Contrary to popular belief, the Paleo Diet doesn’t limit foods like milk… but it does limit the type of milk you consume…
Many people look into the paleo diet for inflammation… the wrong type of milk will agitate any existing inflammation, which is why you may hear that it’s best to cut out foods like grains and dairy…
Rather than try to tell you that milk is either good or bad, let’s simply understand what is it about milk that can create inflammation and what type of milk you can include in your diet that would be Paleo Friendly…
Is milk paleo friendly?
There is a type of milk that is considered Paleo friendly… the first criteria to look for is what breed of cow did the milk come from?
The Paleo Diet is all about eating the way our ancestors did… our ancestors consumed milk from cows that produced A2 type of milk… these breeds are cows like Jerseys, Guernseys, Charolais, brown Swiss, etc.
These are ancient breeds and what’s different about them is that the type of milk they produce has a much easier to digest protein…
Now, let’s pause here for a second because this is what inflammation is all about… inflammation is your body’s inability to digest protein… when your body can’t break down protein, it triggers a histamine reaction, it heats up the area where the foreign protein is which is why inflammation means that the body is “in flames”… once the body realizes that it can’t break down the foreign protein, then it builds mucus around it…
Modern breeds of cows produce A1 milk which has a much harder to digest casein protein… this is why when people cut out dairy from their diet, they feel much better… not because milk is bad, but because there is a difference between drinking A1 milk and A2 milk…
Is Raw Milk allowed on the Paleo Diet?
The type of milk (A1 VS A2) is the first most important characteristic of milk that determines if it’s Paleo or not…
The second thing has to do with being able to digest and break down the nutrients of milk… in order to digest food, you need probiotics… probiotics take carbs, proteins & fats, and it breaks them down into smaller nutrients that your body can uptake…
If you have a strong immune system, then you should have plenty of probiotics to break down food…
If you are experiencing inflammation, gas, bloating, constipation or other digestive issues, then chances are your probiotics are weak…
You would need to strengthen your probiotics and one of the best ways to do so is with raw milk…
Why?
… because raw milk has probiotics…
Pasteurized milk does not have probiotics…
This can be confusing to many people because the associate the word pasteurized with “safe”, but is it?
Probiotics are friendly bacteria… pasteurization kills all bacteria…
People are told that raw milk “may” contain harmful bacteria… keyword is “may”… they can’t say that it does… so how would you know?
If raw milk were to contain harmful bacteria, it would be spoiled… it wouldn’t taste good… it would smell funky…
If you are getting milk from a healthy cow, then milk won’t have harmful bacteria, but it will have friendly bacteria (probiotics), which you need to digest milk…
That’s why pasteurized milk creates so much inflammation… it’s made from A1 cows, which harder to digest proteins and on top of that, it’s pasteurized so you don’t get the probiotics that are needed to digest milk…
How to consume raw milk on a Paleo Diet
While raw milk has a lot of benefits as is, our ancestors consumed fermented dairy products… fermentation is the number one skill you need to learn if you want to get more energy and lose weight…
Fermentation is the skill of growing probiotics… it’s how you make fermented dairy products like yogurt, kefir, and cheese…
When you ferment food, you are essentially allowing probiotics to pre-digest food for you… when you consume dairy that has been pre-digested, your body doesn’t have to digest as much (if at all), and that’s why our ancestors didn’t experience inflammation from dairy consumption…
The problem with modern day dairy products is that you won’t find yogurt or other fermented dairy products made with raw A2 milk… that’s why most Paleo gurus will say to eliminate milk from your diet…
To an extent, they are right… if you are consuming bad milk, you will experience inflammation… but all that changes when you learn how to go Paleo and consume milk the way our ancestors did…
There’s one big caveat to this… if you have damaged your gut and you are sensitive to histamine, you may need to repair your gut before introducing fermented foods & beverages back into your diet… a low histamine diet is what you’d be looking into…
Regardless of your starting point, growing probiotics is the number one skill to learn to get more energy and lose weight…
