Being a Westchester chapter leader for the Weston A. Price Foundation, I generally have a biased view of raw milk.
Milk has been held high and then demonized over the last century. Many cultures all over the world have utilized the milk of many different mammals for survival and health.
Pottery found in Poland, aged 7000 years ago showed the use of milk as a food. In the Middle East, fermented dairy such as curds and yogurt were used thousands of years ago. Masaai are a peoples in Africa that still use milk as their predominant nutritional source of food when hunted meat is not available.
As we moved more to the industrialized era, people lived farther and farther away from healthy, humane farms and closer to dirty, congested cities. In order to get the milk to the people, distilleries (yes alcohol places, eww) were keeping cows in sick conditions near the cities (because whiskey and milk were very profitable) and many babies died from the sick milk.
A doctor created a milk health commission which made sure the raw milk getting to the people was clean again. Towards the end of WWII, another person, Mr. Strauss, came along and created milk depots. Only problem is raw milk curdles after awhile, so he had the milk cooked, pasteurized. His big money had lobbyist, and voila!, no more raw milk distribution. From that point on, it became more profitable to sell pasteurized dairy as a retail than for a consumer to get their raw milk from a farmer directly.
To this day, nobody has died from drinking raw milk.
It's important you get all the facts.
You can learn more about it at The Weston A. Price foundation.
Back to nourishing your body pre-pregnancy. You need a healthy diet and lifestyle (duh). Plenty of good fats, folic acid, B12 , and vitamin A.
The thing is pasteurized dairy has a lot of the good stuff cooked off. You can see a power-point about it HERE
Whole milk, especially raw, contains calcium, fatty acids, phosphorus and even some B vitamins including B12. All these are necessary for building the body up, creating a good ovulation cycle , and storing up the nutrients for you and the developing baby.
The natural occurring vitamin A in raw milk will help with fetal lung development as well as the urogenital formation in the fetus.
Grass-fed milk especially has a good amount of Omega-3 fatty acids.
And if you're concerned about safety, don’t be, HERE are some great links on the FDA, CDC, and many other things.
Again with a healthy diet and a couple of glasses of raw milk a day, you’ll be well on your way to a healthy AND very welcoming womb!
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