Mrs C.E.J. writes: - I have been making cottage cheese curdling the milk with lemon juice, as recommended in The Healthy Life. Suppose the milk contains disease germs, would not this cheese be injurious, as the milk is not sterilised by being brought to boiling point? I have also been drinking the whey from the same, as it as given in The Healthy Life Beverage Book. I notice in a reply given in this month's issue that Dr Knaggs states that the whey of the milk is the dangerous element. Since reading this answer I have been somewhat in doubt as to drinking the whey. I should like to know if it can be taken without harmful effects.

Ordinary unboiled milk, free from preservatives, is far less dangerous to health than boiled milk, because Nature inserts in the raw milk certain germs known as the lactic-acid-producing bacilli, which protect us from the injurious germs. These lactic germs cause the milk to go sour and produce in this way the much-extolled soured or curdled milk. They convert the sugar of the whey into lactic acid by a process of fermentation. If milk is boiled it cannot go sour because the germs natural to it have been destroyed by the heat and it becomes necessary to introduce fresh lactic germs into the boiled milk as is done in the artificial production of curdled milk. Failing this, milk will undergo, not lactic fermentation, but putrefaction, and thereby develop highly dangerous qualities.

When a person takes soured milk its lactic acid acts as a powerful germ destroyer and in a certain concentration it actually kills the lactic germs as well. It also keeps down the disease-producing germs of putrefaction which work in an alkaline medium (opposite to acid) by depriving them of the sugar of the whey.

Boiled milk, if set on one side, in warm weather, speedily becomes alkaline and putrid or putrefactive. It is in this condition that, when babies take it, they are made dreadfully ill with diarrhoea and inflammation of the stomach and bowels. Hence it is the chief cause of the appalling mortality among infants in hot weather.

Mrs F.K.J. need have no fear of any harm coming to her as a result of eating cottage cheese, but she should not take the whey unless she has decided to undergo a whey cure and take nothing but whey; in this latter case, there being no other foods taken, there will be no germs to act harmfully upon it. If there is much flatulence and stomach or bowel trouble sweet milk or whey will simply feed the germs which are the cause of the digestive trouble, or self-poisoning, and are thus far better discarded.