Warnings – A1 vs. A2 Milk!
Did you know there’s a huge difference
between Milk from A1 Cows vs. Milk
from A2 Cows?
Got Milk? A1 or A2?
Cow Milk … A1 or A2?
Sheep Milk?
Goat Milk?
Camel Milk?
“The Devil in the Milk”
— Dr. Thomas Cowan
on how the A1 – A2 factor explains why
even raw milk sometimes does
not seem to be enough of an
improvement over “store-bought”
It’s not the type of milk, it’s actually the type of cow!!
I’d like to share with you a fascinating
article,written by the well known
Dr. Thomas Cowan, please see herewith:
“…The trouble is that we have “the wrong kind of cows”.
It seems the black and white cows — Holsteins
and Friesians — generally give milk that contains a
small but significant amount of beta-casein type A1,
which behaves like an opiate and which
epidemiological studies have implicated in
heart disease, Type 1 diabetes, autism and
schizophrenia.
This is big news, folks.
Heart disease is the leading cause of death.
This is like cigarettes and cancer.”
Dr. Thomas Cowan, co-founder of the Weston
A. Price Foundation has published this fascinating
introduction to the subject in his email newsletter:
Devil in the Milk
“I have been involved in thinking about the
medicinal aspects of cow’s milk virtually
my entire career.
As one four-year-old child pointed out to me
many years ago, “Mommy, I know why he
always talks about milk,his name is Cow—an.”
So, I guess this milk “obsession” is no surprise.
The obsession started in earnest about 25 years ago
when I read the book
The Milk of Human Kindness
Is Not Pasteurized by maverick physician
William Campbell Douglass, MD.
This was one of the most influential books I have
ever read. I became convinced that a large
part of the disease in this country is related
to the way we handle, or rather mishandle,
milk and milk products.
Raw and cultured dairy products from healthy
grass-fed cows are one of the healthiest foods
people have ever eaten. It is the very foundation
of western civilization (not that this is
necessarily so good).
On the other hand, pasteurized, particularly
low-fat, milk products have caused more
disease than perhaps any other substance
people are generally in contact with. This
view was re- enforced when I met and joined
up with Sally Fallon and learned the principles
of the Weston A. Price Foundation.
End of story, I thought – I could stop thinking
about milk.
Over the years, every once in a while Sally
would say to me, “You know we have
the wrong cows here.”
I had also heard this from assorted bio-dynamic
farmers but didn’t really know what to make of
this or whether this was a medical issue I should
be tackling. All along, though, something was
not quite right.
It remained unmistakably true that many of my
patients, in spite of eating only the proper dairy
products, still had illness and still seemed not
to tolerate milk.
Truth be told, for most of my adult life I myself
couldn’t drink any kind of raw milk without
feeling a bit sick and congested.
Somehow my story with milk wasn’t quite
finished.
Along came the GAPS diet (Gut and Psychology
Syndrome) and the use of low dose naltrexone,
both of which I have described in previous
Fourfold newsletters,
but the relevance here is that many patients only
improved and recovered when they eliminated milk
(but not other dairy products) from their diets
and took a medicine that stimulated
endogenous (one’s own) endorphin production.
Then, a further nudge on this topic showed up
about a month ago.
I was asked to consider writing the foreword to
a book called The Devil in the Milk,
written by agribusiness professor and farm-
management consultant Keith Woodford.
In this book Dr. Woodford lays out the theory that
there is a devil in some of our milk, and this is
something we need to come to grips with.
Here is a brief synopsis of the main thesis of
his book.
Milk consists of
three parts: 1) fat or cream,
2) whey, and 3) milk solids.
For this story we are only
concerned about the milk
solid part, as the fat and
whey don’t have this “devil”.
The milk solid part is composed of many
different proteins which have their own names,
lactose, and other sugars.
It is the protein part of the solid we’re interested in.
One of these proteins is called casein, of which
there are many different types, but the one casein
we are interested is the predominant protein
called beta- casein.
As you may or may not know, all proteins
are long chains of amino acids that have many
“branches” coming off different parts of the
main chain. Beta casein is a 229 chain of amino acids
with a proline at number 67 – at least the
proline is there in “old- fashioned” cows.
These cows with proline at number 67 are called A2
cows and are the older breeds of cows
(e.g. Jerseys, Asian and African cows).
Some five thousand years ago, a mutation
occurred in this proline amino acid, converting
it to histidine. Cows that have this mutated beta
casein are called A1 cows, and include
breeds like Holstein.
The side chain that comes off this amino
acid is called BCM 7. BCM 7 is a small protein
(called a peptide) that is a very powerful opiate
and has some undesirable effects on animals and
humans.
What’s important here is that proline has a
strong bond to BCM 7 which helps keep it from
getting into the milk, so that essentially
no BCM 7 is found in the urine, blood or GI
tract of old-fashioned A2 cows.
On the other hand, histidine, the mutated
protein, only weakly holds on to BCM 7,
so it is liberated in the GI tract of animals
and humans who drink A1 cow milk,
and it is found in significant quantity
in the blood and urine of these animals.
This opiate BCM 7 has been shown in
the research outlined in the book to cause
neurological impairment in animals and people
exposed to it, especially autistic and
schizophrenic changes. BCM 7 interferes with
the immune response, and injecting BCM 7 in
animal models has been shown to provoke
Type 1 diabetes.
Dr. Woodford presents research showing a
direct correlation between a population’s exposure
to A1 cow’s milk and incidence of auto-immune
disease, heart disease (BCM 7 has a
pro-inflammatory effect on the blood vessels),
type 1 diabetes, autism, and schizophrenia.
What really caught my eye is that BCM 7
selectively binds to the epithelial cells in
the mucus membranes (i.e. the nose) and
stimulates mucus secretion.
For reasons which are unclear historically,
once this mutation occurred many thousand
years ago, the A1 beta casein gene spread
rapidly in many countries in the western world.
Some have speculated that the reason for this
wide spread of A1 cows is that the calves drinking
A1 cows milk and exposed to the opiate
BCM7 are more docile than their traditional
brethren (in effect, they were stoned).
This is only speculation, of course. But what is
true is that basically all American dairy cows
have this mutated beta-casein and are
predominantly A1 cows.
The amazing thing for me is that all these years
Sally was right: it’s not the fat, it’s not the whey,
and it’s not raw milk.
Consider French cheese –mostly due to culinary
snobbery, the French never accepted these
A1 breeds of cow, claiming they have lousy milk.
Voila, they have good milk and cheese. Our issue
in America is that we have the wrong cows. When
you take A1 cow milk away, and stimulate our own
endorphins instead of the toxic opiate of BCM 7,
some amazing health benefits ensue.
So what are we all to do with this? Does
this mean no one should drink US raw cow’s milk?
One saving grace, as expressed in The Devil
in the Milk, is that the absorption of BCM 7
is much less in people with a healthy GI tract.
This also parallels the ideas of GAPS theory
which talks a lot about this. BCM 7 is also not
found in goat’s or sheep’s milk, so these
types of milk might be better tolerated.
One final point: we now have one more thing to
put on our activism to-do list. Dr. Woodford
explains that it is fairly straightforward to switch
a herd to become an all A2 herd. No genetic
engineering is needed, no fancy tests, just one
simple test of the Beta-casein and it can
be done.
Hopefully, when this becomes widespread
we will end up with a truly safe and healthy
milk supply. Then maybe I should just change my name. “
You can read it on his website, click here.
