Dairy Contains Pus
Yes, it's "only" a few drops of pus per glass. And yes, it IS pasteurized pus. But still...
I don't know about you, but whenever I've had a cut or scrape that got infected, I have never had the urge to ingest any of the pus that may ooze out of it. And that is pus coming out of my own body. So, it is really hard for me to grasp why so many people don't mind ingesting pus that has oozed out a cow's body—specifically, out of her infected udder.
According to Vegan.com, "To increase milk yields, dairy farms rely on selective breeding. These breeding programs have succeeded to point that cows now produce four times more milk per lactation than they did in the 1950s....High milk yields increase the risk of mastitis—the [painful] swelling of the mammary glands usually due to infection....Milk from cows suffering mastitis inevitably contains elevated amounts of 'somatic cells'—the dairy industry’s euphemism for pus."
Dr. Michael Greger of NutritonFacts.org goes deeper into the details in his article entitled, How Much Pus Is There in Milk? Here are some excerpts from that article:
"Turning dairy cows into milk machines has led to epidemics of...mastitis (udder infections). Because of [this], the dairy industry continues to demand that American milk retain the highest allowable 'somatic cell' concentration in the world....Somatic cells are not synonymous with pus cells....Somatic just means “body.” Just as normal human breast milk has somatic cells—mostly non-inflammatory white blood cells and epithelial cells sloughed off from the mammary gland ducts—so does milk from healthy cows. The problem is that many of our cows are not healthy.
"According to the USDA, 1 in 6 dairy cows in the United States suffers from clinical mastitis....Somatic cell counts greater than a million per teaspoon are abnormal and 'almost always' caused by mastitis. When a cow is infected, greater than 90% of the somatic cells in her milk are neutrophils, the inflammatory immune cells that form pus. The average somatic cell count in U.S. milk per spoonful is 1,120,000....
"The U.S. dairy industry, however, insists that there is no food safety risk. If the udders of our factory-farmed dairy cows are inflamed and infected, industry folks say, it doesn’t matter, because we pasteurize—the pus gets cooked. But just as parents may not want to feed their children fecal matter in meat even if it’s irradiated fecal matter, they might not want to feed their children pasteurized pus."
You can read Dr. Greger's whole article by clicking on the link above and/or you can also watch a video he made about this subject right here:
Mahalo for reading. Aloha...
