When Moses led his people out of slavery in Egypt, he had his eyes set on the land of milk and honey. Today, there are voices out there saying that milk isn't that great. Milk has been hailed as the cornerstone of healthy nutrition but has also been damned as a toxin filled liquid unfit for human consumption.
What can anyone have against milk? Well, the proteins in milk can be highly allergenic so it is a good idea to keep them away from children in the first year of life. Cows' milk is also very low in iron so that iron deficiency anemia can develop in children who are fed milk during their first 14 or so months instead of mother's milk or formula. Some intriguing research has also suggested that milk may trigger juvenile diabetes in children who are genetically predisposed to the condition. And then, milk is high in fat, a full 50% of the calories in whole milk come from fat. Skim milk, by contrast has no fat. Furthermore the fat in milk is mostly "saturated," that is, the kind most implicated in heart disease.
On the other hand, milk is an excellent source of vitamins, particularly vitamin D. It is also a great source of calcium. Oh, sure you can also get calcium from kale or broccoli. But how many people are going to eat a half a dozen cups of these vegetables on a daily basis? So is milk good or bad? There is no simple answer. It depends on how much, for whom and what type.
Raw milk, that is milk which has not been pasteurized, can kill. It may have a "health food" image to some who do not realize that it may be contaminated with salmonella, campylobacter or listeria bacteria. There actually is no nutritional difference between raw milk and pasteurized milk. Some people have nevertheless paid for perceived beneficial "natural" properties of raw milk with chronic diarrhea, or in some cases with their lives.
One of these unfortunate victims was Abraham Lincoln's mother, Nancy Hanks Lincoln who died of milk sickness in 1818, when Abraham was only nine years old. This sickness, which actually wiped out many pioneers who of course were also searching for their version of the land of milk and honey, had nothing to do with bacteria. It had everything to do with the cows' diet. When the animals grazed on a plant called snakeroot, people who drank their milk got sick and often died. A naturally occurring substance in the milk, called tremetone is converted by human body enzymes into a highly toxic substance. When chemists linked milk sickness to snakeroot early in this century, farmers were counseled to rid their fields of the plant and thus milk sickness was eliminated. So much for natural goodness.