Should You Avoid Homogenised Milk?

With cow’s milk in its natural form, the cream rises to the top.

Homogenisation is a process by which milk is forced through tiny holes under high pressure. This reduces the size of the fat globules, causing the cream to be dispersed throughout the milk, so it no longer rises to the top.

People who don’t know about the negative health consequences of homogenisation, prefer milk that’s homogenised. You don’t have to shake the bottle, and there are no fat droplets floating around in your tea.

Homogenisation benefits the dairy industry too, because it makes all milk, regardless of its quality, look the same. You can partly judge the quality of milk by looking at the amount of cream floating on top, and also by the colour of the milk – the more of a yellow colour it has, the more nutritious the milk. Homogenisation takes away the cream at the top and whitens the milk.

Since homogenised milk was presented to the public, at around the early 1930's, it has become more and more popular, to the point where today, you have to really look hard to find any unhomogenised milk at the shops.

But the artificial alteration of food is rarely a good thing, and there isn’t enough research available on the effects of homogenised milk on the long-term health of consumers, for us to know if it is safe.

Let me describe to you a potential problem of homogenization.

Milk fats are covered by a milk fat globule membrane (MFGM), which plays a very important and complex role on our health that we aren’t even close to fully understanding. What we do know, is that the MFGM helps to lower cholesterol levels by modifying gene expression in the liver. A study comparing MFGM deficient butter oil with unhomogenised whipping cream (with intact MFGM), found that the butter oil increased LDL cholesterol levels (the bad form of cholesterol), while the cream did not.

Homogenisation breaks up the milk fat globules and the MFGM. The new smaller fat globules have a ten-fold higher surface area, and there isn’t enough original MFGM to cover the entire surface of the smaller fat globules, so a new MFGM is formed, containing both the old MFGM, and added proteins – mostly casein and whey (Cano-Ruiz, 1997).

When you adulterate the MFGM like this, there’s a chance it will diminish its protective effect against heart disease. But we don’t know, because the studies have simply not been done.

Some researchers believe that the smaller fat globules with protein-filled MFGM in homogenised milk can potentially increase the milk's ability to cause allergic reactions. In an experimental study on sensitized mice, only homogenized milk induced an allergic reaction in the intestinal wall of the animals.

If you develop an allergy to milk, then drinking milk will cause an inflammatory response in your body.

Like pasteurisation, homogenisation inactivates beneficial enzymes and healthy probiotic bacteria in milk (Picart, 2006), both of which only in their active state are known to impart multiple health benefits, such as improved gut health, reduced whole-body inflammation, improved immune response, reduced lactose intolerance, reduced allergy development, reduced blood pressure, and more.

Homogenisation also lowers heat stability of milk, increases its sensitivity to light-triggered oxidation, and reduces the natural flavour of milk.

Reducing the flavour of milk is yet another way to standardise milk, so it not only looks the same all year round and all over the country, but it tastes the same as well.

Most people want their milk to taste the same all year round and to taste the same regardless of where they buy it from. But that’s not how milk is supposed to be enjoyed. Left in its natural state, milk tastes different from one breed of cow to another. In the same cow it tastes different depending on the season and on the cow’s changing diet.

The same applies to any food. Only artificial food tastes the same regardless of where or when you eat it. Natural food changes in taste and texture depending on where and when in the year you eat it.

It's lack of knowledge of the danger of artificial food that makes most people want this artificial consistency in their food. This is one reason why McDonald's is so successful. Heck, even I love this about McDonald's – no matter where in the world or when you buy McDonald's, it always tastes and feels the same. But that's just a testament to how dangerously artificial the food from McDonald's is.

Now that I have discovered how much better natural food is for my health, I enjoy and look forward to all the naturally varying flavours and textures in my milk and in all the natural food I eat.

The bottom line with homogenisation is that there are some studies that show it may be harmful to health, but we just don't know enough to be certain, and for as long as we haven't done the studies to verify that it is safe, then it's best to avoid it.

I find it bizarre how doctors always say, “there's no evidence that homogenisation of milk is harmful”. But there's also no evidence that it is safe, the studies just haven't been done. Humans have thrived on unhomogenised milk for 10,000 years, we haven't come remotely close to fully understanding the human body and how it's affected by food, so when we come along and artificially alter a natural food, the burden of proof lies on the proponents of the altered food – they should show us the evidence that homogenised milk is safe, not the other way round.

From the wikipedia page on burden of proof:

“In a legal dispute, one party is initially presumed to be correct and gets the benefit of the doubt, while the other side bears the burden of proof.”

In the case of milk, which party should be initially presumed to be correct – proponents of unhomogenised milk with a 10,000 year track record of success, or proponents of homogenised milk, which has barely been around for 100 years, during which time rates of heart disease, obesity, cancer, type II diabetes, allergies, and inflammatory disease have exploded?

And then there's the other reason to avoid homogenised milk. Homogenisation severely reduces the shelf-life of milk, and to prevent this it has to be pasteurised first:

Click here to learn why you should avoid pasteurised milk and drink raw milk instead.