Friday, January 8, 2010

A2 beta casein, Autism, Guernseys and diabetes

According to the new book "The Devil in the Milk" all the mammals on the planet make the same beta casein in their milk except certain cattle from Europe. Holsteins and Ayreshires came from a different line of wild cattle, and produce a mutated protein in their milk. Brown Swiss and Jerseys are affected to a lesser degree but something like 90% of Guernseys make normal protein in their milk. There is a company, the A2 Corporation that patented a genetic test for these mutations and made money helping farmers market A2 milk in NZ and AU. They arrived in the USA in '03 and went broke. They say they are coming back, but in the meanwhile diary farmers can't get their cattle tested, and people who know they react to milk are avoiding cow milk altogether. It's not good for the public health, not good for the dairy industry.
I wanted to buy a home cow myself, and have a friend with reliable but tolerable reactions to cow milk (but not goat milk) so she was willing to test some milk samples for me. Then it dawned on me we could just muscle test, or that we could use a machine. Dairies and folks with backyard cows could cheaply test the milk of individual cows via EAV or electro-dermal machines. These are NOT tests for A2 milk, which is trademarked. They’d be tests for hypoallergenic milk
This is going to be big news very soon. That book was a best seller in NZ. 25% of Holsteins are homozygous for the normal protein, and 50% carry one gene for it. The cows that carry only the normal protein need to be gradually culled from the herds. If we can get some backyard cows tested and prove that the milk is really different from the grocery milk, we can help increase the demand for the dairies to switch to A2 only milk.
A1 milk certainly causes Type 1 diabetes, is very bad for autistic children, and is related to heart disease. Changing over to A2 milk could make us a healthier, happier nation.

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