The natural foods movement goes much deeper than staple “hippie foods” like flax seed oil, nutritional yeast, quinoa, and almond butter. It’s about the foods we’ve raised for centuries, like free range chicken and organic milk. Did you know that milk consumption is only half today what it was in 1945 but production continues to rise? (Mostly due to increased cheese consumption). If you’re a milk drinker (or cheese eater for that matter), take a closer look at where your milk comes from and ask yourself: Does this brand of milk fit within a healthy whole foods diet? The underlying concern is whether or not the cow producing the milk is as healthy as she should be.   

The modern cow, bred to maximize milk production, produces six to eight gallons of milk each day compared to only a gallon and a half from a cow a hundred years ago. Milk production per cow, has increased 16% in the last decade. What explains this steady rise in output? Just over a decade ago, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved a milk-boosting hormone called bovine somatotropin (BST) also called bovine growth hormone (BGH). Currently 15% of all cows are regularly injected with BGH, which increases milk yield by nearly a gallon per day. BGH was met with great resistance and remains highly controversial today. One of the concerns is that BGH increases the prevalence of an infection in dairy cows’ udders called mastitis. Antibiotics are the standard treatment for mastitis, so an increased risk of mastitis means a higher reliance on antibiotics. While the FDA has established "safe levels" and “tolerance levels” of antibiotics in milk, the concerns shared by many are whether these added chemicals are, in fact, acceptable when natural and healthy alternatives are readily available.

The push for more milk, in addition to overall stress on the cow, requires the feed to contain more protein and energy. In the U.S., rendered protein and industry byproducts, including poultry waste, are regularly used to meet these energy needs. Fearing the spread of mad cow disease in the U.S., the FDA imposed a partial ban on feeding rendered cow proteins back to cattle in 1997. Exempted from this ban, however, is the use of rendered swine, chickens, horses, blood, milk, and gelatin as animal feed. The industry estimates that more than 47 billion pounds of animal by-products are transformed into feed as well as industrial materials.

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