Eating nothing for a month and drinking only raw milk. Bas Renooij did it. In April, he gave up any kind of solid food. Does such a one-sided diet lead to health problems or is there a positive effect? The Easly Essential 7 test after the experiment yielded surprising results.
Bas Renooij (43) is a business manager at the Raw Milk Company and works out a lot. Crossfit, cycling, swimming: he does it all. He also studies nutrition and health. With organic food supplemented with supplements, Renooij tries to lead as healthy a life as possible. Still: how does a person come to drink only raw milk for a month?
For a month, Bas drank four liters of raw milk and one liter of kefir, made from raw milk, every day. The unusual diet went surprisingly easily for him.
“I actually didn’t go hungry,” Bas says.
The key question, of course, is what such a one-size-fits-all diet does to your health. To find out, Renooij, with support from Easly, did two Essential 7 self-tests: a baseline measurement and a test after the experiment was over. “The Essential 7 is just about the most comprehensive blood test. It requires you to take blood at home with a finger prick. I thought: three tubes, that will be tricky. But it went well. I watched the instruction video and everything was in the package. There was even some Vaseline in it. If you rub your finger with that, and then prick it, it keeps going well.”
During the baseline measurement, most of Bas’ blood values were good. Only his kidney function was not optimal and the LDL cholesterol level was elevated. The key question, of course, was the impact of drinking raw milk for a month on key blood values.
However, Renooij’s inflammation markers were elevated at the end of the experiment. And leukocytes were also in the red. “That can be explained because I got sick the last day of the experiment,” Renooij says. “I was coughing heavily and my throat was sore. In that respect, it was nice that there was some interpretation with the results. The Easly doctor explained each value and also compared the two tests with each other.”
Despite the positive results, Renooij went back to his old diet. “I started craving a tender piece of meat the last few days of the experiment anyway,” he laughs. “And a nice cheese isn’t bad either.”
