August 17, 2025 • 13 mins
Guest host Richard Syrett and author Forrest Maready discuss the forgotten medicinal history of unpasteurized milk.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Now here's a highlight from Coast to coast am on iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:04):
In the days before raw milk was being shunned and
it was seen as medicine. This idea that if you
had a specific ailment, you could be matched to a
specific cow that was grazing in a specific field. Tell
me more about that.
Speaker 3 (00:19):
Yeah, milk was definitely considered a medicine, not of last
resort either, oftentimes a first resort for people that were
having gastro intestinal illnesses. And doctors were aware of certain
types of grass providing certain types of health benefits. For instance,
(00:47):
milk from clover fed cows was often prescribed for respiratory illnesses,
and milk from cows that on timothy grass that would
be more for digestive complaints. And even beyond the types
of grass, the certain pastures on certain farms were thought
(01:10):
to have certain properties, maybe based on the mineral content
that was in the soil. And these are the sorts
of peculiarities that you get when you live in harmony
with not only your food, but would those who produce
your food in such a way that the farmers that
were stewarting the cattle that made the milk would were
(01:36):
aware of you and your health conditions, and they would
often recommend milk from certain cows and certain pastures because
they knew that those types of grass or those areas
of their farm tended to fare better for a particular condition.
And the modern listener will hear that and think that
(01:57):
just sounds insane, That sounds so strange, when you know
all of our medicines now come from a lab and
are made with machines and robots that we can't understand.
But this was the way of things back then, and
milk went on, just so you know, to become a
(02:17):
very very famous cure. They had something they called it
the milk cure. And even the world's wealthiest man, which
was Rocketfeller, he had gastrointestinal illness that was so bad
his weight I believe I'd gotten under one hundred pounds,
(02:40):
and he famously offered a million dollars, which is a
lot of money back then and still is, offered a
million dollars to anyone who could cure him because he
was at wits end, and of course had seen every
doctor on the planet trying to help him. So finally
one doctor came around and said, you need to go
on raw milk, and I'm sure that might have seemed
(03:05):
odd for someone of his data to have a doctor
insists that he used no medicine but essentially cut out
all food and go on only raw milk or nearly
a month. But that's what Rockefeller did. He trusted him
and he did it, and he got better, and in fact,
he threw it a party to celebrate where he toasted everyone,
(03:27):
not with wine, but with tumblers full of raw on
bachelarized milk because he wanted everyone to know that that's
what he thought had cured him.
Speaker 2 (03:34):
That's fascinating. Another famous individual responsible famous for my favorite
quote of all time, a great muckraker, journalist, author Upton Sinclair,
political activist who famously said or wrote, it is difficult
for a man to understand something when his salary depends
on his not understanding it. That's often attributed to Mark Twain,
(03:55):
but it was Upton Sinclair. He was also cured by
raw milk.
Speaker 3 (03:58):
Right.
Speaker 4 (03:59):
Yeah, Actually the same year he was having his own problems.
Speaker 3 (04:08):
He had chronic fatigue and he had digestive problems that
just wouldn't go away.
Speaker 4 (04:14):
And so he after.
Speaker 3 (04:16):
Trying a lot of other things that had failed, went
on a raw milk diet.
Speaker 4 (04:20):
Very strict, and.
Speaker 3 (04:24):
It was so successful he started.
Speaker 4 (04:26):
Writing about it.
Speaker 3 (04:26):
He wrote columns about it, testimonials about it, because he
wanted other people to know about it. And these were
two very famous men, you know, right at at the
same time, nineteen ten eleven twelve, Rockefeller and Upden Sinclair,
who found no release from any medicine at the time
(04:48):
and found that the only thing that could cure them
was raw milk. Now, interestingly, the milk cure had existed
for a long time, but this industrialization of cows and
berry farming practices came about, the milk cure started to
lose its popularity because people started noticing that it didn't work.
(05:15):
People were complaining that they weren't getting any better on
milk anymore. And what they didn't know at the time,
of course, was that pasturization was ruining the milk. It
was destroying all the nutritious properties of it. So the
milk cure sort of suffered at that time in popularity
(05:36):
because people didn't realize there was such a stark difference
between raw and unpasteurized milk. But there were in the
nineteen hundreds there was a very complex system of regulation
around raw and pasteurized milk, where they certified the dairies
and they went through checks and safety check and all
(06:00):
these things. There were I think some twenty five thousand
dairies that participated in this, So raw milk was still
extremely popular in the nineteen hundreds. It wasn't until after
World War Two that, with the invention of electricity and
refrigerators and air conditioning, these sorts of things, that people
(06:23):
most anyone at that point started to have pasteurized.
Speaker 4 (06:26):
Milk in their house.
Speaker 3 (06:28):
But before then, if you grew up in a rural area,
you likely still drank raw milk. It wasn't it wasn't
as prevalent as it is today. Nearly everyone grew up
on pasteurized milk.
Speaker 4 (06:40):
Today.
Speaker 2 (06:41):
You'll hear people sometimes doctors will say and it you know,
raw milk or pasteurized milk, may either or, but they'll say,
we are the only we humans are the only mammals
that drink the milk from other mammals.
Speaker 4 (06:57):
How do you respond to that? Is that true? As
far as I know?
Speaker 3 (07:04):
As far as I know, yeah, I think of it
as an honor. You know, in the western areas of
the world, we drink cow milk predominantly. If you go
to the Middle East and other areas nearby, they drink
goat milk. If you go to other areas, they might
(07:25):
drink reindeer milk or seal milk. I mean, there's all
sorts of animals that humans drink their milk from. But
I think of it, as you mentioned earlier, a symbiotic relationship,
just akin to domestication, and that we have animals that
(07:46):
bring us joy.
Speaker 4 (07:47):
Like dogs or cats or.
Speaker 3 (07:49):
You know, some people have pigs in their house. But
I think of it as an advance. I think of
it as a technological advance that allowed humans to asper
in a way they never had. I don't imagine humans
always drank milk from other animals, but I think they
realized the nutritious benefits of it early on. So to
(08:15):
suggest that there's something wrong with it because other mammals
don't do it, you know, I would say, well, other
mammals don't keep pets either, and I certainly think human
kind have benefited from that, you know, from domesticating dogs
and cats and so on. So I think that's a
very horrible argument to sort of make against the case
(08:38):
for for raw milk, but it's definitely got health benefits
that the closest thing we could come to is an
instant receiving, you know, the microbial adjustments their mother may
make in the breast milk that they're they're fed as
as youngins. So I I think there is something to
(09:01):
be gained from drinking other animals milk, particularly in more
natural environments where perhaps the cow is your own cow
and you know you are in contact with it and
are eating food from the same pastures and the sorts
of things. This is a natural state of affairs. Going
to the grocery store and buying milk that's essentially the
(09:25):
pulled milk of two thousand cows from a dairy farm
five hundred.
Speaker 4 (09:29):
Miles away is not ideal.
Speaker 3 (09:31):
This is not what is supposed to be a nutritious system.
Speaker 4 (09:36):
So yeah, I don't know.
Speaker 3 (09:38):
I think it's a beautiful relationship. I think it's an
amazing relationship that animals can provide for us in that way.
Speaker 2 (09:46):
I think that's a wonderful response to that argument you
mentioned mother's milk, breast milk, colostrum. We hear all about
all of the importance of colostrum, and that seems to
be a big thing these days.
Speaker 4 (10:00):
People.
Speaker 2 (10:00):
You know, you can get colostrum. That's is that in
raw milk? Colostrum? And is that important? Yeah?
Speaker 3 (10:09):
It actually just three or four weeks ago, we had
some a.
Speaker 4 (10:18):
Mother gave birth to the calf.
Speaker 3 (10:22):
We were on a farm and in the overnight the
mother had We checked on the mother about twelve thirty
and she was definitely getting close.
Speaker 4 (10:32):
She was holding her tail up.
Speaker 3 (10:33):
And by morning when we came back in there, the
calf was already already out. The mother had cleaned her up.
The calf looked like it was a perfect beautiful little animal.
And of course the first I don't know milking or
two is going to be colostrum. And colostrum is thought
(10:55):
of as the most highly nutritious version of milk that
exists on the planet. And I think you can sell
it if you wanted.
Speaker 4 (11:06):
To, or if it were legal.
Speaker 3 (11:07):
I don't even know the legal ramifications of it, but
you could sell it for a.
Speaker 4 (11:10):
Lot of money.
Speaker 3 (11:12):
The farm we were at, you know, grabbed the colostrum.
You know, the calf had drank all that it wanted.
It wasn't they weren't taking any from the calf. They
took it and did a special run and offered it
to me and my wife. And you don't know this
about me, Richard, probably, but I am an extremely picky eater.
(11:34):
I have probably this ur FID diagnosis. I was the
subject of a documentary on Health Channel Discovery Health Channel
many years.
Speaker 4 (11:42):
Ago because I'm such a real eater. Wow. Yeah, it's
a whole.
Speaker 3 (11:45):
Other topic we can talk about one time sometime.
Speaker 4 (11:48):
But my wife had it. She drank it.
Speaker 3 (11:51):
You know, this is warm, straight out of the utter.
This is liquid gold. If there ever was anything, this
was it. And she said it was difficult to drink.
It was not you know, it was not what you
think of as as milk.
Speaker 4 (12:06):
But so she just drank it.
Speaker 3 (12:10):
And this is someone who has not been able to
drink dairy at all for a lot of her life
and she's found a comfort and raw on pasteurized milk
and was really honored that she was offered this clostrum.
Speaker 4 (12:23):
You know, fresh literally you.
Speaker 3 (12:25):
Know, seconds out of the mother's utter. So yeah, it's
definitely I think athletes are asking for it. It's got
some sort of it's like this elixir of youth type thing,
but it's all natural and there's no you know it's
not made in a lab, it's made in an animal.
But you know you only get it once a cabin.
(12:45):
You know, the mother only makes it just in that
first sort of day or two for once the cow
the cap is born, so very expensive. I'm sure if
it were for sale. I don't know if people sell it,
but I think there's something to it that people find
very interesting.
Speaker 1 (13:03):
Listen to more Coast to Coast AM every weeknight at
one am Eastern and go to Coast to coastam dot
com for more
Now here's a highlight from Coast to coast am on iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:04):
In the days before raw milk was being shunned and
it was seen as medicine. This idea that if you
had a specific ailment, you could be matched to a
specific cow that was grazing in a specific field. Tell
me more about that.
Speaker 3 (00:19):
Yeah, milk was definitely considered a medicine, not of last
resort either, oftentimes a first resort for people that were
having gastro intestinal illnesses. And doctors were aware of certain
types of grass providing certain types of health benefits. For instance,
(00:47):
milk from clover fed cows was often prescribed for respiratory illnesses,
and milk from cows that on timothy grass that would
be more for digestive complaints. And even beyond the types
of grass, the certain pastures on certain farms were thought
(01:10):
to have certain properties, maybe based on the mineral content
that was in the soil. And these are the sorts
of peculiarities that you get when you live in harmony
with not only your food, but would those who produce
your food in such a way that the farmers that
were stewarting the cattle that made the milk would were
(01:36):
aware of you and your health conditions, and they would
often recommend milk from certain cows and certain pastures because
they knew that those types of grass or those areas
of their farm tended to fare better for a particular condition.
And the modern listener will hear that and think that
(01:57):
just sounds insane, That sounds so strange, when you know
all of our medicines now come from a lab and
are made with machines and robots that we can't understand.
But this was the way of things back then, and
milk went on, just so you know, to become a
(02:17):
very very famous cure. They had something they called it
the milk cure. And even the world's wealthiest man, which
was Rocketfeller, he had gastrointestinal illness that was so bad
his weight I believe I'd gotten under one hundred pounds,
(02:40):
and he famously offered a million dollars, which is a
lot of money back then and still is, offered a
million dollars to anyone who could cure him because he
was at wits end, and of course had seen every
doctor on the planet trying to help him. So finally
one doctor came around and said, you need to go
on raw milk, and I'm sure that might have seemed
(03:05):
odd for someone of his data to have a doctor
insists that he used no medicine but essentially cut out
all food and go on only raw milk or nearly
a month. But that's what Rockefeller did. He trusted him
and he did it, and he got better, and in fact,
he threw it a party to celebrate where he toasted everyone,
(03:27):
not with wine, but with tumblers full of raw on
bachelarized milk because he wanted everyone to know that that's
what he thought had cured him.
Speaker 2 (03:34):
That's fascinating. Another famous individual responsible famous for my favorite
quote of all time, a great muckraker, journalist, author Upton Sinclair,
political activist who famously said or wrote, it is difficult
for a man to understand something when his salary depends
on his not understanding it. That's often attributed to Mark Twain,
(03:55):
but it was Upton Sinclair. He was also cured by
raw milk.
Speaker 3 (03:58):
Right.
Speaker 4 (03:59):
Yeah, Actually the same year he was having his own problems.
Speaker 3 (04:08):
He had chronic fatigue and he had digestive problems that
just wouldn't go away.
Speaker 4 (04:14):
And so he after.
Speaker 3 (04:16):
Trying a lot of other things that had failed, went
on a raw milk diet.
Speaker 4 (04:20):
Very strict, and.
Speaker 3 (04:24):
It was so successful he started.
Speaker 4 (04:26):
Writing about it.
Speaker 3 (04:26):
He wrote columns about it, testimonials about it, because he
wanted other people to know about it. And these were
two very famous men, you know, right at at the
same time, nineteen ten eleven twelve, Rockefeller and Upden Sinclair,
who found no release from any medicine at the time
(04:48):
and found that the only thing that could cure them
was raw milk. Now, interestingly, the milk cure had existed
for a long time, but this industrialization of cows and
berry farming practices came about, the milk cure started to
lose its popularity because people started noticing that it didn't work.
(05:15):
People were complaining that they weren't getting any better on
milk anymore. And what they didn't know at the time,
of course, was that pasturization was ruining the milk. It
was destroying all the nutritious properties of it. So the
milk cure sort of suffered at that time in popularity
(05:36):
because people didn't realize there was such a stark difference
between raw and unpasteurized milk. But there were in the
nineteen hundreds there was a very complex system of regulation
around raw and pasteurized milk, where they certified the dairies
and they went through checks and safety check and all
(06:00):
these things. There were I think some twenty five thousand
dairies that participated in this, So raw milk was still
extremely popular in the nineteen hundreds. It wasn't until after
World War Two that, with the invention of electricity and
refrigerators and air conditioning, these sorts of things, that people
(06:23):
most anyone at that point started to have pasteurized.
Speaker 4 (06:26):
Milk in their house.
Speaker 3 (06:28):
But before then, if you grew up in a rural area,
you likely still drank raw milk. It wasn't it wasn't
as prevalent as it is today. Nearly everyone grew up
on pasteurized milk.
Speaker 4 (06:40):
Today.
Speaker 2 (06:41):
You'll hear people sometimes doctors will say and it you know,
raw milk or pasteurized milk, may either or, but they'll say,
we are the only we humans are the only mammals
that drink the milk from other mammals.
Speaker 4 (06:57):
How do you respond to that? Is that true? As
far as I know?
Speaker 3 (07:04):
As far as I know, yeah, I think of it
as an honor. You know, in the western areas of
the world, we drink cow milk predominantly. If you go
to the Middle East and other areas nearby, they drink
goat milk. If you go to other areas, they might
(07:25):
drink reindeer milk or seal milk. I mean, there's all
sorts of animals that humans drink their milk from. But
I think of it, as you mentioned earlier, a symbiotic relationship,
just akin to domestication, and that we have animals that
(07:46):
bring us joy.
Speaker 4 (07:47):
Like dogs or cats or.
Speaker 3 (07:49):
You know, some people have pigs in their house. But
I think of it as an advance. I think of
it as a technological advance that allowed humans to asper
in a way they never had. I don't imagine humans
always drank milk from other animals, but I think they
realized the nutritious benefits of it early on. So to
(08:15):
suggest that there's something wrong with it because other mammals
don't do it, you know, I would say, well, other
mammals don't keep pets either, and I certainly think human
kind have benefited from that, you know, from domesticating dogs
and cats and so on. So I think that's a
very horrible argument to sort of make against the case
(08:38):
for for raw milk, but it's definitely got health benefits
that the closest thing we could come to is an
instant receiving, you know, the microbial adjustments their mother may
make in the breast milk that they're they're fed as
as youngins. So I I think there is something to
(09:01):
be gained from drinking other animals milk, particularly in more
natural environments where perhaps the cow is your own cow
and you know you are in contact with it and
are eating food from the same pastures and the sorts
of things. This is a natural state of affairs. Going
to the grocery store and buying milk that's essentially the
(09:25):
pulled milk of two thousand cows from a dairy farm
five hundred.
Speaker 4 (09:29):
Miles away is not ideal.
Speaker 3 (09:31):
This is not what is supposed to be a nutritious system.
Speaker 4 (09:36):
So yeah, I don't know.
Speaker 3 (09:38):
I think it's a beautiful relationship. I think it's an
amazing relationship that animals can provide for us in that way.
Speaker 2 (09:46):
I think that's a wonderful response to that argument you
mentioned mother's milk, breast milk, colostrum. We hear all about
all of the importance of colostrum, and that seems to
be a big thing these days.
Speaker 4 (10:00):
People.
Speaker 2 (10:00):
You know, you can get colostrum. That's is that in
raw milk? Colostrum? And is that important? Yeah?
Speaker 3 (10:09):
It actually just three or four weeks ago, we had
some a.
Speaker 4 (10:18):
Mother gave birth to the calf.
Speaker 3 (10:22):
We were on a farm and in the overnight the
mother had We checked on the mother about twelve thirty
and she was definitely getting close.
Speaker 4 (10:32):
She was holding her tail up.
Speaker 3 (10:33):
And by morning when we came back in there, the
calf was already already out. The mother had cleaned her up.
The calf looked like it was a perfect beautiful little animal.
And of course the first I don't know milking or
two is going to be colostrum. And colostrum is thought
(10:55):
of as the most highly nutritious version of milk that
exists on the planet. And I think you can sell
it if you wanted.
Speaker 4 (11:06):
To, or if it were legal.
Speaker 3 (11:07):
I don't even know the legal ramifications of it, but
you could sell it for a.
Speaker 4 (11:10):
Lot of money.
Speaker 3 (11:12):
The farm we were at, you know, grabbed the colostrum.
You know, the calf had drank all that it wanted.
It wasn't they weren't taking any from the calf. They
took it and did a special run and offered it
to me and my wife. And you don't know this
about me, Richard, probably, but I am an extremely picky eater.
(11:34):
I have probably this ur FID diagnosis. I was the
subject of a documentary on Health Channel Discovery Health Channel
many years.
Speaker 4 (11:42):
Ago because I'm such a real eater. Wow. Yeah, it's
a whole.
Speaker 3 (11:45):
Other topic we can talk about one time sometime.
Speaker 4 (11:48):
But my wife had it. She drank it.
Speaker 3 (11:51):
You know, this is warm, straight out of the utter.
This is liquid gold. If there ever was anything, this
was it. And she said it was difficult to drink.
It was not you know, it was not what you
think of as as milk.
Speaker 4 (12:06):
But so she just drank it.
Speaker 3 (12:10):
And this is someone who has not been able to
drink dairy at all for a lot of her life
and she's found a comfort and raw on pasteurized milk
and was really honored that she was offered this clostrum.
Speaker 4 (12:23):
You know, fresh literally you.
Speaker 3 (12:25):
Know, seconds out of the mother's utter. So yeah, it's
definitely I think athletes are asking for it. It's got
some sort of it's like this elixir of youth type thing,
but it's all natural and there's no you know it's
not made in a lab, it's made in an animal.
But you know you only get it once a cabin.
(12:45):
You know, the mother only makes it just in that
first sort of day or two for once the cow
the cap is born, so very expensive. I'm sure if
it were for sale. I don't know if people sell it,
but I think there's something to it that people find
very interesting.
Speaker 1 (13:03):
Listen to more Coast to Coast AM every weeknight at
one am Eastern and go to Coast to coastam dot
com for more
The Best of Coast to Coast AM News
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George Noory
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