Authored by Sally Fallon Morell via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

In the summer of 1983, an outbreak of listeriosis occurred in Massachusetts. Forty-nine people became sick and 14 of those—29 percent—died. Listeria is the bad actor among pathogens. Most pathogens make people sick but don’t kill them—listeria, on the other hand, often kills, especially the very young, the elderly, and the immune-compromised.

(Andrey Burstein/Shutterstock)

Listeria most commonly occurs in deli meats, seafood, raw vegetables, soft cheeses, and poultry. But the 1983 outbreak was different. It came from pasteurized milk. Health officials isolated listeria from the raw milk that came into the pasteurizing plant. “At the plant where the milk was processed, inspections revealed no evidence of improper pasteurization.” The officials were perplexed but noted that “L monocytogenes is quite resistant to heat. … The ability of L monocytogenes to exist as an intracellular parasite may have increased likelihood that some organisms survived pasteurization …”

They came to an interesting conclusion, “These results … raise questions about the ability of pasteurization to eradicate a large inoculum of L. monocytogenes from contaminated raw milk.”

A year later, a huge outbreak of Salmonella typhimurium occurred in Illinois, with a second wave in 1985. The pathogen was found resistant to most common forms of antibiotics. “Two surveys to determine the number of persons who were actually affected yielded estimates of 168,791 and 197,581 persons, making this the largest outbreak of salmonellosis ever identified in the United States.” At least five people died. The outbreak affected people in six states—Illinois, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Michigan, Iowa, and Indiana. Health officials concluded that the milk was contaminated after pasteurization by salmonella, which persisted in the plant despite efforts to eradicate it.

The Arrival of Factory Farming

Something else was going on during those years—dairy farms were getting bigger. Consolidation began in the 1930swith pigs and in the 1950s with chickens. In the 1970s, agriculture secretary Earl Butz told farmers to “get big or get out,” and by the mid-1980s, this trend was in full force. “Get big or get out,” also meant, “Get inside.” The U.S. Department of Agriculture was advising dairy farmers to “become more efficient” by keeping their cows in barns and feeding them grain.

Large amounts of grain are not a natural diet for cows, nor is it natural for cows to live in close quarters with no way of distancing themselves from their fresh manure. To keep the cows alive in such conditions of filth, antibiotics became necessary. It was a recipe for antibiotic resistance and stronger, mutated pathogens.

With the outbreaks of the mid-1980s, the dairy industry realized that under these new conditions, pasteurization was not working. Unfortunately, their solution to the problem was not to go cleaner, but to go hotter. Enter UHT—ultra-high temperature processing.

Old-fashioned, “low-temperature” pasteurization takes milk to 150 F—hot enough to destroy most of the enzymes in milk, many of which protect against pathogens, while others attach to vitamins and minerals in order to make them easy to absorb. High-temperature pasteurization (also called flash pasteurization) takes milk to 161 F, hot enough to kill all the enzymes and denature some of the proteins.

Ultrapasteurization takes milk to 284 F—hotter, much hotter, than the boiling point—by rushing this most fragile, delicate food past superheated stainless steel plates. The process kills bacterial endospores—tough, dormant structures produced by many pathogens, which allows them to “hibernate” and come back to life when conditions are sufficiently favorable (such as the small intestine). The process also kills everything else, including nutrients, enzymes, and proteins.

UHT milk comes packaged in aseptic, sterile containers—it needs no refrigeration and has a shelf life of six to nine months—a boon to retailers. The process was developed in Europe—I remember seeing stacks of these aseptic containers in supermarkets in France when I lived there in the early 1980s and wondering why anyone would buy milk that didn’t spoil.

In the early 1990s, the Italian company Parmalat introduced its UHT milk to the United States. American consumers resisted purchasing unrefrigerated milk, so the industry packaged it in traditional containers and sold it from the refrigerator aisle.

According to Parmalat’s website, “UHT milk is the same as fresh milk but simply uses a different pasteurization process. It contains a lot of nutrients that are good for your body, just like fresh milk.” It adds, “With our special pasteurization process, our milk doesn’t need to be stored in the fridge until opened. This means you can store as many bottles as you want and never run out of milk.”

A 2019 study from China titled “Processing milk causes the formation of protein oxidation products which impair spatial learning and memory in rats,” indicates that UHT milk is not like fresh milk at all. The researchers subjected milk to four processing techniques: boiling, microwave heating, spray drying, and freeze-drying. (Boiling takes milk to 212 F—ultra-pasteurization is much hotter.)

All four techniques (even freeze-drying) caused “various degrees of redox state imbalance and oxidative damage in plasma, liver, and brain tissues.” Feeding damaged milk proteins to rats resulted in learning and memory impairment—why would any parent want to give UHT milk to their kids?

The researchers concluded that “… humans should control milk protein oxidation and improve the processing methods applied to food.”

Other researchers have noted that “The major protein modifications that occur during UHT treatment are denaturation and aggregation of the protein, and chemical modifications of its amino acids.” Damaged milk proteins are likely to cause allergies. Today, milk allergy is the number one allergy and according to statistics provided by the Asthma and Allergy Network, we can estimate that modern milk causes approximately twenty deaths from anaphylactic shock per year!

Most milk sold today in supermarkets is UHT milk—even organic milk is UHT. But it is not used in fermented products—check the labels for sour cream or cheese. These products are made from pasteurized—not UHT milk—most likely because UHT milk is so dead that it will not ferment. That’s another way of saying that UHT milk is indigestible, as fermentation is a form of digestion.

A recent listeria outbreak causing two deaths and more than twenty hospitalizations initiated a Feb. 5 recall of pasteurized cheese, yogurt, and sour cream—an indication that pasteurization doesn’t ensure safety in fermented dairy foods.

UHT milk has served as a temporary fix for the dairy industry, but it will ultimately be its undoing. Milk consumption in the United States has declined by half since 1970, and the dairy industry has been unable to reverse the trend. It blames competition from sodas and plant-based “milk,” but won’t admit that UHT processing makes milk unpalatable, allergenic, and indigestible.

How to Find Good Old-Fashioned, Unprocessed Milk

The public is wising up to the problems of consuming ultra-processed food, and UHT milk is by any definition an ultra-processed food. This may be why sales of raw milk are booming. The website realmilk.com receives more than 320,000 visits per month, mostly to the Raw Milk Finder page. The site lists 3000 sources of raw milk in the United States and there are many more dairies that choose not to be listed—yet raw milk farmers are reporting that they can’t produce enough to meet the demand. Raw Farm in California provides raw milk products from a herd of 1,200 cows, and they sell it all.

My prediction: Within 20 years UHT milk will be a thing of the past, recognized as a misuse of technology, a rust belt solution that ruins the goodness of Nature’s perfect food. We have many elegant technologies today—stainless steel, on-site testing, a national cold chain, and moveable electric fencing that makes grazing feasible—which allow us to get clean raw milk safely to every person in America. “Get bigger, go hotter” is not the future. The future is small and medium grass-based farms selling raw milk directly to grateful customers.

Authored by Amy Denney via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

A naturally derived antibiotic that helps preserve food by killing any threatening pathogens has kept our food safe for decades.

(Drazen Zigic/Shutterstock)

The World Health Organization and even watchdog groups have classified this additive, called nisin, as safe. Nisin is a lantibiotic—a peptide-derived antimicrobial agent synthesized from its natural form—first discovered in 1928 and commonly used in products such as cheese, beer, processed meats, and dipping sauces.

Nisin is made when bovine milk or whey is fermented by strains of Lactococcus lactis that are concentrated and processed into small particles. In addition to being used as a food preservative, nisin can be found in beauty products, pharmaceuticals, and pet products.

However new research raises concern about whether nisin could be harmful to the human gut microbiome—the community of bacteria, viruses, fungi, and other microorganisms that work symbiotically to help with body functions like digestion and immune response.

Potency of Lantibiotics

A study published in ACS Chemical Biology examined human gut bacteria genomes to identify those that resemble nisin. Researchers then produced six lantibiotics, including four new ones, and tested them on microbes. While the researchers found that these new candidates kill pathogenic bacteria, they also discovered they have varying effects on commensal (favorable) microbes, too.

“Even though it might be very effective in preventing food contamination, it might also have a greater impact on our human gut microbes,” lead author Zhenrun “Jerry” Zhang, a postdoctoral scholar and director of the Duchossois Family Institute at the University of Chicago, said in a news release.

“This study is one of the first to show that gut commensals are susceptible to lantibiotics, and are sometimes more sensitive than pathogens. With the levels of lantibiotics currently present in food, it’s very probable that they might impact our gut health as well,” he said.

Each person has a unique microbiome and the balance of commensal microbes is what helps the body protect itself from pathogens, create important metabolites, and more. Food additives that kill commensals could be destroying the very community that is protecting our bodies from the pathogens in food, and leaving us worse off than if we’d simply eaten contaminated food, the news release pointed out.

The fact that an antimicrobial additive would kill beneficial microbes isn’t too surprising, Catherine Rall, a certified nutritionist who works with the women’s wellness company Happy V, told The Epoch Times in an email.

“This makes a certain amount of sense. Preservatives are designed to keep microbes from growing on our foods, and many of them aren’t too discriminating about which microbes they affect,” she said. ”I suspect that we’re going to find more and more preservatives with these kinds of effects as we learn more about our microbiomes.”

Slippery Slope of Bioengineering

A more sinister concern arises from the slippery slope of bioengineered food that’s becoming more commonplace, Robert Verkerk, founder and executive and science director of the nonprofit Alliance for Natural Health, told The Epoch Times.

These foods may have antimicrobial properties designed into them.

Bioengineered food is modified in a lab to alter genetic material in ways that cannot be found in nature or done by conventional breeding, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. In some cases, disclosure of bioengineered ingredients on food labels is discretionary.

While this new study doesn’t mention bioengineered forms of nisin, Mr. Verkerk said that it’s the kind of research that lays the groundwork for the development of patented products. The Alliance for Natural Health is an international organization that promotes and protects natural, sustainable, and bio-compatible approaches to health optimization.

When a company identifies a microbe that may have a biological use, they can use technology to engineer it—sometimes drastically changing its properties—patent it, and potentially slip it into the food supply chain under the [U.S.] Food and Drug Administration’s “generally regarded as safe” (GRAS) umbrella, he explained.

Genetic engineering was popularized in the 2000s with the mass production of genetically modified organisms, now common in the food industry. The government has generally disregarded “little tweaks” of genome editing as long as an organism’s similar trait is being passed on, Mr. Verkerk said.

This business model that encourages patents, biotechnology, and exclusivity often results in products that bypass thorough safety testing. And while the original intent of nisin (also known as food additive E 234) was noble—it protects us from the rare but toxic Clostridium botulinum in food—new variants may easily be slipped into food without us knowing that it’s an engineered product.

“The minute a human starts to tweak the genome or these microbes, you basically start to play God and do things that could take years to find out,” Mr. Verkerk said. ”You shouldn’t be able to get these through the front door saying these are GRAS.”

Examining Labels

Nisin does have to be listed on food ingredient labels, with the exception being processed cheese that naturally contains the nisin-producing bacteria, Mr. Verkerk said.

The additive can also be found in food packaging materials, though it doesn’t have to be declared on labeling if there’s no risk of it leaching into food.

However, Mr. Verkerk said it would be hard to determine if nisin has been bioengineered because companies can claim the product’s manufacturing is proprietary.

Bioengineered forms of nisin have been around for decades—created to “enhance the efficacy and stability of nisin under different physiologic conditions, and to enhance its pharmacokinetic properties for a variety of biological applications,” according to a 2016 article in the Journal of Applied Microbiology.

Several variants of genetically modified nisin have been identified, the article said, adding that research on the different products’ applications can be anticipated. Nisin has also been studied for use in human disease and veterinary medicine with promising results.

“The continued unearthing of new natural variants from within human and animal gastrointestinal tracts has sparked interest in the potential application of nisin to influence the microbiome, given the growing recognition of the role the gastrointestinal microbiota plays in health and disease,” according to a 2023 article in FEMS Microbiology Reviews.

While it makes sense to use a natural variation of nisin—such as those derived from the human gut microbiome—as a food additive, Mr. Verkerk pointed out that even naturally occurring biological products aren’t guaranteed to be universally effective or safe.

Because each person’s microbiome with its trillions of microbes is unique in composition, Mr. Verkerk said there’s no way to predict the response without more research.

However, he added, it’s hard to be critical of the study, which is simply foundational research. He warns that such research is likely to lead to patented products that could be put into the market with possible harm.

“It [the study] seems to be very carefully done,” Mr. Verkerk said of the study. “It’s not close to an end product, but it’s part of a journey that would take us to an end product.”

Protecting Personal Health

In some ways, lantibiotics have escaped criticism because of their use in fermented foods—something that’s come to be associated with improved health. In nisin’s case, the bacteria is found in cow’s milk.

“It’s an easy sell in a lot of ways because everyone knows fermentation is good,” Mr. Verkerk said.

However, that doesn’t mean that the microbes being used are advantageous for human health. In some cases, they could be microbes that have not traditionally been part of the food supply—creating new preservatives foreign to human digestion that could ultimately lead to an increase in gastrointestinal issues, Mr. Verkerk said.

“The ramifications in terms of chronic disease and autoimmune disease are absolutely huge,” he said. “We’re just going to become more and more allergic and intolerant to the food we are eating.”

Mr. Verkerk recommends the following tips to help consumers protect themselves:

• Eat food you know and recognize.
• Avoid eating “bar-coded” food as much as possible.
• Try not to destroy your food in the way you cook and prepare it.
• Keep your diet as diverse and colorful as you can.

“That’s getting harder and harder for people to do,” he said.