Lyrwik wrote:
I believe the issue with raw milk isn't usually when it comes straight from a (healthy) cow and is consumed in a short amount of time. I too have had that at times - tastes great. I believe the issue is more when it is then stored and transported, and not consumed in an appropriate amount of time.
That would be true for any food substance though. Raw milk, properly stored, doesn't go bad. It ferments, unlike pasteurized milk, which putrefies.
I did a quick look to find some comparative data on illnesses from pasteurised vs unpasteurised milk. What I found is that yes, overall the total numbers are comparable.
Actually, they're not comparable. Be very careful when you do research, because there are plenty of booby traps and lies out there. I recall some relatively recent incidents where raw milk was blamed for illnesses and it turns out the people who consumed it also ate all sorts of other raw and potentially contaminated food. It was not at all scientific. It was just
assumed that it was the milk that caused the problem. I've seen this happen quite often, in the case of raw milk. Someone gets sick, they blame the milk without even having checked it. The report will usually say something along the lines of
"Doctors believe the illness was caused by drinking raw milk..."
not "The victim drank raw milk, which was tested and found to be contaminated with...".
A similar type of dishonesty happened years ago when an athlete (a baseball player) died after taking an energy supplement containing ephedra. Ephedra has been safely used for thousands of years. The guy died during a workout/training, and immediately all the dishonest pieces of shit in the FDA and mainstream media blamed ephedra. What they did not say is that the man had kidney and liver problems to begin with, was not supposed to be taking stimulants, the supplement itself warned not to take it if you have these pre-existing conditions, the man took far more than the recommended dose - multiple times the correct dose, he was on a very low calorie diet in an attempt to lose weight, he was severely dehydrated from the intense training which was being done in extreme weather (upper 90s with high humidity), etc. The man died because he was a damned fool. Good riddance to him I say. Stupidity of that level deserves to hurt. His stupidity caused others not to be able to have access to a supplement that can be very helpful used correctly.
However, I think attention also needs to be paid to the population values for each of those. I'm not from the US (so happy to be corrected if I'm wrong in this assumption), but I assume that there is far greater consumption of pasteurised products rather than unpasteurised. As such, if there are similar total illnesses, that still indicates that unpasteurised milk does cause a higher rate of illness.
I understand the ratio issues, but the bottom line is that it's far rarer to have problems with raw milk than with pasteurized milk even adjusted for percentage. On top of that, pasteurized milk is allowed to contain over 75,000,000 dead bacteria. While these bacteria will not cause infection, they are foreign proteins and can trigger reactions in people, sometimes serious. Many people who believe they are lactose intolerant and cannot drink milk are in fact not reacting to the lactose but rather experiencing reactions to the dead bacteria and the toxins that are released into the milk during pasteurization (substances that stay in the milk I might add). On top of that, pasteurized/homogenized milk isn't just not healthy,
it's not even food! Pasteurization damages the calcium, making it less absorb-able. It destroys the natural Vitamin D (D3 - cholecalciferol) which is why they have to "fortify" it with Vitamin D (D2, ergocalciferol - an inferior form of Vitamin D). It destroys all the beneficial probiotics (good bacteria) in the milk. It destroys the lactoferrin, which boosts the immune system. It destroys Wulzen factor. Wulzen factor actually assists the calcium into the bones and prevents it from calcifying the arteries and building plaque. It kills the enzymes in the milk, including naturally occurring lactase which digests the lactose (milk sugar). Many "lactose intolerant" people can actually drink raw milk. And homogenization breaks the fat molecules into such tiny particles it can bypass the blood-brain barrier, which is it not supposed to do. We've found high levels of milk fat in Alzheimer's and Parksinson's patients' brains. Then there's the issue of growth hormones, toxic pesticides being sprayed onto the cows, etc. A while back in England, they suspected that a herd of cows had mad cow disease. Turns out it was the pesticide they liberally doused across the backs of the cows (right along their spinal columns) to prevent flies and other insects from attacking them that was making them stagger, twitch and tremble. Pesticides are mainly fat soluble, they enter the bloodstream and go to the brain and nervous system. And consider this...the cows are sprayed with pesticides which are potent neurotoxins. It accumulates in the fat in their bodies (including the milk). The milk is homogenized, which breaks down the pesticide-containing fat molecules small enough to bypass the blood-brain barrier. Now that pesticide-loaded fat accumulates in the brain. The brain is directly dosed with neurotoxic chemicals. I really wish we had more research on that. Scary!
So in every way, pasterurized, homogenized milk is not a food product. It's a dead, infected, Frankenfood.
At the same time, while a lot of people claim to drink raw milk, I've found it's not uncommon for people to drink unhomogenised milk thinking it's 'raw', not realising that it's still pasteurised. Not saying this is you, since you clearly know the difference, but I've seen people who don't.
True, I see people confuse that a lot. Once it's pasteurized, it's garbage. Not homogenizing it doesn't save it.
Yes, there are still pathogens in pasteurised milk. The process is not about killing everything in there (unless you're talking about UHT milk which gets pretty close). The purpose is to vastly reduce the number, thus reducing risk of infection, and slowing further bacterial growth (thereby giving it a longer shelf life). I don't think I've ever seen a claim that pasteurisation makes it 100% safe. I don't think anything ever really is. It's just about reducing risk.
Pasteurization turns milk from a nutritious food product into a toxin. Literally. The FDA and most doctors and of course the milk industry tout pasteurized milk as safe. They never say 100% safe, but they state it in a way that people believe it is 100% safe. Far from it. The irony is that even if pasteurization made milk 100% safe from bacterial contamination, it would not change the fact that the milk becomes health-damaging despite being pathogen free.
The FDA went after a dairy farm in California that sold raw milk. Actually, it tried to stop them from selling raw colostrum. The FDA tried to inoculate the colostrum with various commonly occurring bacteria. It wouldn't grow. They tried it using higher colony counts - far more than what would normally be seen in even badly contaminated milk. Still, they could not contaminate it. So they said "OK, I guess you can sell it." That blew my mind. And it shows how hard it is to infect many raw foods.
Also, looking at the list you gave, I did a quick search on some of them. I'd be careful in relying on some of those (particularly the ones from earlier on). For example, for the one in 1927, it's dubious whether the milk being referred to was actually pasteurised, since the requirement for pasteurisation was only new, and poorly enforced. Given this was 90 years ago, it's really hard to say either way, but it does suggest it's not really great authority for any argument.
True, back then it was rare to even have refrigeration. The point being that people truly believe that drinking raw milk will put you in a hospital bed, if not your death bed, while store-bought, pasteurized milk is "safe". It's anything but. More recent ones, however, are very relevant. The one in 1985 particularly, with 197,000 people affected and 16,000 culture confirmed cases. That isn't even a complete list. It's just a big list of some of the more major issues.
Also, given that pasteurisation is about reducing risk (as opposed to claiming to make it 100% perfectly safe), I'd suggest that that same milk in its raw form would have also been contaminated - but with higher quantities of the bacteria (thereby likely making the outbreak worse).
Highly unlikely. I'd go so far as to say impossible. Factory farmed milk is coming from cows that get no exercise, eat an unnatural diet, are fed cement dust and growth hormones, are highly dosed with antibiotics to combat the inevitable infections from poor conditions and excessive milking (which of course leads to antibiotic resistant bacteria) and therefore their milk is loaded with bacteria. It's not uncommon at all for milking cows to have teats so infected with abscesses that pus is getting squeezed into the milk (sorry to anyone here with a weak stomach!
). FDA doesn't care! Pasteurize it! It'll kill all the nasty stuff in that pus, right? Well, maybe. Often not, as we've seen in so many cases. And even if it does, those dead bacteria are foreign proteins that have negative effects on the body and that release toxins into the milk. Ultra-pasteruization only damages the calcium and destroys more of the vitamins and minerals in the milk and make it even less healthy. There's simply no way to pasteurize milk and make it healthy.
In contrast, raw milk is coming from cows raised mainly on organic pastures, they're treated humanely and not given antibiotics. If one gets sick, it's separated from the herd, The animals are healthier by far, they don't have the bacteria in the milk to begin with. It's healthier in every way. It's funny, when I first started buying raw milk, I gave some to my grandmother, who before WWII was raised on a farm. Everyone drank milk raw back then. Breakfast consisted of cleaning off the cow's teats, then squeezing milk into a glass and drinking it. Raw and fresh as could be! I asked her if she remembers anyone getting sick, vomiting, etc. Never. No one she knows, no one in the family, none of the other families almost ever got sick. Oh, the usual colds and flus. A few got mumps or chicken pox. But never any food borne illness from raw milk.
Yep, contamination can occur through processing - however, this typically occurs through late stages of production, such as bottling, etc. where things haven't been cleaned properly. This could have the effect of making individual outbreaks worse. However with fewer, larger producers (rather than lots of smaller producers), this also reduces the frequency, and thus should not really affect the overall numbers (assuming appropriate cleanliness standards etc are held the same). My experience has usually been though, that larger producers (of anything) tend to have greater scrutiny than smaller ones. (Anecdotal evidence warning) I spent a while in an internal audit role, which included food handling/safety practices. I've seen some pretty shocking things - especially in the smaller places.
I've seen the exact opposite. I wouldn't use factory farmed milk to
flush my toilet, much less to drink! The conditions of the cows is abominable. What they eat is horrifying. What's found in the milk is disgusting and unhealthy. And even if you had 100% perfect production sanitation, the fact that the cows are so contaminated and unhealthy (and thus also the milk) and that the pasteurization process creates to many foreign proteins (dead bacteria), the level of sanitation is almost irrelevant. The milk is still unhealthy and damaging to the body.
Smaller production is also safer. A small farm like the one I go to, assuming its product somehow got magically contaminated to the point of causing disease, would infect at worst probably a few dozen people, maybe as many as a hundred. No way in hell could it affect 197,000 people with 16,000 culture confirmed cases as we saw in 1985. Physically impossible. I'd take many smaller, more conscientious, responsible farms over a handful of mega-corporations whose only interest is money and who will cut corners to get there regardless of the effect on the product. This is why big factory farms have very sick cows exuding pus into the milk. No worries, we'll just
PASTEURIZE it! And leave 75,000,000 dead bacteria floating around in that gallon of milk along with the toxins they released into the milk when killed. And destroy the Vitamin D, Vitamin A, calcium, Wulzen factor, enzymes, probiotics, lactoferrin, etc. And then fortify it with inferior synthetic vitamins that cause other problems.
No thanks. I'll stick with my nutritious raw milk.
(I know, that's beer - we don't have a milk drinking icon yet).
So yes, this is certainly a risk - but, this would equally apply to raw milk.
Actually, it
doesn't apply equally. Huge mega-producers buy cows dirt cheap and can afford to lose entire herds. They can afford to fight major lawsuits. They've been show to have utter disregard for the health of the cows (and therefore for the health of the consumer). They don't mind tons of pus getting into the milk because they believe pasteurization is akin to the AD&D spell
purify food and water (which is definitely is not) (that's my attempt to inject a tiny sliver of D&D relevance
). The product coming out of the factory is of far inferior quality and is actually detrimental to health.
Small farms selling raw milk own just a small number of cows and cannot afford to lose one due to maltreatment. What a mega-corporation would write off as a loss and not even notice would shut down virtually any small farm. So they must take better care of the cows. They also are forced to practice better hygiene because they know any food borne illness will put them out of business. And if they get sued or fined, they may go bankrupt (personally). And then there is the threat of governmental fines. They just can't afford it.
Bottom line, outbreaks of food-borne illness in raw milk has historically been very, very low. When illness began was in the early days when people started moving to big cities and instead of buying raw milk direct from the farm locally, had it shipped in via large trucks. Prior to that, raw milk illnesses were very, very rare. The problem was that sanitation was not that great once we started shipping it to the cities, and the trucks harbored all sorts of pathogens in the storage tanks. Now we have raw milk being stored and shipped in dirty, contaminated (sometimes grossly contaminated) tanks and being days old when the consumer got it. Even then, it was very rare to have any significant outbreak. However, pasteurization stepped in and
only after that point do we see such massive outbreaks of food borne illness in milk. And even in modern times, the rate of illness from raw milk is so far below that of any other food product as to be insignificant. So no matter how you look at it, raw milk was, is and always will be safer and more nutritious than pasteurized milk.
So, overall, if we're talking about drinking raw milk straight from a healthy cow, in a short amount of time - I tend to agree. However, if we're talking about milk which is then transported, bottled, transported again, and consumed potentially weeks later, then I think it's a different story.
This is a theoretically possible concern. Raw milk isn't meant to be stored for long periods of time. But then again, when raw milk sits too long, it does not putrefy as pasteurized milk does. Putrefied pasteurized milk is dangerous to drink. You can't use it. Raw milk doesn't "go bad". It ferments and becomes what is also called "clabbered milk". It's just the beneficial bacteria eating all the sugars and turning the flavor sour. It's just like liquid yogurt. I've had very old bottles of raw milk turn sour like that. I just whipped it into a smoothie with some berries and drank it. Good probiotics, no bad effect. Now of course, there is a limit to everything. But my point is that if you left a gallon of pasteurized milk and a gallon of raw milk both sitting out at room temperature for 5 or 6 days, you could still absolutely safely drink the raw milk (I actually make kefir that way) but the pasteurized milk would get you sicker than hell if you even tasted it.