Most people are probably familiar with lactose intolerance. It means that ice cream, butter, yogurt, cheese and most any other dairy product have suddenly become the enemy and you now have to find an alternative form of milk to put on your morning cereal or in your morning cup of joe. Personally, I think if I were told I could no longer have dairy, I would probably burst into tears every time I was in the dairy section of the grocery store. Part of this is probably from being a dairy farmer, but my goodness, do I love me some dairy!
Don't despair yet though. One of the cool things that we've learned over the years of being a raw milk dairy is that raw milk can still be consumed by many folks that are diagnosed with lactose intolerance. Yup. Who knew?! When milk is pasteurized, it burns everything beneficial out of the milk.
If you think about anti-bacterial hand sanitizer for a second, it kills all bacteria. Good or bad. it's all gone. They do warn you of this on the labels "Kills 99.9% of bacteria." Great! But you kinda want some bacteria or else your immune system gets out of whack and you get sick more often because you aren't exposed to enough germs for your body to build up antibodies to protect you.
I promise I'm coming back to milk. Pasteurization is the anti-bacterial of the dairy world. It was originally invented because refrigeration didn't exist and people got sick. (That's the extremely simplified version) However, they can't really control what happens to all of the good stuff that's in milk when it's heated to kill the bad sickness causing bacteria. But those good bacteria and wonderful enzymes are what help you to digest the milk. And raw milk still contains those! Often times folks aren't lactose intolerant, their stomachs simply can't digest milk that has the very things that help the body digest that milk taken out of it.
Time after time, we've gotten calls, emails, texts and facebook posts from customers thanking us profusely for providing them with milk. They are so excited to be able to drink milk again! (Can you imagine not being able to drink milk with your cookies??)
There is more than one allergy that gets the blanket diagnosis of lactose intolerance so obviously not all folks that get this diagnosis will be able to have dairy, raw or not. But it's DEFINITELY worth a try! Life is too short to live without dairy. And besides, what else will you drink with delicious homemade cookies?