Podcast Episode #32: “The Return of the Goats: Goat’s Milk vs. Cow’s Milk”

Podcast episode number 32 from BenGreenfieldFitness.com welcome to the BenGreenfieldFitness.com podcast, your free weekly audio exposure to cutting edge fitness, nutrition and wellness information. My name is Ben Greenfield and I'm an exercise physiologist, certified personal trainer and nutritionist. Each week I'll be bringing you information that goes outside run of the mill exercise and diet advice or so whether you're an Ironman triathlete or you're just trying to lose a few pounds, enjoy this week's podcast episode from BenGreenfieldFitness.com. Hey podcast listeners, this is Ben Greenfield. Today I've got good news and I've got bad news. Okay, the good news first interview today with Joe Stout. And you may remember Joe Stout from podcast episode number 16, where Joe talked quite a bit about probiotics and digestive enzymes. And in the interview today, Joe's gonna talk specifically about five different reasons why you may need to look into goat's milk. I learned some things about allergies, homogenization, lactose intolerance, fat globules, protein absorption rates, and many, many more interesting things during this interview. So I encourage you to listen in, especially if you're going after fat loss, sports performance, or overall health. And I'll just cue you into one interesting statistic, and that's that about 66% of the world's population actually drinks goat's milk, not cow's milk. And there are some reasons why, some compelling reasons why. So listen to that interview. It's a good one. Okay, here's the bad news. I've had an incredibly busy week and I'm not going to have time today to dish out a research corner or a listener Q and A. I'm just going to give you a couple of special announcements and then go straight into the interview. However, that being said, here's your bonus material. I, as some of you know, have a personal blog where I do things like put pictures of my kids up. But I also talk quite a bit about training, racing and some of the triathlons that I do. And for you athletes out there, I'm going to be writing an article about how to train through or with an injury. I happen to be sprinting on my bicycle, maybe a little bit too hard, tweaked my hamstring just a little bit, laid off the bike, but started swimming and tweaked the shoulder a little bit. So I'm sitting here with a couple of injuries and I'm gonna feed you out some information on that blog on how to train through stuff like this. I'll put a link to that blog in the show notes. I'll put a link to the stuff in the announcements in the show notes. And let's go ahead and go straight into those announcements and then onto the interview special announcements. If you were to go back through the blog archives and the podcasts@bengreenfieldfitness.com There are a lot of articles and interviews that talk about nutritional supplements. And I know it can be a confusing road for many of you to know what you're supposed to take or what's really applicable to you because some of us are out there looking for sports performance, some of us are out there looking for enhanced recovery from exercise. Some are looking for a way to boost their metabolism, some are looking for a way to lose fat at a more rapid pace. And some people are looking for general overall feelings of weight, well being or beating, chronic fatigue or enhancing wellness. And so I know there's a lot that we've talked about and what I've decided to do is make the next online televised Q and A video session to be all about nutritional supplementation. I'm going to go through what I take, what some of my clients take, what might work for you, and give you the details and also open that up to a comprehensive question and answer session as well. So that's on this coming Sunday. Mark your calendars 6pm Feb. 22. All you do is go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com There'll be a link right there for you to click on. It'll take you to a page where you'll be able to interact with me. I'll be on video. Don't worry, you won't be on video. So you can be at home in your pajamas if you want. And you'll just be able to type messages to me and I'll respond to them. But I'm also going to be giving a little talk there. This is likely not going to be recorded, so you're going to want to be there if you decide this is information that you want to take advantage of. I occasionally do record some of the talks that I give. For example, the Synergy of Fat Loss, which was a lecture that I gave over at Coeur d' Alene a couple of weeks ago. That's up on the website. It's available. It'll be in the in the show notes to this podcast. So February 22nd, that's the main announcement. And then one other announcement is for you Triathletes out there. We've got the Coach Cal's critical speed Coeur d' Alene Triathlon coming up in Coeur d', Alene, Idaho, May 9 to May 14. You're going to want to register early for this one. Space is limited. I'm coaching at that camp. Coach Calzyrisky from Canada is coaching at that camp I attended last year. It was a great time. So I would encourage you to look into that if you are a triathlete. I'll put a couple other interesting things in the show notes. You can always go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com to look at those and some of the links that I put up. But for now, let's go ahead and go straight into the interview on Goat's Milk with Joe Stout. Welcome back, podcast listeners. This is Ben Greenfield, and I'm here today with the chief scientist over at Mount Capra Nutritional, a fellow who has his bachelor's in food science and nutrition and a master's in clinical human nutrition. And he spent particular in the field of dairy, digestive enzymes, probiotics, as well as some of the things that he's going to talk to us about today. You may remember Mr. Joe Stout. I had him on an interview where we talked all about protein enzymes, probiotics. That was podcast episode number 16. I'll put a link to that in the show notes if you want to go back and listen to that podcast episode. But before I before I turn things over to Joe, I also wanted to point you out to podcast episode number 28, where we talked about the deal with dairy. And Paul, a personal trainer, was going over some pretty interesting things on dairy. And just real briefly, he touched on the difference between dairy that comes from different, different animals, the fact that not all dairy, and especially not all milk is created equal. The body has some different ways that it processes cow's milk versus goat's milk. And something interesting that I found out recently was that 65% of the milk consumption worldwide is actually from goat's milk, even though we may not see that in the United States. But anyways, with the Dairy Farmers of America reporting sales of $11 billion last year, this is definitely an industry that's pretty popular in America and an industry that you as a consumer should be aware of. You need to know your choices about what's going into your body and what's going to be best for your body. And Joe is the man to talk to about this. So, Joe, thank you for coming on the show today.

Well, thanks for having Me, Ben.

Obviously you know the difference between goat's milk and cow's milk, and I was going to ask you, before you go into some detail about that, what your background in terms of goats actually is.

Yeah, well, thanks for asking. I know. I'm not sure if many of your listeners are aware of this, but my family actually operates the largest goat dairy in Washington state. It's out of the west side of Washington, just a little south of Olympia. We operate the largest goat dairy in Washington state, and we actually manufacture whole food nutritionals from goat's milk. So as far as goats are concerned, they're definitely a big part of my life, and especially growing up myself on goat's milk. I was severely allergic to cow's milk when I was quite young and only could drink goat's milk myself. Background with goats goes all the way back to as far as I can remember.

So you were allergic to cow's milk? You weren't allergic to goat's milk?

Not even in the slightest. In fact, my allergy to cow's milk was so sensitive that simply licking the ice cream spoon would make me break out into hives. And I actually have some type of protein reaction to it.

Okay, so no Ben and Jerry's Chunky Monkey for you, huh?

No, I had to. Had to watch out for that.

So why is goat milk like that? Why. Why does it cause fewer allergies compared to cow's milk?

Well, the simple answer really is that goat's milk is just simply less allergenic than cow's milk. In fact, in the United States, the fact that I was allergic to cow's milk was not really that uncommon. It's the number one most common common food allergy in children under three. So a lot of people suffer from these cow milk allergies. It wasn't uncommon for me to have that. The reason why cow's milk is more allergenic than goat's milk is because cow's milk contains an allergen, a protein allergen. Allergies come from proteins. It's a protein allergen known as Alpha S1 casein. It's found and high levels in cow's milk and almost.

Sorry to interrupt. You said Alpha S1 casein. I know that some people may actually recognize the spelling of the word casein on many of the food products they consume. That's C, A, S, E, I, N, in case you're looking for that on the nutritional label of something that you're eating. And then the other thing I was gonna. Oh, go ahead.

No, no, no, absolutely you're right. And this specific allergen is actually alpha S1 casein. And so it' just casein. Because all milk contains casein, it's alpha S1 casein, which is the actual allergy inducing protein.

Okay. And so if someone were, for example, consuming say like a whey protein, like a, like a cow derived whey protein that was a whey casein mix, it's likely that it could still have this alpha S1 casein in it.

It's more than likely. It would definitely be there. It's just a constituent of cow's milk. So if you're doing the whole protein from cow's mil, it has alpha S1 casein in it.

Okay, gotcha. When you're talking about food allergies, I know that some people think that it might not be a big deal if you have a sneeze here and there or you have a red nose. But with my clients that I help out with weight loss and sports performance, it gets a whole lot more serious than that. There's a lot of things that go on inside the body. I know when you have a food allergy going on. One of them being, for example, leaky gut syndrome. Have you heard of leaky gut syndrome before, Joe or.

Oh, yeah, absolutely. It's kind of one of thoseit's one of those diseases that it's so under diagnosed in ourin, our community, in our medical community. I think a lot more people suffer from it than we even know.

Yeah, and that's again, that's not just stomach upset. That's things like having decreased sensitivity to the insulin that's circulating in your bloodstream because you get undigested food, food circulating in your bloodstream. And guess what, people, that makes you fat or that makes you resistant to weight loss and it decreases your ability to perform. It decreases your mental clarity, your focus, and it can wreak havoc on you physically. So we're talking about more than just sneezing when youwhen you ingest milk, right?

Yeah, absolutely. And an important distinction to make, and we mighti'm not sure, we might get into this a little bit later, is that there's definitely a difference between an intolerance, a lot of people are intolerant to milk and allergy to milk. An allergy is a reaction to a protein in the food. And so some of the things that these allergies can induce is vomiting, diarrhea, skin rashes. In some cases, although they're rare, they can be as serious as anaphylactic shock and death has resulted from cow's milk allergies before.

So is cow's milk and goat's milk, or are they different in terms of the way that they're prod of, like the homogenization process?

Yeah, they're actually fairly. They're fairly dissimilar in that regard. Goat's milk actually is what's called naturally homogenized. I think. I would imagine your listeners are probably fairly familiar with what homogenization is. But just to really quickly recap, if you were to take fresh, let's just say raw cow's milk and stick it in your refrigerator, look at it the next morning, you would see that it has separated into two phases. There would be the cream on the top, and on the bottom would be kind of the skim milk. Well, our society really doesn't like that kind of thing. So what the cow industry does is they homogenize it. They force it through a tiny little hole that breaks up the fat globule that makes it homogeneous throughout the whole thing, so it all looks the same.

So basically, you can't see the layer of fat that's floating on top of your milk, in other words.

Right. And all that fat is just dispersed through the whole jug of milk instead of sitting on top. And that's why they call it skim milk, because they can just skim it off the top before they homogenize it. And so with goat's milk, it's naturally homogenized. And if you were to put a glass of goat's milk, raw goat's milk, in the fridge the next morning, it would look exactly the same. And that has to do with the fact that. But the fat globules are already small. There's no need to break them up. Then the reason why that matters, because some people say, well, who cares if it's homogenized? The reason why it matters is because nature is intended very specifically for fat globules to be a certain size for each animal. Now, in the case of goat's milk, they're on average 2/3 smaller than cow's milk. So when we take those cow's milk fat globules and we break them up, it can release a superoxide known as xanthine oxidase, which is like a free radical. Free radicals can cause a host of problems in the body, whereas with goat's milk, that's never even an issue because there's no need to homogenize it.

Oh, yeah. I mean, free radicals float around and DNA damage Cancer. That's why people consume antioxidants. But it kind of, it's, I guess it's not really, it doesn't really make sense to be consuming antioxidant supplements and at the same time dumping large amounts of free radicals into your body. So it's just basically the fact that when you homogenize, cow's milk disrupts that, that fat globule. It basically mixes it in with the milk and by disrupting it releases the free radicals from it.

Exactly, because it's breaking down that fat cell wall. If you were to just drink raw cow milk, you would not have a problem with xanthine oxidase because it would be trapped inside the fat globule and it would not be released as a free radical. It would be bound with the fat globule. When you homogenize it, it causes those problems.

Okay, now other than the fat, how about the protein in goat milk? Does the protein differ in any way from cow's milk in terms of its structure or its digestion?

Yeah, absolutely. In fact, one of the ways we've already talked about is just the fact that the protein levels are different in that there's less proteins, the allergy causing proteins, alpha S1 casein. But goat's milk, it's easier to digest because the proteins actually form a much softer curd when they're actually in the stomach. I've heard on average if you drink a glass of cow milk, like say an eight ounce glass of cow milk, it's going to take maybe three to four hours to digest. If you drink that same eight ounce glass of goat's milk, it's going to digest in about 20 minutes because it doesn't clump up into a big hard ball of protein in your stomach, it's released a little bit easier. That's one of the reasons, reasons why it is a little bit easier to digest. Dr.

So when we're talking about athletes and post workout nutrition in terms of protein absorption and muscle repair and recovery, this might be a technique that they could use to actually enhance muscle repair.

Absolutely. And it actually has to do with the fact that goat's milk doesn't contain a compound called glutenin, Cow's milk does. And that's one of the things that causes it to clump up in the stomach. And that's one of the things where your athletes could really feed their post workout quite a lot easier by taking goat's milk as opposed to cow's milk. Dr.

Right. And you know, I know that Some people who are listening in right now, you know, whatever, the triathlete out on the bike ride is thinking, well, how the heck am I going to be able to get my hands on goat milk to consume, you know, whatever, when I'm, when I'm out of town training or when I'm, you know, even. Even here in Spokane, it can be difficult to find a reliable and convenient source of goat milk. And one of the things I'll include in the show notes of this podcast, for those of you listening in right now, are some of the ways that I found to get your hands on it, whether in, in liquid form or in powder form, that can make it a little bit more convenient for you. And I wanted to return to the concepts of goat's milk versus cow's milk when it comes to something I know that's really important to people, to a lot of people, Joe, and that's lactose intolerance. Is that gonna be a problem still for people who are consuming goat's milk?

Yeah, you know, there's kind of some misconceptions out there. A lot of people seem to think that goat's milk is lactose free. Well, that'sthat's not true. It is lower in lactose. There's about 10% less lactose in goats milk than there is and cows milk. But, you know, Ben, there's an interesting thing we've seen, and I've been in the goat industry a long time, and my father longer than me, and we've seen a very distinct, very unique thing that's going on, is that a lot of people who are very sensitive to cow's milk are having no trouble digesting the goat's milk. And kind of one of the hypotheses that's out there is because goat's milk is so much easier to digest, you don't have a lot of leftover, undigested lactose to get out there into the system to cause those painful, uncomfortable effects of lactose intolerance. And therefore, you have a more complete digestion that kind of ties right in there with what you were saying, with the leaky gut syndrome, because when we digest our food more completely, that ceases to be an issue.

So, you know, someone like myself, I'm actually fairly sensitive to cow's milk and have a little bit of lactose intolerance myself. One of the things that I do is I make sure to consume foods that are dairy foods that are a little bit higher, and lactase, the enzyme that helps to break down lactose, so for example, I'll do yogurt or kefir versus regular milk. But what you're saying is that if I were to add goat milk into my dietary regimen, I would probably be able to tolerate that, even though I'm not tolerant to the lactose in cow's milk?

Yeah, I would say that. Now, obviously everybody's different. If you have a severe lactose sensitivity, you might not because there is lactose in goat's milk, but I would be surprised if you didn't find it a lot easier to, to tolerate and to digest.

Okay, now I, the, the other thing that I've heard is that in terms of the way that the human body is built, I think this was something that Paul talked about in podcast number 28 and I'll put a link to that in the show notes. But he was talking about how it's more like the, the natural milk that we get as a baby and the profile of it is a little bit more closely tied to, to the human body versus cow's milk. Is that true?

Yeah. You know, that's kind of one of, I think goat's milk's strongest points is the fact that thermodynamically, it was created toto feed and stimulate growth in a 7 to 9 pound baby goat. You know, when you drink cow's milk that was specifically designed to for a very large calf, that gets all the way, that turns into a 1,200 pound cow. Whereas when you are drinking goat's milk, a baby goat is about 7 to 9 pounds at birth, an infant about 7 to 9 pounds at birth. And the end product, the adult goat, the adult human, they're both a lot closer in size than cows are. It takes a lot more energy and, and to produce that much bigger of an animal. And that's one of the reasons why goat milk can match up to the human body better than cow's milk.

That's interesting because when you're talking about the fat globules in goat milk being smaller and the proteins interacting with the human body a little better, it almost makes sense. Just because a goat is closer to the size of a human than a cow is.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And another great thing that goat milk has going for it is the fact that goat's milk is an incredible source of potassium. Not quite so much cow's milk isn't too bad, but goat's milk really is a great source of potassium and that kind of causes it to react in the body in an alkaline way. Whereas cow's Milk really is acid forming in the body. And then when you have an acidic condition in your body, that obviously leads to a host of problems, as you and your listeners are well aware. Aware of.

Yeah, it's. It's inflammatory. We actually had a registered dietitian on the show talking about how sugar is acidic and it causes an inflammatory condition in the body, which can really lead to a host of metabolic problems, including, you know, obesity and poor performance. And so what you're saying is that something that's high in potassium is actually going to yield almost. Almost a condition within the body that balances out the.

Yeah, absolutely.

Acidic state.

Yeah, absolutely.

Interesting. So in terms of resources for people, you know, if I were going to put some links to the show notes in this podcast for someone who listens to this and what they want to do is find a place locally, you know, whether they're in whatever California or Florida. I mean, is there a place. I know that cows. For cow's milk, they have a website like rawmilk.org or something of that nature. Is there an equivalent of that for someone to find goat milk milk?

You know, being that goat's milk is on such a. Such a vastly smaller scale than cow's milk, I think that is. That's an area where the goat milk industry really has a lot of room to grow. I feel like our networking between goat dairies needs a lot of improvement. So, unfortunately, right now, getting your hands on raw goat's milk is going to be kind of hit and miss. You're going to have to kind of do your own homework in whatever area you're at. It's certainly not nonexistent. You can find it. It's just going to be a little bit tougher to find in cow's milk, obviously. But then there's always the powdered goat's milk option as well.

And is there any nutritional deficiency in a powdered form versus a liquid form?

I would say just from a. Purely. If you can go out and buy yourself a goat and milk it every day and drink it right from the other, that's the best way to do it, obviously, for.

I'll put it in a glass first. Thanks.

Yeah, probably 99% of your listeners, that's not really an option. So there is really. No, there is nothing nutritionally deficient with powdered goat's milk. It would just be better to have it from the udder in a glass to you.

Okay. So what I'll do is in the links to the show notes on this podcast, I will put for anyone local in the Spokane Coeur d' Alene area, I'm going to put a link to a few options where you can get local goat milk sources. For those of you listening on the national level, what I'll do is put a link up there on some sources that could get you like a powdered form of goat's milk to start putting in your refrigerator and you know, either using as a replacement for the cow's milk that you're currently drinking, or a higher protein, higher quality alternative, or even something that you can use in addition to some of the other milks that you're drinking, maybe soy milk, rice milk, almond milk, et cetera. So I think this is going to be a great resource for the audience to just improve their health a little bit better and especially for people who are concerned about food allergies, obesity, poor performance, things of that nature. I just want to thank you for putting out this information, Joe.

Yeah, absolutely. Thank you so much for having me on. And kind of as a closing point also another thing to just add into the mix is the fact that goat's milk as a whole, the use of hormones in the goat industry is very virtually nonexistent. Whereas the cow industry has almost come to rely on growth hormones to stimulate their massive supplies of cow's milk. So that's another great reason to switch over to goat's milk because you're not going to find any of those growth hormones in your milk.

I imagine antibiotics as well.

Yeah, growth hormones, antibiotics, you name it. It's going to be a lot less prevalent in goat's milk. In effect, virtually non existent in goat's milk. Whereas it's gonna be very, very common in cow's milk.

Good to know. Uhm, so remember, yeah. The definition of insanity. I always tell myself this when I'm making nutritional changes. Definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, expecting different results. Uhm, you know, just we're on podcast number 32 on BenGreenfieldFitness.com and I don't just interview the people that I have on this show, I put into practice their recommendations. Recommendations. And I have noticed a enormous difference in my own energy levels, my immune system and the health of myself and my family since I started making some of these changes. So remember, when you listen to these shows, don't just listen in, go out there and turn your knowledge, your empowered knowledge into action. Until next time, this is Ben from BenGreenfieldFitness.com signing out. So after that interview with Joe, here's What I've done, I put a link to powdered goat's milk and the source where I get my powdered goat's milk up on the show notes to this podcast. And in addition, a couple of the other things that you're going to find in the show notes are a link to that triathlon camp that I talked about as well as a link to the special announcement about some of the seminars as well as a place where you can get access to the Synergy of Fat Loss video. I made that available for basically just a couple of bucks if you want to see that one hour fat loss lecture that I gave. And then the final thing is if you remember, in my interview with Ann Louise Gittleman a while back, she talked about this Romanian anti aging formula that she uses with a lot of her older clients, people about 50 plus around in that range. And she sent me some and I tried a little bit out. I just, I just wanted to check it out and I put a link to that up in the show notes. If it's something that you want to read more about or find out more about, I put a picture of the bottle, it's called hcl, up on the website and you can check that out, read a little bit more about it, see if it's something that interests you, especially if you're, if you're going after or looking for more of an anti aging type of supplement, remember you can leave our podcast a rating in itunes and there's a link up there in the show notes that you click on. It will take you right to the itunes page. If you have questions. I know there was no listener Q and A this week and there was no research corner, but if you have questions or if you want me to cover a specific topic, I'm serious, just email me. Very receptive to email. Email BenGreenfieldFitness.com Feel free to post a comment on any of the blog postings for this week and until next time, where we'll be featuring an entire episode devoted to fat burning fitness secrets. This is Ben Greenfield signing out. Have a great week.