The Cream Always Rises to the Top

The cream always rises to the top is an idiom that is used to describe people.  In other words, people of high moral character or virtue always distinguish themselves from the others, rising to the top.  I think that the saying comes from a bygone era before the Industrial Revolution when people had milk cows.  The milk they drank didn't come from Borden's or the grocery store and it didn't come in a plastic jug with a handle.

People not accustomed to this nostalgic time probably don't understand the saying. Cream rising to the top?  The fat in milk separates from the water and rises to the top, similar to what oil and water does.  Homogenization came on the scene around the year 1919 as a means of stopping the natural separation:

ho·mog·e·nize

həˈmäjəˌnīz/

verb

past tense: homogenized; past participle: homogenized

1. 1.

   subject (milk) to a process in which the fat droplets are emulsified and the cream does not separate.

   "homogenized milk"

After homogenization, the cream no longer rose to the top.  In this process the milk is highly pressurized and pushed through a screen, breaking down the fat particles into a much smaller size and this allows the fat particles to be combined with the milk.  Homogenization came about when the milk from different herds or dairies were mixed and the need arose for standardization in order to ready the milk for processing, thereby requiring a consistent product.

Fun Fact: Goat milk is naturally homogenized as the fat globules are much smaller than cows' milk and remains in suspension.

Alternatively, if your milk comes directly from the cow, there is no homogenization and this is what it looks like after it cools and sits for a while:

Cream rising to the top!

You can see the cream line, where the milk has separated from the cream.  The lighter fatty portions of the milk (the cream) has risen to the top.  In fact, almost three quarters of this gallon of milk is cream.  This is not normal.  Usually there are a couple of inches of cream on top, but the tender Spring grasses will do this to the milk, making it richer and with a yellowish color.  It is delicious!

Now, we normally do several things with it.  We either shake it up, pour, and drink WHOLE milk, or we skim the cream off the top for our coffee or to make butter, homemade ice cream, or whipped cream.  It's good stuff.  As I was learning about cream and the homogenization process, I stumbled across the following from Natural News:

Homogenization is a more recently invented process and it has been called "the worst thing that dairymen did to milk." When milk is homogenized, it is pushed through a fine filter at pressures of 4,000 pounds per square inch. In this process, the fat globules are made smaller by a factor of ten times or more. These fat molecules then become evenly dispersed throughout the milk.

Milk is a hormonal delivery system. When homogenized, milk becomes very powerful and efficient at bypassing normal digestive processes and delivering steroid and protein hormones to the human body (both your hormones and the cow's natural hormones and the ones they may have been injected with to produce more milk).

Homogenization makes fat molecules in milk smaller and they become "capsules" for substances that are able to bypass digestion. Proteins that would normally be digested in the stomach are not broken down and instead they are absorbed into the bloodstream.

The homogenization process breaks up an enzyme in milk which in its smaller state can then enter the bloodstream and react against arterial walls. This causes the body to protect the area with a layer of cholesterol. If this only happened once in a while it wouldn't be of big concern, but if it happens regularly there are long term risks.

Proteins were created to be easily broken down by digestive processes. Homogenization disrupts this and insures their survival so that they enter the bloodstream. Many times the body reacts to foreign proteins by producing histamines, and then mucus. Sometimes homogenized milk proteins resemble a human protein and can become triggers for autoimmune diseases such as diabetes or multiple sclerosis.

Two Connecticut cardiologists have demonstrated that homogenized milk proteins did in fact survive digestion. It was discovered that Bovine Xanthene Oxidase (BXO) survived long enough to affect every one of three hundred heart attack victims over a five-year time period. Even young children in the U.S. are showing signs of hardening of the arteries.

That's very interesting reading, especially in that the homogenization process has potentially caused some people to have adverse reactions to milk.  Some people that think that they are having allergic reactions to milk are actually having adverse reactions to the homogenization process!  Milk has gotten a bad rap for something that it didn't do and it causes people to stop drinking milk. Talk about throwing the baby out with the bath water!!!

There's a simple answer to this - drink raw milk.  Okay, admittedly it is not that simple, but it is worth it for health reasons to drink real milk.