The Town without a Toothache

Hereford, Texas became known as the “Town without a Toothache” in 1942 due to the pioneering work of dentist George Heard and author of Man Versus Toothache. Dr. Heard explains the town’s secret:

After a newcomer has lived in Hereford a few years, provided he had drunk lots of raw whole milk, he develops resistance to tooth decay. Even the tooth cavities which he brings with him when he comes to Hereford will be glazed over, if he has drunk raw milk.

For years I made inquiry of my patients as to their milk habits. Almost invariably I found that the possessor of a mouth full of sound teeth had been a consistent milk drinker from early childhood. A surprisingly large number liked either buttermilk, clabber or both. The significant fact is that the milk those patients drank came from cows that had grazed on native grass in Deaf Smith County pastures. In winter, as a rule, the cows had grazed on green wheat.^1a

My fellow dentists heard me out of respectful attention. One dentist Dr. Young remarked: “If all our patients adhered to Dr. Heard's ideas, we would be minus patients.”^2a

There are not words to explain the supreme value of raw grass-fed milk in all its forms. High quality raw milk will substantially contribute to your health and well-being, and to your children’s health and well-being. Milk is very high in the minerals calcium and phosphorus which we know we need for strong teeth and bones. Four cups (one quart) of milk provides about one gram of calcium and one gram of phosphorus per day. This is a significant portion of your daily requirements of the minerals you need for healthy teeth and bones. The fat portion of the milk, the cream, contains small amounts of valuable fat-soluble vitamins like A and D, as well as vitamin C. When pasturing cows eat rapidly growing grass in the time of rapid growth after it rains, there will be moderate amounts of bone hardening Activator X in the milk. It is worth noting that the soils of Deaf Smith County, Texas were extremely high in the mineral phosphorous.

Dr. Heard’s years of observations show that people drinking one quart (four cups) of excellent grass-fed milk per day will be immune to cavities. He also advised to take some of the milk in different forms such as: buttermilk, clabber, cottage cheese, kefir, and yogurt. Several ancient Ayurvedic texts, more than 2,000 years old, describe using milk, yes, raw grass-fed milk, as a cure for literally hundreds of ailments. The most particularly healing milk to the body was identified as buttermilk. Since all milk was cultured in those days (the refrigerator was not yet invented) this would of course be non-pasteurized cultured buttermilk. Milk’s healing power lies in its nutrient density and the ease with which our body can digest it.

Before the recent invention of refrigerators, milk was drunk either immediately after milking, known as sweet milk, or it naturally began to sour and was transformed into cheese or yogurt. Probiotics are vital to our health and good digestion. Many forms of soured milk are excellent for obtaining these detoxifying and vitamin-creating bacteria. Having healthy teeth is a result of more than just eating well; it is about absorbing food well. An essential aspect of nutrient absorption is having a diet rich in probiotic, live foods. In addition to a wide spectrum of probiotic bacteria, different forms of soured milk including yogurt contain highly absorbable forms of calcium. Soured milk is also low in milk sugar, known as lactose. Dr. Heard’s observation that people who are immune to cavities consume a significant amount of soured milk reveals a vital but little known way to create immunity to tooth decay.

Let’s review some of the life-affirming forms of raw milk.

Clabber is a strong soured yogurt-like milk product produced by allowing milk to sit out in a jar at room temperature.

Kefir (pronounced keh-FEER )is produced when milk sits in a jar with kefir grains. This is a symbiotic matrix colony of bacteria and yeast that resemble a cauliflower. Kefir grains can be obtained online, or from friends. At room temperature the kefir grains consume milk sugars and transform raw milk into a potent nutrient-rich cultured beverage. It can be drunk plain or in smoothies. Kefir seeds our intestines with milk-digesting bacteria and aids in cleansing and detoxification of the body. Regular consumption of kefir will increase your vitality and longevity by filling you up with more than 60 probiotic yeasts and bacteria, not to mention the highly digestible forms of minerals in the kefir milk.

Whey is the light yellowish liquid that remains when milk solids are removed from cultured milk. You may have seen it on the top (or at the bottom) of your yogurt container. After milk sours, the liquid portion of the milk can be separated from the solids, leaving you with curds and whey. Whey is an ancient health remedy because of how easy it is to absorb and digest along with its vast probiotic contents. Whey can be obtained from yogurt if you do not have access to raw milk.

Butter milk is the liquid that is left over from the process of churning butter. It has a refreshing sweet and sour taste, and will aid your overall health.

Suggested Dairy Intake

2-4 cups of raw dairy per day. Make sure to regularly include any or all of these probiotic milks: kefir, yogurt, clabber, whey and buttermilk.

Dentist George Heard’s message for the people:

Reader, would you like to have my formula for building sound teeth in one line? Well, then, here it is: Drink plenty of pure raw milk every day.^3a

These excellent results were enjoyed by Deaf Smith residents because the cows pastured on Texas’s native grasses grown on mineral-rich soil and grazed green wheat in the winter time.

Deceptive Labeling

Milk laws are backwards these days. Milk laws are controlled at the state level, so the law may be different in your state. Dairy products that are sold in larger chain stores labeled as kefir, buttermilk, cottage cheese, or cream cheese are in fact counterfeit. Because of the laws, real kefir, buttermilk, and cream cheese are banned from our stores. Instead, the products you see have a specific strain of culture added to the milk or cream to create these products. The natural, old-fashioned way to make these products is through natural fermentation without adding enzymes. Store products do not benefit from the natural culturing process and are dramatically inferior. Usually the taste is completely different from what the real food, not available in stores, actually tastes like. Equally, the health benefits from the store-bought products will not be the same, with the possible exception of some superior brands of yogurt.

The problem with store-bought dairy is not just in the culturing process, but also in the quality of the original milk used. Most milk labeled as organic comes from cows that are not raised naturally. Dairy cows, even from supposedly organic dairies, are often confined, and deprived of their natural diet of grasses. Instead, they are fed grains and other inexpensive fodder, including waste grains from distilleries which are not a part of the cow’s natural diet. The result of this large scale, profit-driven production is that the grain-fed milk lacks wholesome life-sustaining nutrients. In general people do not do well on grain-fed milk; it is too sweet and nutrient poor. Unless labeled otherwise, you can assume that store-bought milk is completely grain fed, even the organic varieties. Although the ideal of organic milk is that it comes from pasture-fed, free ranging cows, the reality is that very few dairies selling organic milk meet these standards.

Pasteurization Kills Milk

Many people have learned that milk makes them sick and as a result they avoid it. This is rarely due to the commonly blamed lactose intolerance; it is due to pasteurization and grain-fed milk intolerance. Probably pasteurization's worst offense is that it makes the major portion of the calcium contained in raw milk nonabsorbable. Pasteurization came into being to try to clean up dirty milk from “distillery dairies” in the mid 1800s.^4a It was never meant for clean milk from healthy animals on pasture.

In order to absorb calcium from milk, we need the enzyme phosphatase which is naturally present in raw milk. High temperature pasteurization heats milk typically to 165 degrees or more, and destroys phosphatase.^5a Significant portions of other vitamins are lost in the pasteurization process as well, in particular the highly important vitamin C. Typically the conventional type of milk that most people drink contains fecal matter, blood, and pus. Commercial milk must then be pasteurized to make it even drinkable. Pasteurization cooks this material. It makes sense that significant portions of the population are going to be allergic to this toxic soup.

Because pasteurization damages the probiotic content of raw milk, pathogenic organisms associated with disease can easily grow in pasteurized milk. When the probiotic organisms are destroyed, pasteurized milk lacks its own protective mechanism against harboring toxins that make people sick. In 2007, three people died from drinking pasteurized milk in Massachusetts. Many times when people get sick from milk, it is assumed that the milk was not pasteurized properly. Again, as with tooth decay, bacteria are always blamed. Toxic foods, sick animals, residues of antibiotics and growth hormones are never considered to be the cause of poisoning from pasteurized milk. Even worse, because milk was pasteurized doctors will automatically eliminate it as a likely source of causing a particular disease. As a result, sickness caused by pasteurized milk is vastly under reported while sickness claimed to be caused by raw milk is vastly over reported. With clean hygienic milking standards healthy raw milk from grass-fed animals will be safer than pasteurized milk.

Homogenized milk renders the milk unusable because it breaks apart the milk’s cellular structure. It does so by forcing milk at high pressure through extremely small holes which rupture the milk cells. Do not drink homogenized milk. Many commercial ice creams are made with homogenized milk to give it a creamier texture.

Commercial dairy animals are injected with rBGH (recombinant bovine growth hormone), and they are fed genetically modified grains, which are not a part of their natural diet. Avoid non-organic dairy foods. Consuming pasteurized commercial milk raises the level of nonabsorbable calcium in one’s diet.^6a

Avoid powdered milk because it has been heated and the protein structure destroyed. Low-fat milk is not satisfying to drink, but it can be used to make some good cheese.

Obtaining Raw Milk

Due to laws that assault our personal freedom, liberty and right to choice guaranteed by states and the US Constitution, raw milk can be difficult to obtain. In many states raw milk is harder to get than hard liquor, cigarettes, guns, prescription drugs that have known dangerous side effects, and even marijuana. The term for raw milk where it is illegal to be sold is moo-shine.

www.realmilk.com - One easy way to find raw milk in your vicinity.

www.westonaprice.org/chapters - Get involved with and contact your local Weston A. Price Foundation chapter leader. Many times they can direct you to lesser known cow-share programs and legal direct-from-the-farmer dairy products.

Whole Foods® has a very nice artisan cheese section with many raw milk cheeses. You can tell if a cheese is grass-fed typically by how pungent it is. Grain-fed cheese has a bland or “normal” milk flavor. Grass-fed cheese is flavorful, usually pungent, and sometimes contains hints of a grassy flavor. In cities or more affluent areas, you can often find cheesemongers who will have several varieties of grass-fed raw cheeses, many of which are imported from Europe.

Non-Dairy Options and Calcium Alternatives

Many people are told that they cannot digest dairy foods, or experience known negative effects from pasteurized milk. Yet for a majority of people these negative effects do not occur when they drink raw grass-fed milk. This is because raw grass-fed milk is a completely different product from pasteurized confinement dairy milk. If raw cow’s milk does not work for you, do not be afraid to try some raw milk cheese, or raw sheep, goat or mare’s milk. Many people who have problems with raw milk find that soured milk such as kefir works well with their system. Over a period of months, consuming kefir will restore most people’s ability to drink raw milk.

Calcium Content in Foods

The goal for calcium consumption for an adult is somewhere between 1 – 1 ½ grams of calcium per day. To obtain adequate dietary calcium without using dairy foods, dentist Melvin Page recommended eating: salmon, oysters, clams, shrimp, other sea-foods, broccoli, beet greens, nuts, beans, cauliflower, figs and olives.^8a Green vegetables that are very high in calcium come from the brassica family and include: broccoli, kale, bok choy, cabbage, mustard and turnip greens. Seaweed is another excellent source of calcium. Other sources of calcium could be taro root, and herbs. If you need to look up the calcium content, or nutrient contents of other foods, I like to usewww.nutritiondata.com

Calcium Supplements

Many, but not all calcium supplements contain forms of calcium that are not recognized by your body. Non-absorbable calcium raises blood calcium levels in an unhealthy way which can lead to excess calculus deposits. I do not have any recommendations for calcium supplements even though there may be some good ones on the market. I suggest getting non-dairy calcium from plenty of vegetables and sea food.

For a dairy-free diet, you will need to consume lots and lots of vegetables every day, 1-2 cups of bone broth, and a moderate amount of sea food to get adequate calcium. To obtain one gram of calcium from vegetables, for example, you will need to eat: 7 cups of chopped raw kale, which is about one bunch of kale (and cook that amount), or an entire bunch of collard greens, about 20 ounces cooked, per day. Canned fish with bones is high in calcium, but fresh fish will be much lower because the bones are not consumed.

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