When you search the internet for information about goat milk, it’s easy to think that you’ve discovered a miracle food, that the rest of the stupid western world either know very little about, or has been taught by religiously induced habits and commercial efforts from ”big dairy” to despise.
It’s also tempting to copy all these tributes to goat milk straight off, and tell all your friends to start drinking goat milk in order to cure some diseases, or at least lower the risk of catching them. I almost started doing that, when I realized that I had no clue if it really was true, so I decided to go to the sources. The trick is, when it comes to stories about functional food and other miracle products, nobody is citing any sources. Eventually a study is referred to, but there seems to always be discrepancies between the field of study, and the point of the article. Otherwise, anecdotal evidence is popular, people who drink goat milk report that they reap great benefits like not having cancer or completely stopped passing gas.
What the field of goat milk research actually seems to boil down to, are some deductions that can be made from studies of the health effects of cow milk. We know what is bad in cow milk, and if goat milk doesn’t contain those components, we can assume that goat milk is better at least. Right?
Beta-casein and the correlation between cow milk consumption and severe diseases
The milk protein beta-casein, that is a key component in cheese, exist in two genetical variants, A1 and A2. The A1 variant seems to bee a relatively modern morph that accidentally has come to follow the trait of high milking ability in cow breeds like Holstein and Red cattle, and thus the dominant variant in industrialized milk and dairy products.
According to several studies, there is a correlation between high A1 consumption (like in Sweden and Finland), and diseases like diabetes (I), autism, schizophrenia, ischaemic heart disease and bowel inflammatory problems.
http://www.worldguernseys.org/PageMill_Resources/2007_Volume_48_3-189-198.pdf
http://www.sickpigs.dk/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/milk_and_diabetes.pdf
What about goat milk?
TBC…