The Longest Mile: June Edition

This month I have been thinking about what we put inside our bodies. Two things specifically: milk and supplements.

Both used to be simple. Both have become anything but.

Humans have been drinking milk for thousands of years. Research published on ancient human dental calculus has confirmed direct biochemical evidence of dairy consumption going back at least to the 3000 BCE. Goats and sheep were domesticated 10,000 to 11,000 years ago. Cattle followed about 9,000 years ago.

Milk runs throughout the Bible. A land flowing with milk and honey appears in Exodus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. Jacob’s prophecy that Judah’s teeth would be white with milk dates to roughly 1700 BC. For most of human history, milk was milk.

Then 1864 happened.

Louis Pasteur figured out that heating wine to between 122 and 140°F killed off the microbes that were spoiling it. The method was eventually applied to milk. The first state-level mandate came in 1947. The federal government required pasteurization for interstate milk sales in 1973.

The timing matters because pasteurization landed at the front edge of a much larger shift in how Americans ate.

In 1911, Procter and Gamble launched Crisco, a hydrogenated cottonseed oil, and started Americans on a century-long swap from animal fats to industrial seed oils. By the 1950s, soybean oil had overtaken butter in the American diet. In 1900, seed oils were about 1 percent of added fat in the American diet. By 2000 they were roughly 85 percent.

Call it the industrialized food revolution. A century where most of what people ate became processed, shelf-stable, and shipped in from somewhere far away. Milk got pulled into that current with everything else.

Raw milk does carry risk in a modern supply chain. The CDC’s Foodborne Disease Outbreak Surveillance System recorded that from 1998 to 2018, raw milk drove almost every reported dairy outbreak in the country over those 20 years.

Heat changes things, though. A systematic review of 40 studies on pasteurization, published by researchers in Ontario, found that pasteurization reduces vitamins B1, B2, B12, C, and folate. About 10 percent of whey proteins denature during standard pasteurization, and 70 percent during ultra-high-temperature processing. Minerals like calcium, magnesium, and potassium are heat-stable and unaffected.

The honest read: pasteurization does not totally strip milk of nutrition. It does reduce certain vitamins and enzymes that aid in absorption. Whether that matters to you is a personal call.

I tried raw milk earlier this year. Bought it from Major Farms. The pickup was in a Lowe’s parking lot, out of the back of a refrigerated van. It is legal in Texas, but it felt like it should not have been. The milk was good. The experience was a hassle. If raw milk was more widely available or sold in grocery stores, I would use it more often but for now I have settled on organic grass-fed A2 milk from the grocery store. Cleaner protein profile for digestion. No parking lot exchange. Raw milk is not bad. It is just not worth the friction for me when organic grass-fed pasteurized A2 covers most of the upside with only some nutritional loss.

The other thing I have been thinking about: how much people are leaning on pills for nutrition.

About 74 percent of U.S. adults take dietary supplements, according to the Council for Responsible Nutrition’s 2023 Consumer Survey on Dietary Supplements. Roughly half of American men do. The U.S. supplement market was about $70 billion in 2025 and is projected to roughly double by 2033 per Grand View Research.

Meanwhile, the CDC reports that around 60 percent of U.S. adults live with at least one chronic condition, and 40 percent manage two or more. Among young adults, the share with at least one chronic condition rose from 52.5 percent in 2013 to 59.5 percent in 2023.

People are getting sicker. People are also taking more supplements than ever. Those two trends are not unrelated.

Taking a supplement is an admission that the diet is missing something. More often, the better fix is the food going into your body. Nutrients absorbed through whole foods come bundled with cofactors that help the body actually use them. A pill does not come with that context.

The regulatory layer is worth understanding. Under the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act of 1994, supplements do not require FDA pre-approval for safety or efficacy. A widely cited review noted that 73 percent of supplement manufacturers inspected by the FDA had at least one regulatory infraction. Most products on the shelf are not third-party tested for what is actually inside the bottle.

The liver pays for the price. A 2024 review published in the journal Livers found that up to 20 percent of acute liver injury cases in the United States are now attributed to herbal and dietary supplements. The World Health Organization ranks supplement-induced liver injury as the fifth most common cause of liver disease-associated death.

This is not a blanket case against every supplement. Vitamin D in winter. Magnesium if deficient. Creatine for training. These have evidence behind them. The problem is the stack. The cabinet of bottles. The morning routine that takes 15 pills and promises to fix what real food, sunlight, sleep, and movement already do.

Eat animals that grew up on grass. Plants that grew in dirt. Eggs. Get sunlight before noon. Lift something heavy a few times a week. Walk every day. Wear natural fibers.

That is the whole protocol. It is also cheaper than buying supplements.

Most of what we did right for several thousand years got replaced in the last hundred. Some of that was for the better. Some of it was not. The work is figuring out which.

Thanks for being here.

Thomas

Co-founder