For many years, I’ve been curious about the phenomenon of humans drinking the milk of other animals like cows, goats, buffalo, yaks, etc. If you divorce yourself from your gastronomical conditioning for a second, we can objectively see that drinking [cow’s] milk, which is meant for nursing calves does not really make a lot of sense; this milk is loaded with cow hormones, and is not really meant for human consumption. Human breast milk, on the other hand, is meant for humans. Yet the general consensus is that drinking human breast milk would be “gross.” I suppose that although this seems a bit unnatural, this perception is not odd considering that it has been our conditioning for thousands of years.
Nevertheless, the absense of human breast milk on the market has been bothering me for quite some time. When I have researched the possibility of our society bottling and selling human breast milk, and making human breast milk cheese, etc., I see that certain health authorities step in and argue about how this is an unsanitary and unsafe practice. Is this opinion based in anything besides cultural conditioning? Or does drinking human breast milk pose some sort of threat that other milks don’t?
Nonsense. No food other than mother’s milk is meant for human consumption. No plant, no fruit or vegetable, no meat, no byproduct. Either the food contains nutrients that humans can use or it doesn’t. Cow’s milk is a highly concentrated source of a great many nutrients. To say that drinking it does not make sense is like saying eating an apple doesn’t make sense because it is designed to produce more apple trees and not to feed humans.
All milk from all animals varies via what is in the animal’s diet. The diet of cows can be fairly well known and controlled. The diet of humans is totally unpredictable and humans rarely follow strict regimens and regulations. Any of a huge number of medications can be transferred into the milk, and so can any potential allergen. Outside environmental products can also find their way into the milk.
While these obstacles are not insuperable in an individual case, they make proper regulation of milk on a mass basis nearly impossible.
Many of the special benefits of human breast milk would be destroyed by pasteurization, I think, which would make it far less useful for anyone to buy.
Then there is the issue of quantity, of course.
I believe you can buy animal colostrum, which is the specially nutritious pre-milk that newborn animals get for a while.
Ok, point taken (with gut-level reservations), but still there’s no reason to believe that the milk that has evolved to specially fit into the development cycle of another animal should be a better source of nutrition to humans than the milk that has evolved to specially fit the development of humans, right? Maybe as good, but better? Seems unlikely to me.
What types of special benefits would these be? Does pasteurizing cow’s milk change its nutritional value to humans?
Your OP said that people thought drinking mother’s milk was “gross,” but don’t think that way about cow’s milk. The only people who think that are adults. There is no other comparison to be made. Even babies don’t drink cow’s milk: they drink cow’s milk-based formulas. So while it’s true that humans are designed to drink mother’s milk that didn’t seem to be part of the question you were actually asking.
So: cow’s milk is not better for humans than mother’s milk. But that comes with a couple of caveats. First, mother’s milk is designed to meet all the needs of young babies, not for growing children or adults. The body is designed to go off of mother’s milk and start eating an array of different foods in order to get that proverbial balanced diet. Cow’s milk works as a piece of that diet. Mother’s milk would work as an equivalent piece, but no more. But there is no possible way to get mass amounts of mother’s milk onto the market. Cow’s milk is perfectly healthy for all people who can digest it and are not allergic to it, and probably has more nutrients per unit volume than most other foods. It is cheaply and universally available in huge quantities and in multitudes of forms. As such, it is about as good as a widely available food can be.
There raw-milk enthusiasts who talk about pasteurization depleting milk of nutrients. I don’t feel they have a strong case, and again, history has shown that trying to produce raw milk on the mass scale needed for the modern world leads to worse problems with contamination than any slight loss of nutrients from milk, which is only a piece of an overall balanced diet.
Cows and goats are also far less likely to use recreational drugs and lie about it, so their milk doesn’t require testing for it. It’s likely that human milk would need constant testing of that sort, just as blood products do. (or at least it seems like measures are taken to make sure blood is really “safe.” It’s definitely screened for disease)
Raw cow’s milk is better, but it is really impractical using modern dairying techniques and distribution. Raw milk has to be handled differently, you wouldn’t want to mix milk from different cows together into a giant holding tank, you’d have to monitor cows more closely, etc. Raw milk is perfectly acceptable but only if you’re willing to pay 2-3 times more for it.
Anyway, the biggest problem with human milk is economics. Of course human milk isn’t inherently any more “gross” than cow’s milk, but the supply of it is much smaller, almost all human milk produced is consumed directly. Human females haven’t been bred for thousands of years to produce extra milk, human females consume human food and not cheap grass, grain and silage, you have enormous problems collecting the human milk that don’t apply to cows, sheep or goats who can be kept in pens on dairy farms.
There is a market for human breast milk for babies who for various reasons aren’t able to breastfeed from their birth mothers. However, this human milk is staggeringly expensive compared to cow’s milk, on the order of hundreds of times more expensive. I think if you wanted to you could get a supply of human milk, although you might need some evidence of medical neccesity. I’d try to google up some sites for you on purchasing human milk and if you’d have to show some need for it, but I’m at work right now and I’m afraid of what a google search would bring up.
Unpasteurized breastmilk contains various antibodies to diseases the mother in question has been exposed to. She can pass the increased immunity on to the baby. Further, the baby’s own mother would be likely to have particular antibodies for the diseases the baby is most likely to be exposed to. Nursing mothers are warned not to heat milk in a microwave, partly because it can easily be overheated, which can break down the antibodies and possibly some other beneficial nutrients. I would assume pasteurization would be at least as damaging.
I’m not up on the nutritional benefits, if any, of raw over pasteurized cow’s milk.
Apples are successful to the reproduction of apple trees because they are food to not only humans, but any other animal that will eat the fruit and spread the seeds. Fruit is not necessary to create seeds, but is is advantageous in spreading them.
Actually, the modern 'cow" is quite a differnt creature- in fact some argue a different sub-species even perhaps a different species- than the original wild animal. Thus, human genetic manipulation by selective breeding has indeed made an animal with milk that “is meant for” human consumption.