NPR Raw Milk Story Soft on Government Corruption

Raw Milk is a Healthy Food Being Suppressed by U.S. Government Policy

Readers, please register on the NPR website, and comment on the article mentioned in this story. It is critical that we urge the media to take a deeper look at this important health issue.

Nutrition Activist says Media Needs to Probe Deeper

My Response to NPR on Raw Milk

by Alyce Ortuzar

Bonny Wolf’s NPR raw milk piece, Spilled or Not, Cries Remain in Raw Milk Debate is one of NPR’s most balanced stories about raw milk, but it still lacked documented problems at and failures of these same Federal agencies so eager to ban one more beneficial food. The dismal track records of these Federal agencies reinforce the evidence the proponents of raw milk and of a host of other healthy, minimally processed real foods (from humanely raised animals out in pasture and sunlight) use to retain their right to do the research and bypass what can fairly be described as corrupt government agencies.

For example, Wolf fails to detail the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) recall of so many FDA-approved drugs found to cause profound harm. Drugs that should not have been approved for health problems too often caused by medicine itself and by harmful products and processes that should not have been permitted into our air, soil, water, or our food and bodies. That so many Americans are so sick is a direct reflection of the failures and corruption of the Federal agencies charged with making these life-and-health decisions for us.

Federal Track Record on Healthy Food is Abysmal

These same agencies that tell us raw milk is dangerous told us that transfats such as margarine are safe and nutritious; that pink slime is safe and nutritious; and contaminated food from industrial feedlots and processed chemicals paraded as food are “the safest food in the world.” The unsanitary and inhumane conditions in industrial feedlots are well- documented, and the American Public Health Association has been saying for years that they should be shut down, because of the devastating harm to the environment and to human health.

What else might our children be eating in the school lunches approved by these corrupt government agencies? What are the possibilities? Beef and dairy products with neurotoxic pesticides and endocrine-disrupting artificial chemicals such as Bovine Growth Hormone in conventional dairy products? Irradiated beef or chicken from sick animals raised in crowded, unsanitary, and inhumane confined animal feeding operations?

Fake Food Gets Greenlight, While Real Food is Persecuted

Foods loaded with chemicals that really should not qualify as food? All approved by the FDA, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), and U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA). According to “Maryjane’s Ideabook, Cookbook, and Lifebook for the Farmgirl in All of Us” (www.maryjanesfarm.org), “The typical artificial strawberry flavor found in a fast-food milk shake can contain amyl acetate, amyl butyrate, amyl valerate, anethol, anisyl formate, benzyl acetate, benzyl isobutyrate, dipropyl ketone, ethyl butyrate, methyl napthyl ketone, phenethyl alcohol, rum ether, and solvent.”

These same government agencies still pat conventional farmers on the back for using atrazine and roundup and characterize these toxic chemicals as “textbook farming practices.” Atrazine is scientifically linked to deformed frogs and fish and is getting into our water sources (including the Chesapeake Bay); roundup is banned in at least five industrialized countries, including Canada.

The chemical approved by the EPA for BP to dump into the Gulf Coast after the BP oil spill—and silently approved by the misnamed Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the FDA, and the USDA—is banned in the United Kingdom and elsewhere and is killing the Gulf and all that is now try to live in it. Dead porpoises, turtles, and a host of other wonderful critters from the sea wash up daily onto the beaches throughout the Gulf of Mexico. Two documentaries shown in the recently ended DC Environmental FilmFest (“Beyond Pollution” and “The Big Fix”) document these preventable and profound harms and the cover-up by these same Federal agencies.

Government is Slow to Change Yet Quick to Judge

And statistics refute claims by the CDC that injecting mercury in any form is safe and is not linked to autism. Autism rates were 1 in 500,000 in the 1950s. The epidemic today correlates to the changes in vaccines and in the components of the vaccines, including using mercury as a “cheap” preservative. Cheap only for the drug industry, not for the families and school districts that bear the burden of caring and providing medical care for these destroyed children. No one should forget the lessons from the Mad Hatter in “Alice in Wonderland,” which is a social commentary disguised as a fairy tale.

Insane hatters were all over London after being poisoned by the mercury commonly used to soften the felt to make hats.

Another historical lesson and disgrace is the time it took the U.S. Congress to ban matches manufactured with white phosphorus, long after white phosphorus was scientifically linked to lockjaw. Four years after European countries banned these matches, Congress finally instituted a similar ban.

This is the sickest generation in the history of this country as a result of government-approved unsafe products and processes, including toxic chemicals paraded as food. Americans suffer from profound environmental assaults, over-medication and dangerous diagnostic tests falsely disguised as prevention, and malnourishment that foods such as certified raw milk and raw milk products can mitigate and even prevent.

Alyce Ortuzar is a Medical and Social Science Researcher and Writer for the Well Mind Association of Greater Washington (WMAGW), and a member of the Weston A. Price Foundation. The Well Mind Association was founded in 1967 as a holistic medicine information clearinghouse focusing on environmental and nutritional influences on mental and physical well-being.

WMAGW maintains a national database of holistic health practitioners (and some international practitioners), and provides free referral service to the public. The Association’s mission is enable people to access the safest and most effective treatments, practitioners, and research and outcome data. Contact WMAGW at P.O. Box 312, Ashton, MD 20861 (301.774.6617).

What You Can Do

You’ve read Alyce’s thoughts, now go to the NPR article, and post your response: Spilled or Not, Cries Remain in Raw Milk Debate. You will need to register on their site to leave a comment, but it is so important to do so!  Please ask that NPR consider the evidence for the health and environmental benefits of raw milk, amassed by the International Raw Milk Symposium, and the Weston A. Price Foundation. Please post links to articles of your choosing from realmilk.com or westonaprice.org, or farmtoconsumerfoundation.org. And, thank you for your nutrition activism! WE CAN MAKE A DIFFERENCE!