Also, it was only after I began drinking raw milk that I realized that the intermittent abdominal pain I had been experiencing for years was probably due to lactose intolerance. Since I have been drinking raw milk, the only time I have had such abdominal pain is when I don’t have access to raw milk (vacationing or traveling outside ofCalifornia) or haven’t consumed any for several days. In fact, the only times I have gotten sick (cold or flu) in the past few years has been when I was on vacation (and not drinking raw milk!).
My raw milk consumption is part of a complete overhaul of my diet, which has always been healthy, but within the past year I have almost completely eliminated any processed foods and try to consume organic food as much as possible. This has greatly improved my quality of life, although the long-term effects of my diet overhaul remain to be seen. Dairy is a staple of my diet, and since I suffer from lactose intolerance, my quality of life would be greatly diminished if I did not have access to high quality raw milk.
I am very concerned about the efforts to ban raw milk in California, and find it utterly ridiculous that what seems to have instigated it was the epidemiological connection between the e.coli outbreak in 6 children in 2006 and raw milk consumption. WHAT ABOUT THE E. COLI IN SPINACH AT AROUND THE SAME TIME? You don’t hear for anyone calling for a ban on spinach, do you? It makes no sense to me, when there are many other products that are consumed regularly that are much more dangerous. For example, cigarettes kill over 300,000 people in the US each year and yet they are still bought and sold legally. Thousands of people each year are sickened (and die!) from legally prescribed drugs that are supposedly “safe”. I’d really like to know why the CDFA is focusing its efforts on a product that hasn’t killed anybody and causes relatively few problems compared to other products. This is a waste of my taxpayer money! What is their argument against raw milk?
The real problem will start when and if consumers are forced to get their raw milk on the “black market”, and begin purchasing raw milk from unsanitary sources. I can’t say that I would be brave enough to do this, but some people will do it because they don’t understand or choose to ignore the possible contamination problems. Then the CDFA will have a real public health problem to deal with.