Why certified organic milk brands such as Horizon and Organic Valley are toxic despite glowing marketing claims, which falsely lead consumers to believe this type of milk is a healthier alternative to regular supermarket milk.
Fact: Organic milk companies such as Horizon and Organic Valley are pulling the wool over the eyes of consumers.
By marketing their ultrapasteurized (UHT) milk as certified USDA Organic, a willing consumer base buys it, thinking it is a better choice than regular pasteurized supermarket milk.
The sad truth is that ultrapasteurized (UHT) organic milk is just as unhealthy as regular, pasteurized store milk.
I’ve often thought if I HAD to choose between them, which milk would I select as being better: regular pasteurized supermarket milk or ultrapasteurized certified organic milk? That’s a toughie. Neither choice is optimal as there is no clear winner.
Both are highly processed milks, and both contribute to poor health and chronic illness in general.
Pasteurized vs Ultrapasteurized Milk
Let’s first consider regular supermarket milk.
The dairy cows producing this type of milk are injected with hormones and other drugs.
They consume unnatural, GMO, pesticide, and antibiotic-laced feed with no access to fresh air or green grass.
To add insult to injury, these abused animals stand on cement floors their entire lives. No surprise that they usually die within about 18 months. Incidentally, the true lifespan for a healthy dairy cow should approach 15 years.
Milk from confined cows NEEDS to be pasteurized. It is dirty, nasty stuff loaded with pus and pathogens because of the filth and chronic mastitis the cows endure.
Now let’s consider certified organic (UHT) milk. A consumer with only partial knowledge of how milk is processed is easily lured into buying this milk.
On the surface, it seems so much healthier.
After all, the cows don’t get any antibiotics, steroids, or hormones, right?
It’s certified USDA Organic. Doesn’t that mean something?
While the cows producing organic milk may not be subjected to the drugs and antibiotics used on conventional dairy operations, the milk coming from the Organic Industrial Complex is even more highly processed.
For example, ultrapasteurized (UHT) organic milk is subjected to the insanely high temperature of 275–302°F/ 135–150°C for 1–10 seconds (most commonly 2–5 seconds).
This is waaaay over the boiling point!
For reference, the boiling point of milk is 212.4–212.9°F/ 100.2–100.5°C.
Excessively high UHT processing, far above the boiling point, results in a destroyed product (it isn’t really even food anymore), but dairy corporations love it because it has a much extended shelf life compared to regular pasteurization.
The dirty little secret is that certified organic UHT milk can actually remain unrefrigerated for up to 6 months when packaged in aseptic cartons!
Yet, it is placed in the refrigerated section nonetheless because US consumers won’t readily buy cartons of milk from an unrefrigerated shelf. It goes against intuition and just doesn’t seem very natural, does it?
I don’t know about you, but I find this practice outrageous!
To show the disconnect, consider that Moms often buy individually sized aseptic packages of organically certified milk and put them in their children’s lunchboxes….with ice packs that aren’t even needed!
If they only knew that this milk is so dead that it doesn’t require refrigeration, then they might rethink their choice of beverage.
Auto-Immune Disorders
Why is ultrapasteurization so bad?
The high temperature (far above boiling point) necessary to ultrapasteurize organic milk greatly damages the fragile milk proteins. The same thing happens when sweetened condensed milk is manufactured too.
This violent industrial process results in a “food” that the body no longer recognizes when it is consumed.
The enzymes produced during digestion do not “fit together” like puzzle pieces with the milk proteins destroyed by UHT processing.
These undigested proteins then make their way into the bloodstream due to “leaky gut” syndrome, which nearly all Westerners suffer from to some degree.
At that point, the body identifies them as foreign proteins and mounts an immune response.
This translates into symptoms such as allergies, asthma, eczema, reflux, bloating, and other symptoms of autoimmunity.
People who drink this type of certified organic milk often think they have a “milk allergy”. In reality, they have an allergy to the processing, not the milk itself!
Ultrapasteurized milk is so completely sterilized that sometimes it is difficult to culture into homemade kefir or 24 hour yogurt.
In short, ultrapasteurized milk is dead, dead, DEAD.
There is no way that it can be considered healthy, even if it is labeled USDA organic and comes from grassfed cows.
I remember when my first child was nursing, I drank a lot of Organic Valley ultrapasteurized milk.
My baby spit up so badly during that time that there was some concern that he had a reflux disorder.
Remarkably (but not surprisingly), when I stopped drinking the Organic Valley milk, his reflux problem completely resolved. No treatment was required.
I have no doubt that if I had continued drinking this milk while nursing and he drank it as a toddler, that a likely “milk allergy” would be the result today.
Fortunately, I wised up in time to get off the industrialized poison otherwise known as certified organic milk!
Pick Your Poison
While a consumer may be reducing his/her exposure to antibiotic and pesticide residues by choosing Organic Valley milk, this is by no means a guarantee to less chemical exposure.
Processors of organic milk frequently boil the milk to the required 275–302°F/ 135–150°C after the milk is in the plastic or plastic-lined aseptic carton packaging.
Another method (just as toxic), is to fill the package or jug with sterilized hot milk that has not yet cooled down!
Either of these industrialized processes release high levels of endocrine-disrupting phthalates from the plastic or plastic lining into the milk!
Most everyone now knows never to heat food in a microwave with plastic wrap on top for this very reason.
It’s a shame more people aren’t aware of the tremendous endocrine-disrupting potential of drinking all forms of pasteurized milk, even certified organic that is falsely perceived as safer.
Never Buy Certified Organic Milk from the Store!
As you can see, it is an extremely hard decision to pick which milk is more unhealthy: regular pasteurized store milk or certified organic milk.
It is best not to have to make the decision at all!
Seek out fresh raw grassfed milk straight from the cow (or goat) from a farmer in your local area.
And, if you are fortunate enough to have a source for this truly healthy milk, don’t run out and buy a half-gallon of ultrapasteurized organic milk if you temporarily run out of the fresh-from-the-farm variety.
In those situations, it is best to simply go without.
The risks from consuming certified organic milk even on occasion are simply too enormous to ignore.
Another option is to make healthy milk substitutes like this recipe for coconut milk tonic or homemade sprouted oat milk until the next local dairy delivery.
More Information
101 Uses for Raw Soured Milk
Tips for Freezing Milk and other Dairy Products
A1 and A2 Milk: Do Cow Genetics Even Matter?
I love informing the public on the government's lack of caring when it comes to food. Another part of the equation is what the cows are feed. I have been looking into milk products for over 1 year because my son has a high gluten intolerance. The cows in the commercial farms are all grain feed and it seems as if those grains are getting into the milk making him sick. Almost 1 out of 100 Americans have a gluten intolerance and don't know it. The gluten intolerance leads to the leaky gut unless they are allergic to the milk itself from the start. Certified organic milk only needs to be 10% grass feed which in turn causes a problem that there is no regulation on how much grain the cows get leading to gluten in the milk making it unhealthy.
That being said my son is highly intolerant to all grains and the only milk he can tolerate is Horizon 2% from our local market because their processing and feeding seem to be totally grain free.
One final comment is I am not sure what you mean by aseptic containers since the word aseptic means to be germ and contaminate free. I am sure the local farmer cleans his containers by placing boiling water in and around them 100 °C (212 °F) which in Fahrenheit is only a few degrees shy of what you said the pasteurization process is.
Hi Sam, you can test the deadness of ultrapasteurized milk in your own kitchen. Try culturing it into yogurt with a basic yogurt machine. It doesn't work. If the beneficial cultures in yogurt starter can't do anything with the ultrapasteurized milk to ferment it into yogurt then your body most certainly can't digest it either.
I don’t disagree with you that farm fresh is the way to go, but that’s not an option where I live and I make yogurt with organic ultra-pasteurized milk all the time and it turns out great.
Hi Sarah! I too loved your article, but I would like hard facts. You wrote that our bodies have a hard time with the proteins in the ultra pasteurized milk. Do you have a link to any studies for that? Where did you get this information?
This is my first time reading your blog and I find this post very interesting and disappointing since my toddler loves his milk.
We use Meyenberg Goats Milk so taking this away from my 2 year old who drinks two bottles a day will be tough. However it is ultra pasteurized. Would you provide links to research and studies that have shown that pasteurization renders foods dead and has adverse health effects? It seems to make sense but I'd like to read up on this myself to get fully education in my choices for my family. It's such a complex info landscape out here in blog-world. Thank you!
Yes, yes, yes, Danielle. What you are buying from the farm is infinitely better than Horizon. Probably your farmer is low temp pasteurizing (vat pasteurizing) which is much less damaging to the fragile milk proteins than even regular pasteurization.
Hi there, this is my first time reading your blogs
We buy milk from a local dairy that is pasturized but not homogonized grassfed cows. It's not "certified" organic b/c the people that run the place said the process the government make you go through to get "certified" is long and expensive. The cows graze – you can see them when you drive to the dairy and the milk is in glass bottles. Even my husband, a skepic of "natural" "organic", etc said it's the best milk he's tasted in years – since childhood.
We drink the 1 1/2% variety, mainly b/c I cannot stomach whole milk. Is that better than the Horion brand from the store?
Hi Sarah, how do you make yogurt at home using raw milk? I have a little yogurt maker… Thanks!
If ultrapasteurized is the only thing you can get, then yes, it is better to not drink milk! Do you have a healthfood store in your area? Then, ask them to start stocking Natural by Nature low temp pasteurized, nonhomogenized grassfed whole milk. You can also mail order Organic Pastures raw milk from CA. It is quite pricey, to do this, so it would be best to get your local healthfood store to stock a decent alternative.
Ultra Pasturized is the ONLY option we have in this area. I was one of those who bought Horizons and Organic Valley because they were "organic". I guess I'll just quit buying milk . . . Not sure what else to do.
Trader Joe's organic milk is not ultrapasteurized, and I think same can be said of Whole Food's milk. Thank you for your post! It explains why I have problems every time I run out of milk and use the parmalat I keep in cupboard as backup (no longer). Very useful information.
That is great to know that some Organic Valley milk is regular pasteurized now. Perhaps the company is responding to consumer pressure? One can always hope! Thanks for sharing this information.