12 Steps to Whole Foods

Preserving Raw Foods with Natural Probiotics
sensitivities. And you don’t have to scald the milk, so all the enzymatic benefits of raw milk are preserved
when you make kefir.
To make it, you use kefir “grains,” best obtained from someone
near you who has extra (the grains grow and proliferate). Or you
can purchase live kefir grains online: see the “Kefir Grains”
topic under “Robyn Recommends” on GreenSmoothieGirl.com.
You can purchase dried kefir starter at health food stores, but you
have to continually buy it for each batch, whereas grains are
infinitely reusable and are live rather than dried. (You do have to
feed them fresh milk every day, to keep them healthy and
proliferating.)
Kefir does have a slightly stronger taste, so if you like yogurt
and aren’t sure about kefir, you can start with yogurt. You can
certainly purchase yogurt at the store rather than make it, though it will be a pasteurized product, often with
less-than-ideal additives. If you do purchase, be sure to buy plain, organic yogurt. Flavored yogurts (even
vanilla) are full of sugar and corn syrup—some of them have more sugar than ice cream!
Although you can purchase yogurt, by buying a gallon of milk and fermenting it into yogurt or kefir, you’ll
save at least 75% of what you’d spend buying that same amount of commercial yogurt/kefir. Once you’ve
made milk into yogurt/kefir, it lasts a long time in the fridge (preserved by lacto-fermentation), unlike the milk
it is made from that goes bad in a week or so (even if it is pasteurized). I have never had yogurt or kefir go bad
in my fridge.
Raw milk is best—but if you can’t obtain that, at least find milk from cows that are untreated by hormones.
Stores that sell hormone-free milk usually promote it very publicly (with loud outcries and much regulation by
government agencies, because of the pressure by the large dairy companies who use hormones). The dairy
industry is very powerful and wants to promote fear about raw milk—and certainly about goat’s milk, its
competitor. Small goat farmers in some states have been so squeezed by the dairy industry’s chokehold on the
FDA that they cannot sell goat’s milk as “food.” You may have to find a small local farm to sell it to you as a
product “unintended for human food.”
Goat’s milk is often tolerated well by people who have problems with cow’s milk. It is not mucous-forming
like dairy is, because it has a much smaller fat molecule than cow’s milk that permeates the human semipermeable
membranes. When the body produces mucous in response to a food, that’s a sign that the body
wants to flush that food out. Getting an occasional cold is a positive thing, because thin, clear mucous is a
natural defense mechanism that bathes and cleanses the tissues and organs. Lots of mucous production and
mucous turning thick and discolored (yellow or green), however, causes a buildup of acids in the body that are
destructive at a cellular level, burning out tissue binders and leading to many chronic health problems.
Goat’s milk is more similar to human mother’s milk than cow’s milk and, therefore, makes a more nutritious
yogurt or kefir if you have access to it. My oldest child had very negative reactions to cow’s milk when I was
too young to know better and he was constantly fighting a green snotty nose. I switched to goat’s milk, and the
mucous never returned. I weaned all my other children onto raw goat’s milk, yogurt, and kefir with only
positive results. However, at times, I have been unable to obtain raw goat’s milk and I have discovered that my
children do fine with cow’s milk only in its fermented (predigested) forms of yogurt or kefir. I credit strong
internal populations of beneficial organisms from daily kefir/yogurt consumption with the fact that none of my
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