New member with questions about milk storage

[Guest guest]

Hello all,

My name is Rae. I am an active wap member, and a frequent poster on the wap

healthy

baby group. I have three little girls, and our family is very commited to

traditional eating

and living a low-impact, sustainable lifestyle. I live in western NJ right now;

we just moved

from Northern California. I am very interested in raising heritage breed cows

and goats,

and have been researching the idea extensively.

Recently, an issue came up on the waphb list regarding the safety of milk

storage. I posted

information about the following article:

http://tinyurl.com/juzuc

The jist of it is that researchers found that after 24 hours of refrigerated

storage, levels of

good bacteria in the raw milk went down, and levels of bad bacteria went up.

I also shared the story of some digestive troubles my family had after a few

months of

regularly drinking raw milk that was 10-12 days old. Within 5 min of drinking a

glass of

milk we would all have horrible stomach aches that would last up to an hour. We

had to

take chapparel and garlic tincture and greatly increase our probiotics to

finally get a

handle on it. I finished my post by saying that I no longer drink " old " fresh

milk, letting it

go only 4 days and freezing the rest.

The response to my post was quite varied, from two list members who had very

similar

experiences, to another who called the information " nonsense " , " ridiculous, " and

from a

potentially unreputable source. She said that in her opinion, raw milk only gets

" more

nutritious " and that I was using scare tacts to keep people from drinking raw

milk. (I have

been drinking it for 2 years and plan on doing so for the rest of my life.)

Can someone back up the research in this article? Does raw milk in the fridge

really get

" more nutritious " or is it, as I feel, an unnatural enviroment for the bacteria

in the milk,

surpressing the good and allowing the bad to flourish?

Thanks so much for any insight.

Rae.