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 live in Japan and have searched and searched for healthy milk. These are the best ones I have found:
1. Raw milk from almost 100% pasture-fed Holsteins — $10 for 720ml (about 3 cups!)
2. Milk from Brown Swiss cows grazed on non-sprayed pasture, pasteurized at 75C (higher than Vat. Pasteurization) — $5 for 1L (4 cups)
3. Milk from Holsteins, partially pastured + fed non GMO grains (not organic though), vat pasteurized at 65C for 30 minutes –$3 for 1 L
I truly can’t afford the raw milk. 🙁 Bought it for my son for a year when he was 2, but had to give it up after cleaning out my bank account! The Brown Swiss milk is almost 100% pastured, but the pasteurization temperature is higher than the Holstein milk, which is only partially pastured. Sigh! WWYD? Giving up milk is out of the question!
Hi Linda, Japan is indeed very expensive. I traveled there back in the late 80’s when the exchange rate was something like 200 yen to one US dollar. Do the best you can … cut out every single junk food item in your pantry. An alternative is coconut milk tonic .. 1 quart filtered water, 14 oz whole coconut milk, 1 tsp vanilla, 1-3 TBL maple syrup or coconut sugar. I know you can get whole coconut milk pretty reasonably in Japan so perhaps this would be a way to go some of the time.
Hi Michelle, your parents are in no way the problem. Hard working families like yours are to be commended and are worthy of great respect. Let’s put the blame where it belongs: with the Organic Valley ultrapasteurization processing. This is what turns the milk from your parent’s farm into such an indigestible allergenic food. Processing is the problem, not the milk from your parent’s farm!
It’s sad to hear what my parents do so often misrepresented: my parents own a small dairy farm, and they raise their animals conventionally.
There are twenty-four stalls in their barn and another handful of heifers and dry cows running around in the pasture. Yes, I said pasture. Milk from the store sometimes comes from cows who have seen grass. Apparently, this is shocking news.
Our cows all have names. They all have personalities; we know the personalities because we work with, pet, feed, and even play with these animals on a daily basis. And the oldest in the barn is over twelve with several right behind her.
And yes, they occasionally get treated with antibiotics. Then again, when my aunt was breastfeeding and got mastitis, she got treated with antibiotics, too, because the pain was horrible and the issue needed to be resolved. Surely no one would begrudge her for doing so, but if a cow is treated and her milk is kept from the milk supply, she’s still labeled as a bad, conventional, out-to-kill-small-children cow, just like her owners.
Oh, and one more thing: my parents both work full-time off the farm so that they can afford to run the farm. Which runs at a loss every year. But they–and every other farm family I know–do it because they love it and they believe in the product that they produce.
But thanks for making us look like monsters.
I don’t think they are attacking small dairy farms like the one you speak of.
The ones we are trying to avoid are the huge cafo like places that treat the cows badly , where cows don’t see grass, where they stand in their own feces etc. Milk does not need to be ultra pasteurized. That must be a marketing thing b/c I can’t think of why else they would do that.
Anasthasia,
Please educate yourself. Many large dairies are just as safe and healthy for people and animals and are conventionally run. Our society has removed itself so much from the farm that many people that comment on stories like this only believe and know what has been force-fed to them by media extremists.
Conventional milk and food products are safe and healthy, and the animals are treated very well. It’s always the few “bad apples” that get the majority of press coverage, so consumers tend to automatically group those into a category that covers all conventional production.
And FYI, organic, large or small, confined or allowed to roam anywhere, cows are cows. They don’t care about walking in feces. They are ANIMALS and it’s NATURE. Animals are not human, nor should they be treated as such.
Take a look:
http://www.kalonasupernatural.com
” Kalona SuperNaturalâ„¢ uses a process called VAT pasteurization, where a fixed volume of milk in a vat is slowly agitated at 145 degrees Fahrenheit–this process has a uniquely negligible effect on the pure flavor of the milk. Our end product is as close as pasteurized milk can get to farm fresh flavor. “
Wow – this answers I question I have been wondering for for months! I noticed in the grocery store that the organic half & half has a sell by date is six weeks out, whereas the regular half & half ‘s sell by date is only 10 days out. I tried searching online to figure out why, but I couldn’t find anything. Thank you!!
HI Sarah, can you ask your local healthfood store to order Natural by Nature nonhomogenized, low temp pasteurized whole milk in glass bottles? Usually, if you make a request, they will honor it particularly if you have several families that all ask together and the store knows there is a ready market for this product and it won’t sit on the shelves unsold.
This is so frustrating. I have been searching for a healthier milk for my family. I want the best for my 4 and 1 year old. Raw milk is illegal in Wyoming, so my choices are limited. There are some locals trying to get cow shares but the ranch is 1.5 hours away. In the winter especially it is not a good choice. Not sure what to do. I don’t like the feeling I’m poisoning us every time I pour a glass of milk.
There is a brand that our local vegetarian store stocks called KAlona supernatural. I have tried the milk (low-temp pasteurized non-homogenized) and they make an awesome yogurt!
Organic butter should be ok .. I still do not buy Organic Valley or Horizon butter though just for the sake of principle, though.
Does these same issues occur with organic butter? Thanks for any info you can give on that.