Answer - from
Cheeseslave's March 5 Q & A
The short answer is no. Raw milk (and raw dairy) contains lactase, which is the enzyme that helps us digest lactose. People who are lactose intolerant are lacking lactase so they can’t digest the lactose. This is why so many people who are lactose-intolerant have no problems drinking raw milk. (Excessive mucus production is a common sign of an allergic reaction).
Here’s the long answer:
According to nutritionist, David Getoff of the Price-Pottenger Foundation:
I’m a little bit tired of hearing the statement that dairy is mucus-producing
because if you take 1,000 people who, when they drink milk or eat dairy
products, it stuffs them up, and if you take another 1,000 people who, when
they’re exposed to either a cat or dog (or something else they’re allergic to)
that that stuffs them up, nobody is going to say that cats and dogs are
mucus-producing.
A lot of people are allergic to dairy, to cats, dogs or dust mites. The allergic reaction is called a histamine reaction in which case they get stuffed up, so a lot of people are allergic to milk! It’s not mucus producing any more than cats and dogs are mucus-producing. A lot of people are simply allergic to it.
He goes on to explain why so many people are allergic to milk (which is why they think it is mucus-producing) — it’s a long response but very well-written:
In general, there isn’t anything in milk that a large percentage of the
population is allergic to…until we start changing it and altering it, otherwise
known as homogenization and pasteurization.
Raw milk shouldn’t be called raw milk, it should only be called milk. Nobody ever calls the broccoli that they buy in the store raw broccoli, or cauliflower, raw cauliflower. They just say broccoli and cauliflower, and if you cook it, you say it’s cooked.
Well, we shouldn’t say raw milk, we should say milk if it’s raw and
cooked milk instead of pasteurized (because you are basically bringing up the
temperature that is starting to cook it). When you do that you destroy all the
enzymes that are in the milk, and you also denature some of the proteins.
Pasteurization alters the milk. A lot of people are intolerant of some
of the changes that have occurred in this food that otherwise wouldn’t have
bothered them. From my own impromptu research with a couple of thousand students and patients over many years, approximately 8 out of every 10 people who have a problem with milk or dairy, do not have the problem when it is consumed RAW.
Pasteurized dairy causes one of a variety of problems depending on the
person, and people do not realize that they do not have a problem with raw milk,
they only have a problem after it’s been pasteurized and homogenized. So milk is
not necessarily the issue. A lot of people know that they are lactose intolerant
which is the sugar that occurs in milk. Lactose intolerance is not a milk
allergy. It doesn’t mean milk is not good for them. It simply means that the
milk sugar, which is called lactose, can’t be properly assimilated by the body
because the lactase enzyme is either not there or is in an insufficient amount
and therefore causes a problem.
Lo and behold Mother Nature knows that the human body generally doesn’t do well with lactose. So she put plenty of lactase into the milk so it wouldn’t cause a problem, but we kill it all by pasteurizing the milk. Most people who are lactose intolerant can handle raw milk (as long as they don’t use it to cook with). When you cook with raw milk, you are raising the temperature even higher than the heat of pasteurization, so
obviously, it is no longer RAW.
Other people have a problem with denaturing of the protein in the milk, which, of course, does not occur until it is heated. This is another reason why people who otherwise could handle raw milk have a problem with pasteurized milk.
Raw milk, in general, is much higher in quality than pasteurized milk because the cows are much healthier. What the public also doesn’t realize is that the bacteria is still in the pasteurized milk, it’s just dead bacteria, and, of course, that’s not good for
us either. It’s toxic. Killing something (bacteria) doesn’t make it go away, it
just makes it dead.
