Introduction
Only about 4000 to 6000 years ago, during what is called the Secondary Products Revolution, humans began consuming the milk of animals. Millions of years after they had already been eating meat, and thousands of years after the Agricultural Revolution when they shifted to dry seeds, only then did they begin to drink milk and use dairy products.
The structure of milk and the ways it is processed pose several challenges to our digestive system and overall health. Milk sugar is not easily broken down by adults, proteins from large animals are poorly suited for such a sensitive stomach as ours, and to these we must add the modern conditions of animal husbandry and industrial processing, which further reduce the nutritional value of milk.
Despite today’s well oiled political and economic machinery driving massive dairy consumption and flooding markets with industrial milk products, it is worth remembering that historically, even after humans began to consume milk, traditional processing methods developed that both eased digestion and helped preserve nutritional value while respecting the environment.
In this article, I will try to provide the essential knowledge that will help you make informed decisions about milk and dairy consumption.
The Secondary Products Revolution
The revolution that followed the Agricultural Revolution took place about 4000 to 6000 years ago. It is less well known than the revolution that preceded it, but it marked a profound turning point: humans began using animals not only for their meat but also, and primarily, for plowing and transport. These changes dramatically reshaped agriculture and commerce.
Alongside these transformations came another, less central but deeply significant: milk from animals entered human diets as a new nutritional element.
It is hard to pinpoint exactly when milking and dairy processing began, but archaeological and textual evidence suggests that humans in the Near East began consuming milk between the late fifth millennium and early fourth millennium BCE. This is also most likely where cheese making first emerged.
Two Key Issues: Lactose and Milk Protein
Historically and physiologically, two aspects define human consumption of milk: our ability or inability to digest lactose, and our use of milk proteins.
Milk and Lactose Intolerance
Why did humans begin consuming milk at all? After the Agricultural Revolution, permanent settlements led to population growth. In some regions this expansion demanded more farmland, but in mountainous areas, where terrain and climate limited large scale grain production, people relied more on animals. To feed growing populations, they turned to milk in addition to meat.
But consuming milk was problematic. Infants are born with the ability to digest lactose, the sugar in human and all mammalian milk, thanks to the enzyme lactase, produced in the small intestine. Yet in most mammals, including humans, lactase production naturally declines after weaning. When milk was added to the diet, this created a problem.
In populations where milk was necessary for survival, natural selection favored genetic mutations that allowed continued lactase production into adulthood. Over time, in these regions, lactose tolerance spread. That is why today in Scandinavia lactose intolerance is only about 10 percent, while among African Americans it is estimated at 80 percent, in South America about 50 percent or more, and in the Middle East very high as well.
A study in Israel of about 500 people found lactose intolerance rates of 83 percent among Ashkenazi Jews, 93 percent among Iraqis, 82 percent among Moroccans, and about 59 percent among Bedouins. These high rates suggest both personal and industrial food systems need to adapt to widespread lactose intolerance.
Milk Protein
Beyond sugar, milk also contains protein. The composition and amount of these proteins vary greatly among animal species.
Cow’s milk contains more than twenty proteins that can trigger intolerance or allergies, most notably casein and whey proteins. Casein in cow’s milk, for example, is different from casein in human, camel, goat, or sheep milk. This is why switching to goat’s milk can sometimes help those intolerant to cow’s milk.
The amount also differs: human milk is relatively low in protein compared to cow, camel, or sheep milk. Human infants produce a soft curd in digestion, while ruminants with multiple stomachs can handle the hard curd created by higher levels of casein.
Allergy to cow’s milk protein occurs in a small but significant portion of the population, sometimes with immediate reactions and sometimes delayed for days. The only reliable way to diagnose it is elimination testing.
Interestingly, studies comparing kosher and non kosher animals found that the casein in kosher animals is relatively similar, which may explain why their milk curdles more easily and keeps longer.
Milk, Cheese, and History
Fresh milk spoils quickly without refrigeration. Historically, humans learned to encourage and control fermentation instead of fighting it. Fermented milk not only preserved nutrients but also created butter, yogurt, and cheese, foods that could last far longer.
- Butter was made by churning naturally soured milk, often in skin bags hung and shaken for hours.
- Yogurt and Labneh developed from extended fermentation, turning lactose into lactic acid and giving the product its tang. Yogurt could be strained and salted to make labneh, which could be eaten fresh or dried into hard balls for storage.
- Cheese arose when fermentation concentrated proteins and fats, creating curds that could be salted, dried, and aged for preservation. Different climates, animal milks, and local bacteria gave rise to the world’s diverse cheeses, Camembert in France, Gouda in the Netherlands, and Safed cheese in Israel.
In the Middle East, a traditional dried cheese called kishk was made from yogurt and grains, ensuring long term preservation. It could be rehydrated in soups or eaten like a biscuit.
Even today, in rural communities like South Hebron, families still process milk much as they did thousands of years ago, fermenting, churning, salting, and drying to produce butter, ghee (clarified butter), and hard cheeses with long shelf lives.
The key products were always fermented and preserved, yogurt, labneh, butter, ghee, and dried cheese, not liquid milk.
Industrial Animal Farming and Dairy Production
Beyond physiological issues, modern industrial farming raises additional concerns. Cows in industrial dairies are confined, separated from calves, fed inappropriate diets, injected with hormones and antibiotics, and milked multiple times a day. Milk from grass fed cows grazing naturally is demonstrably richer in beneficial fats such as omega 3 compared to milk from grain fed cows.
Once milk reaches the dairy, it undergoes industrial processing:
- Fat standardization, separating and re blending fat to fixed percentages.
- Pasteurization, originally low and slow, now high temperature or ultra high temperature, extending shelf life but killing natural microbial cultures.
- Homogenization, breaking fat globules under high pressure to prevent separation, altering fat and protein structures.
Marketing often dresses these industrial processes in pastoral imagery, but the gap between packaging and reality is wide.
Milk, Culture, and Politics in Israel
In Israel, dairy became central only with the movement of European immigrants accustomed to cow’s milk. Historically, locals consumed sheep and goat milk.
The dairy market quickly became highly centralized. Tnuva, founded in 1926 as a cooperative, grew into the dominant force. Today it controls over half the market, with Strauss and Tara following. This concentration grants enormous economic and political influence, mediated especially through the Israel Dairy Board, a hybrid public private regulator industry body with an annual budget of about 60 million shekels.
The Dairy Board not only manages quotas and prices but also funds lobbying, school curricula promoting milk, and cultural campaigns. Its greatest success may be branding Shavuot as the holiday of dairy, a concept absent from Jewish history but now deeply ingrained.
Breastfeeding
Any discussion of milk must include breastfeeding, the primary evolutionary nutrition for human infants. Breast milk not only provides perfectly adapted nutrition but also fosters gut microbiome development, digestion, immunity, and even brain growth.
Historically, hunter gatherer women breastfed for two to four years, with full weaning only at ages two and a half to seven. Today, however, breastfeeding rates worldwide are declining under cultural, medical, and industrial pressures. In Israel, only 20 percent of mothers still breastfeed six months after birth, and just 2.4 percent continue after two years.
Formula companies invest heavily in promoting substitutes, often undermining breastfeeding, despite WHO recommendations for exclusive breastfeeding for six months and partial breastfeeding for two years or more.
My Recommendations
- Reduce overall dairy intake and animal based food consumption.
- Choose organic dairy, preferably from small scale, high welfare farms.
- The three healthiest dairy products are yogurt, labneh, and butter, yogurt and labneh for their fermentation, and butter because it is mostly fat.
- Favor full fat dairy over low fat or homogenized products.
- Avoid heavily processed cheeses, prefer naturally aged, preservative free varieties.
- If buying milk, goat’s milk is generally preferable to cow’s.
- Learn to make your own ghee from butter.
- For hard cheeses, buy from small dairies that use natural processes.
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[3] Wood J.B. Brian (Editor), Microbiology of Fermented Food (Vol. 1), UK 1985. P. 263
[4] Autocatalytic Process: The Agricultural Revolution was an autocatalytic process, one that feeds itself, like a snowball. The transition to permanent settlements increased the rate of population growth, which in turn raised the numerical proportion of farmers compared to foragers and hunters. In this way, agriculture steadily replaced gathering and hunting.
[5] Our digestive system can transfer only monosaccharides into the bloodstream. Lactose is a disaccharide, therefore the body must break it down first.
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[14] Elimination is a nutritional clarification process by way of exclusion. It helps identify suitable foods or behaviors that affect a person’s health.
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ש. צוקרמן-שטרק “שיטה חדשה של הכנת גבינה”, טבע וארץ, ז’ (1964), עמ’ 227-228.
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