk, and exactly what version of each of these things it carries. (There is only one thing called lactoferrin, for example, but many different versions of that one thing. As a parallel, think of different shades of a single color: the color of a lemon rind is different from the color of your eyes when you have jaundice, but they're both yellow.)

Enzymes and antibodies are generally fragile types of protein, easily denatured by heat and acidity and other types of interference. I won't go into the details of what I've learned so far of each species (I'm typing by hand and it fkin' hurts), but there are two things worth noting:
* Camel's milk is fully as magical as any Bedouin ever claimed.
* Lactoferrin (high in human, camel, and cow milk) has an opioid effect at the spinal level.

This is the first time I have seriously reconsidered the benefits of pasteurization. Given my trouble with immunity and pain, I may never buy pasteurized milk again.