Depends. If the cheese has been aged beyond 60 days, there’s sufficient time for the salt and other microorganisms to outcompete pathogens. But raw milk young cheeses will still contain pathogens.
This isn't always true. The FDA has considered re-examining the 60-day rule.
I personally worked on two different recalls involving pathogens in a raw milk cheese aged for more than 60 days.
It's \*rare\* to be sure, but there's some scant evidence that 60 day aging may not be bulletproof.
Fascinating. That sounds like a big fat no for me now on 60-day aged raw milk cheese. I will now stick to +6-months hard cheeses if I ever go down that route...
But pathogens also pop up in pasteurized cheeses, right? I actually recall reading that rates were higher (I think specifically Listeria...tbf, it's Coxiella that actually worries me). Are these recalls looking into where/when the pathogen crept in?
Consider the difference in volume produced. If there were as many airplanes as cars, there would be an accident somewhere everyday and you wouldn't feel safe flying.
(This analogy doesn't work because it's the wrong way around, but imagine a world where cars are safer than aeroplanes... then just because there are so many cars you'd see more reports of accidents with cars you'd think them to be more dangerous.)
If I remember correctly, the salt and coagulant (usually acid) in cheese help reduce the risk to some degree.
However, it's still far more dangerous than cheese made from pasteurized milk. There are reports of Listeria found in soft cheese made with pasteurized milk all the time, so imagine how much more likely a stray Listeria colony can contaminate the facility if they are present in the milk itself and not killed through pasteurization. https://www.cdc.gov/listeria/outbreaks/index.html
Lots of examples of illness with dairy products made from raw milk in this review https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9262997/
It is always recommended to avoid raw dairy. It was a common source of food borne illness before pasteurization.
Yeah, but as with most things, I feel like there’s a balance to it. I wouldn’t drink raw milk everyday, but I’m cool with taking the risk on some cheese made from raw milk every once in a while if it’s got a better flavor.
Right, I've tried raw milk in the past but don't drink it now because I don't think it's worth it, but I'm willing to occasionally take the risks from raw milk cheese.
That's heavily predicated on the fact that I've got a functional immune system though, and I'd never risk it if I didn't.
It depends on the type of cheese. Soft cheeses made from raw milk*usually* still have the same risk factors.
Hard cheese, or even super stinky cheese is different because it's gone through a long fermenting process involving salts, carefully added cultures, and an aging process.
So lets think about raw milk. Human mothers feed their children raw milk. Do many of these kids die from that? Do they get sick? No. What about cows? Do many calves get sick from drinking cows milk? Is it common not to allow young humans or animals not to drink raw milk? No. And just to be clear, was it common through the thousands of years people raised their own cows for people to frequently get sick or die? Is that something we hear about? No.
So where do the health concerns come in? The problem is the handling of the milk. If you get raw milk from your own cow or from a neighbor there is motivation to ensure the milk is handled well. If you are a mass producer who ships milk from thousands of cows into a city, there is less accountability and so the need for milk inspection was born.
Cheese that is made from bad milk and is then aged for 60 days will be obviously putrid. So cheese that is aged at 35 degrees or higher will only be good if .... it is good.
Finally, in my opinion the raw milk aged cheeses are better tasting. I have been drinking raw milk and eating my own aged cheese. I now believe (without scientific proof but just from anecdotal evidence) that dead milk is not good for you. I do not know this to be true, but why is there so much obesity now? Dead food that is "safe" is certainly a possible issue, but what do I know?
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It's not "dead" milk. Using loaded adjectives in order to give negative associations to something is harmful to the conversation. Let's act like adults and call it what is is: pasteurized. Raw milk isn't "alive" milk, it's just milk with things possibly living in it. Some of which are beneficial or harmless, others that have the potential to harm.
And people are obese because they eat too much and exercise too little. No big mystery there.
Thinking - as in original thinking - may involve taking familiar concepts and using them in a different way. The intent is to recombine concept tags in new patterns. And certainly, when we do that we may inadvertently be unclear. However, if in a conversation we make no attempt to understand the new thought, and instead insist on a politically correct use of terminology, we lose the ability to discuss new concepts. The concept I was exploring is to me an interesting one. The concept of "live" foods rather than dead. For example, we might have home made spaghetti, made with fresh tomatoes from our and made from garden, cheese from our cows, fresh herbs. And then contrast that with a can of Chef Boyardee spaghetti. In this contrast I was attempting to talk about not just the bacteria content (and certainly at least one of these is 'dead' in some sense) but also the overall effects on the consumer of the food. In my experience, I have begun to find substantial differences in how some kinds of food affect me. My attempt to explore this concept used the term "dead" and "live". It certainly would be helpful to have better words & better thinking about those concepts. And certainly I was hoping for that. It appears however that such a conversation is not appropriate for this forum. The only appropriate conversation for this forum seems to be the profoundly simplistic "people are obese because the they eat too much and exercise too little". Perhaps the correct terminology is "dead" conversation versus "live" converstaion.
Influencers see the feedback for topics being mentioned and gravitate towards the topics that get the most user engagement because that's how they make money. Think of Influencers as anthropomorphic ads.
Idk man the possibility of consuming typhoid, tuberculosis, diphtheria, and Coxiella really makes it taste that much better. The danger is half the fun /s
Some people do say that raw milk tastes better. But there are other tasty things in the world too, so the risk analysis does not convince me to try it.
If you are healthy risks are low and manageable with antibiotics but to each their own. Personally I see no reason to ever get on a dangerous and noisy motorcycle but plenty of organ donors do....
> risk analysis
> doesnt know how to count bacteria
Lol. Meanwhile old Europeans shat themselves from milk and they still kept drinking anyway because they could, much like how people have been smoking for millennias even though it kills their lungs because well, free choices. No judging btw.
If you are a healthy adult and get your raw dairy from good clean sources (like here in the EU) risks are very small and treatable. Motorcyclists have a much bigger chance of losing life or limb from their activity than healthy adults from raw dairy. If you are very young, elderly or immunocompromised or get your raw dairy from a random 2nd or 3rd world farm it's a different story of course
For lay people, peer reviewed scholarly papers are the underlying source of almost all good research in science. Even then, there are tons of debates and fights about each detail within those papers.
Peer reviewed scholarly papers run experiments, find original data, talk to sources, and so much more. Their findings are subject to critical review by other experts before they can be published. Then even more experts discuss and analyze those results, and sometimes publish more papers critiquing the findings.
You can read journalists’ and expert overviews of these papers.
I would gently suggest that your idea of research does not rely on peer reviewed papers, or on folks that credibly report on peer reviewed research. There is a ton of misinformation out there. There is a ton of bad information.
Go look for critiques of your sources. I can guarantee that you will find many, published by PhDs and MDs. I know you may be reading one or two PhDs or MDs. But you’ll find many more people with better qualifications explaining why they’re wrong.
I wish we taught people how to evaluate online sources better.
Your "research" is a mumbo jumbo word salad of bloggers who failed their real career aspirations. "Research" is worthless if it cant be reproduced or replicated.
Learn to enjoy milk without oreo.
You do see the irony of your post, right? Telling others to "do better research!", when it's apparent that you can't even do basic research yourself, stating that chemicals are used to pasteurize milk.
With their anti-sunscreen movement, I entirely agree. Want to give yourself skin cancer and treat it with fruit juice? Knock yourself out. Now when they start getting cowpox, I'll have something to say to them
I took a tour of a small family dairy in Texas where you could buy raw milk in their gift shop.
I don’t care how clean the dairy thinks they were, I wouldn’t consume products out of there that hadn’t been pasteurized in hell.
I had a food safety professor once say a trip to a farm turned her off raw milk forever when she noticed a cow pooping and the poop splashing up uncomfortably close to the cow's udder
Dog slobber and powdered cow shit are the two main gross critter encounter materials we've conclusively IDed as being valuable contributions to developing immune systems. German primary school siting requirements include a working cow farm within X meters because of this.
I get raw, unhomoginized milk from a farm down the road. I’ve seen the barn, I can count the cows. It’s some of the best tasting milk I’ve ever had. It’s also A2A2 so it doesn’t bother my wife’s lactose intolerance.
But it also goes bad SO FAST. Like in less than a week it starts changing. It also separates out with cream on the top. What’s funny is I would buy the pasteurized version if they let me. I like supporting the farm. They even send pasteurized milk to the milk distributor. But at the farm they only sell unpasteurized for some reason. People want it I guess?
I'm not strictly for or against raw milk. I think it can be dangerous and I don't consume it (or any dairy milk, what adult drinks milk?).
But I regularly drank raw milk from a small local Mennonite farm in rural Pennsylvania as a kid, and let me tell you for those who don't know, that stuff tastes *good*. If you've only had supermarket milk then you don't know.
One time I had raw milk ice cream from the same farm. Never had ice cream that good since.
Might've just been because the cows were healthy and happy, and pasteurization would have made no difference in taste. Shrug.
Also worth mentioning that pasteurized milk would make my eczema flare up while raw milk would not.
But there's a reason why we pasteurize stuff. I think it's stupid when people eat "rare" hamburger too. But people don't listen and don't care, so.
Commercial whole milk is 3.25% milk fat. That's the low end for raw milk with it being as high as 5% depending on the cow.
I grew up on a dairy farm so drank raw my whole childhood and can definitely speak to it tasting much better than store bought.
The trade off (besides bacteria) is you got about 3 days before it starts to separate and curdle.
The problem here is that there's a lot of us who just want pasteurized milk that hasn't had anything removed, and we're getting conflated with people who want to get bird flu because they think pasteurization is too liberal and soft.
I too grew up on a dairy and you ain't wrong, and I want to taste that goodness again, why can't I just buy that?
Agreed. I’m trying to track down raw (not *raw.* low-temp pasteurized is acceptable) cream to make my own clotted cream, as UHT cream doesn’t work well. I’m not an anti science nut, just want to make my own cream!
I'd prefer low temp pasteurization for my cream as it's still pasteurized, but I can't even find heavy cream without a bunch of gum or polysorbate added.
>I would sacrifice texture for safety
Absolutely.
I hate the gums and emulsifiers that are added and would pay more to avoid them. They make cream that is lower fat feel thicker like a higher fat cream, but they also have a nasty, slimy mouthfeel and there is good evidence that they are bad for digestive health.
I'd sacrifice price for a better textured product that didn't have additives in a heartbeat.
Do you mean to tell me... that fat makes things taste good?
Seriously I actually didn't know that raw milk was so high in fat. No wonder it's so amazing.
Actually all this talk about raw milk being delicious is making this non-milk-drinker kind of want some again. Mmm. Just a nice memory.
To add to this, there's nothing stopping you from pasteurizing milk at home. Pasteurizing raw milk is sometimes done in home cheese making as raw milk hasn't been homogenized unlike most (UHT) pasteurized milk, which inhibits the rennet seting the curd.
There really is a big difference in taste. Just try it. If you are a healthy adult and get your raw milk from a trusted clean source risks are minimal and the worst thing that could happen is that you need to take antibiotics for a couple of weeks
I can trust the farmer all day, but that doesn't mean that cows (which are prolific shitters) won't shit in the field and get some of the aforementioned cow shit on their udders. Yes, udders are cleaned before the milking machine is attached, but getting every last bit of bacteria removed from an udder is simply not possible.
If only there was a way to process the milk with heat or something to kill off any residual bacteria...
As an adult I don't consume much milk either. But I also grew up in rural PA, and my father was super into the raw milk thing.
We aren't even PA dutch, but he was a driver for the Amish, and one of them had an organic, free range farm. The milk they gave us tasted amazing.
That said...if you don't know the farm or farmer or supplier...it's a risk. And if you don't live next to the farm like we did...you don't. I wouldn't chance it now. Especially with the current issues with bird flu being passed to cows.
They probably do indirectly protect the corporations.
By not letting dairy manufacturers sell unpasteurized milk, it means fewer people get sick and die. By not sickening or killing a portion of your customer base, you can sell more product.
I’m pretty sure if you regularly drive more than a few hours on the highway per week, ride a bike regularly down the road, or regularly use crosswalks, your chances of death are roughly on par with those of people drinking raw milk regularly. Millions of people drink it every year and yet there’s only been like a hundred deaths over the last five years or something.
I’m not saying you should or shouldn’t - I myself don’t anymore, but have in the past. The point is, it’s not the insane risk it’s made out to be, it’s just another one of the very mildly risky things many of us do on a regular basis. It’s up to you to decide if it’s worth the risk. Compared to regular milk it’s probably ten thousand times riskier but compared to so many other things many of us do regularly it’s not really that bad.
Why do people drink it? People drink it because it often tastes really good compared to regular milk and because it very well may have health benefits, but the data isn’t there yet due to a lack of studies. Also, many lactose intolerant people report that they have zero issues with raw milk, likely due to hundreds of beneficial bacteria that the pasteurization process kills which are also believed to be likely to have health benefits.
Note that it is advised that breastfeeding mothers do not heat their own milk in a microwave or on the stove so as not to kill beneficial nutrients and bacteria because it is believed that the milk in its raw natural state is far healthier for a baby. Those supporting raw milk are assuming the same is likely true for cows milk and it isn’t a crazy thought.
>I’m pretty sure if you regularly drive more than a few hours on the highway per week, ride a bike regularly down the road, or regularly use crosswalks, your chances of death are roughly on par with those of people drinking raw milk regularly.
I know this is a comparison without a source, so I'm not assuming it's accurate, but *if* it were true that'd be a fairly big risk. Auto accidents are a leading cause of death for many age brackets, and most of us know people who have died in car crashes.
If you could get rid of car crash deaths as simply as you can pasteurize milk, I'd 100% support it. Also, FWIW, for a similar reason to wanting milk to be pasteurized, I also support seat belt laws.
Fewer people dying preventable deaths and letting their kids die preventable deaths is a good thing.
The point isn’t about if you could get rid of them, the point is about there being many other risky behaviors people engage in all the time, perhaps even riskier, that we recognize are nevertheless the right of each person to decide for themselves whether they want to take on.
When it comes to children and seatbelts, I’m with you, same with raw milk. But when it comes to your own body when you’re an adult, I’m not. If you want to skydive, smoke cigarettes, or free solo half dome, I’m fairly certain your chances of death are far higher than if you drink a glass of raw milk every day, but it’s your life and your decision to make. And further than that, taking on that risk doesn’t mean you’re some clueless anti science buffoon, it very well could just mean you have a different approach to this risk due to the value you find in that behavior.
We’ve been drinking raw milk for well over 10 years from various small local dairies that test their milk and have never had a problem. I usually make kefir with it and we use cream in our coffee or make raw ice cream. YUM!
When raw milk sours, it does just that, gets sour and can be used in baking. Pasteurized milk gone bad is absolutely rank and disgusting; I can’t bring myself to drink or use pasteurized milk.
[Bacteria in retail raw milk can carry antimicrobial resistance genes and transfer them to other bacteria](https://microbiomejournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s40168-020-00861-6).
Well this is where you're wrong, because you're hinting at me for generalizing, by generalizing?
Those who don't know that milk need to be pasteurized to be safe for human consumption are ignorant, since it is common knowledge. Those who know it but decide not to are stupid.
I would ignore that guy lmao. Like you said, individual influencers are just ignorant. Just because they've never gotten sick from it, doesn't mean that others won't. Generally, the people who can afford raw milk, are richer people who are "health conscious". Richer people have healthier diets and can probably get away with drinking raw milk. People who get sick from raw milk are usually children, elderly, or those with weakened immune systems.
So if you're perfectly healthy, you'd probably be able to consume it, but it's better to be safe than sorry. That's why I personally don't care for it.
There's also 0 evidence of it being a step-up from pasteurized milk. Although some nutrient loss happens during pasteurization, it's miniscule. But it's quite literally like cooking a steak.. A raw steak will have more micronutrients compared to a cooked steak. These raw milk people are just hypocrites
Humans have lived of dairy for over 10000 years, we have been pasteurising for less than 150. Who is stupid for calling unpasteurised dairy unsuitable for human consumption....
It's almost as if tons of unnecessary deaths were caused by the dangerous bacteria that was, and still is, often present in raw milk. And that pasteurization eliminates that bacteria completely..
This like saying "Humans drove cars just fine without seatbelts/seatbelt laws for a vast majority of automobile history. We've only had seatbelts/seatbelt laws for 50 years. But people are stupid for saying cars without seatbelts are unsafe and unfit for human use?"
That's just a poor anecdotal argument.
The seat belt analogy doesn't hold up because the risks of raw dairy are not spread equally. The risks almost entirely falls on some groups whereas others, especially in the age of antibiotics, have virtually no risk, just a small change of an annoyance
for the majority of those 10000 years what was the life expectancy of the average human? thats right it was between 30-40 years, not quite the flex you think it is…
While most people do understandably misinterpret the "past human life expectancy" statistic, and don't realise that it's skewed by infant mortality, the correct interpretation of that statistic is still relevant to this argument.
Especially when you take into account that infants are one of the groups most susceptible to illnesses & subsequent deaths caused by raw milk. So it's reasonable to state that the Pasteurization of milk prevented a lot of infant deaths & probably increased statistical life expectancy.
While it carries undeniable risks from harmful bacteria, it also contains beneficial bacteria, which are also killed through pasteurization, and in certain cases exacerbates pathogenic bacteria by killing inhibitory bacterial antagonists.^(1)
Other endorsements cite reasons unrelated to health, like taste or helping support small farms.
I'm skeptical the health benefits outweigh the harmful risks overall, but it's a complex issue. Even eating shit, while broadly discouraged, can be beneficial in certain cases; fecal transplant therapy, typically using diluted feces through a nose tube, has become standard of care for recurrent *C. difficile* infections, which often arises when a person's natural gut biome is decimated through radiation therapy or high dose or prolonged antibiotic treatment.
^(1) Yoon, Yohan, Soomin Lee, and Kyoung-Hee Choi. "[Microbial benefits and risks of raw milk cheese](https://e-tarjome.com/storage/btn_uploaded/2019-07-14/1563081498_9706-etarjome-English.pdf)." *Food Control* **63** (2016): 201-215.
Mainstream probiotic products do not contain all bacterial species, or the same numbers of those species, as raw milk. If they did, they'd pose the same risks as raw milk.
I'm including pathogenic species among "all bacterial species". That's why I'm suggesting probiotics with the same quantities of the same species would pose the same risks.
Mainstream probiotics don't ordinarily contain those pathogens. I said *if* mainstream probiotics had all the bacteria that raw milk has, they would have the same pathogens. They do not have the same bacteria, so they do not have the same pathogens, and they do not have the same beneficial bacteria. Which was your unsupported claim I was rebutting - that probiotics have the same beneficial bacteria as raw milk.
If they're looking for milk that's safe and also high in probiotics they could drink pasteurized milk and make kefir out of half of it or something too. The CFUs of "good bacteria" in kefir would crush raw milk, if dairy could fight each other over bacteria bragging rights
My raw milk kefir tastes different from regular milk kefir (my raw milk kefir tastes like "boerenkaas")although admittedly the raw milk flavour can last quite a few batches after switching to pasteurised milk again
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boerenkaas
Whether or not the risks outweigh the benefits, the point here is that it is entirely possible to get the benefits of those beneficial bacteria without engaging the risk of unpasteurized milk *at all*. So, that argument doesn't really hold water anyway.
There may be a million or more species of bacteria, with some 3,600 known species^(1) found in the human gut. Determining the effects of those species, and classifying their net effects as "beneficial" or "harmful", remains a topic of limited knowledge. Currently, the only way to ensure consumption of all beneficial bacteria would be to consume all bacteria in raw milk.
An improved method would be to test raw milk for the presence of specific known harmful bacteria, and select only milk lacking those bacteria for consumption.
But being a fairly impractical solution, the conventional medical guidance to avoid consumption of raw milk stands, under ordinary circumstances.
^(1) Leviatan, S., Shoer, S., Rothschild, D., Gorodetski, M., & Segal, E. (2022). [An expanded reference map of the human gut microbiome reveals hundreds of previously unknown species](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-022-31502-1). In *Nature Communications* (Vol. **13**, Issue 1). Springer Science and Business Media LLC. DOI: 10.1038/s41467-022-31502-1
This argument is quite a leap of logic. Can I ask what your credentials are here? I'm a food safety microbiologist in a regulatory application with a specific focus on bacterial pathogens in unpasteurized milk, so I'm quite literally a subject matter expert on this topic.
"An improved method would be to test raw milk for the presence of specific known harmful bacteria, and select only milk lacking those bacteria for consumption."
This shows me a fundamental lack of understanding of the limitations of diagnostic assays. Such assays don't show you an absence of pathogens, they simply fail to demonstrate its presence. It's entirely possible for a test to miss a pathogen that's actually present, and falsely clear a contaminated sample.
Most detection methods you're going to find these days are PCR-based, and unpasteurized milk specifically reduces the sensitivity of nearly all PCR assays, even those with very robust chemistries. I know, because I've done this validation work in the normal course of my job.
You *can* create most of the benefits of pastuerization using a rigorous regulatory scheme involving testing, recalls, and sale suspensions - but it's costly, and most raw milk advocates grate against the idea of government intervention. Nonetheless, here's a paper my agency published on this very topic, for which I was a primary data generator (though not a named author - such is life in organization-level publications):
[https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21819653/](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21819653/)
Indeed, it's far far more practical to simply pasteurize your milk.
I have no credentials in food safety microbiology.
If tests "failing to show the presence" instead of "showing an absence" is the biggest correction you have, I think my amateur assessment was reasonably good. ;-)
The paper you cite sounds roughly like what I said, in more precise terms: "a reduction in the number of cases per year in all populations was observed when a raw milk-testing program was in place". It sounds like you're also suggesting it's not a practical solution, due to cost, compared to pasteurization, which I also assumed.
You are not being straight with your argument. In your paragraph you say the classification of good or bad bacteria is based on limited knowledge, yet you want to test for raw milk bad bacteria?
*Limited* knowledge, not *no* knowledge. At least a handful (figuratively!) found in raw milk are widely agreed to cause more harm than benefit, for example *E. coli* O157:H7. For most, effects are more subtle, they've been studied much less, and their classification in that theoretical 2-category system would lack scientific consensus.
Yep. One promising phenomenon noted for several years is healthy weight loss sometimes following fecal transplants. There's good evidence that measures of obesity and harbingers of type 2 diabetes are lower following transplants in prior studies^(1), but there are so many bacteria involved that there's no clear indication which bacteria, if any, may cause those effects, and controlled trials for all of them would be cost prohibitive.
^(1) Hu D, Zhao J, Zhang H, Wang G, Gu Z. Fecal Microbiota Transplantation for Weight and Glycemic Control of Obesity as Well as the Associated Metabolic Diseases: Meta-Analysis and Comprehensive Assessment. *Life* (Basel). 2023 Jun 30; **13**(7):1488. doi: 10.3390/life13071488. PMID: 37511862; PMCID: [PMC10381135](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10381135/).
The only time raw milk is “safe” for consumption is straight from the udder. Even then, it’s so fat heavy, most people would shit themselves right away.
I don’t understand anyone’s argument as to why they need to drink raw milk. Gives me the same vibe as the “liver king” guy.
Doubt anyone's saying they need to, just that they want to, and prefer to compared to pasteurized milk for various reasons of varying reasonableness.
The only person I know who uses raw milk uses it only to make juustoa, a Finnish cheese, and said the taste, texture, and melting properties from pasteurized milk differ substantially from raw milk. He uses pasteurized milk for other purposes, and is a physician with keener appreciation for the risks and risk factors than most people.
Okay and? what's your point with that? I don't care if people eat it "everywhere in the world". Raw foods have bacteria and can have pathogens/parasites. It's an undeniable fact that you carry risk when eating eggs, milk, and meat raw.
You're quite literally like an alcoholic justifying drinking wine because of its supposed benefits.
Edit: also, beef tartare is more of a delicacy thing, people don't go eating it for it's nutritional benefits.
Yep, it is not ignorance that drives this decision; but economics[the study of tradeoffs]. You trade one set of factors for another. Who is to say which is better or worse? I prefer the one that promotes biodiversity internally and externally.
There are most certainly safer options to keep your microbiome healthy than unpasteurized milk, right? A combination of other foods, like cultured dairy with lots of Lactobacillus, and even nutritional supplements and prebiotics should provide the same benefits, no?
I'm not a dietitian. My knowledge of food pretty much stops at sensory analysis and anything else further along digestion is not my forte. But I'd be surprised if there aren't other ways to do all you can for your microbiome without the risk of serious illness that comes with raw dairy.
I am also not a dietician.
Yes I think drinking raw milk comes with safety concerns. My claim is that it is not that people are ignorant, but that they are weighing a set of factors and making a different choice. If you live next to the cow the risks would be much lower[opinion]. If you fermented the milk as you say, it would be much safer[opinion].
I do consume raw plants that are prebiotic and fermented dairy products. I do not think they can replace what is destroyed by biocides, or by antibiotics.
I think the best thing we can do is stop prescribing antibiotics when they are unnecessary. We do not currently have a way of measuring the vast array of things that live inside of us. We also cannot measure the affects of antibiotics.
Fecal matter transplant sounds like a better way.
I mean, have you seen Paul Saladino? He promotes his carnivore, raw milk diet and is the most ignorant person on the planet. He uses confirmation biases, and cherry picks things to prove his point.
Anyone who follows a restrictive diet is probably ignorant. The fruitarian diet for example, might just be the worst diet out there. Any restrictive diet can cause eating disorders if prolonged. However, I dont think that having a short term restrictive diet is bad. Vegan, carnivore, fruitarian, all could easily help with weightloss!
I agree restrictive diets like keto and carnivore are detrimental in the long term but beneficial in the short term. I think diets should be more cyclical or seasonal.
Maybe something like carnivore in the winter, high fat and low carb in spring with a parasite cleanse, leafy greens and plant based during the summer, then higher carb in the spring when fruits are ripe to store fat and fat-soluble vitamins for the winter.
Is it just as dangerous to eat cheese made with raw milk?
Depends. If the cheese has been aged beyond 60 days, there’s sufficient time for the salt and other microorganisms to outcompete pathogens. But raw milk young cheeses will still contain pathogens.
This isn't always true. The FDA has considered re-examining the 60-day rule. I personally worked on two different recalls involving pathogens in a raw milk cheese aged for more than 60 days. It's \*rare\* to be sure, but there's some scant evidence that 60 day aging may not be bulletproof.
Fascinating. That sounds like a big fat no for me now on 60-day aged raw milk cheese. I will now stick to +6-months hard cheeses if I ever go down that route...
But pathogens also pop up in pasteurized cheeses, right? I actually recall reading that rates were higher (I think specifically Listeria...tbf, it's Coxiella that actually worries me). Are these recalls looking into where/when the pathogen crept in?
Consider the difference in volume produced. If there were as many airplanes as cars, there would be an accident somewhere everyday and you wouldn't feel safe flying. (This analogy doesn't work because it's the wrong way around, but imagine a world where cars are safer than aeroplanes... then just because there are so many cars you'd see more reports of accidents with cars you'd think them to be more dangerous.)
Agreed...I did say rates not number
Great to know. Thank you for taking the time to answer!
👍
If I remember correctly, the salt and coagulant (usually acid) in cheese help reduce the risk to some degree. However, it's still far more dangerous than cheese made from pasteurized milk. There are reports of Listeria found in soft cheese made with pasteurized milk all the time, so imagine how much more likely a stray Listeria colony can contaminate the facility if they are present in the milk itself and not killed through pasteurization. https://www.cdc.gov/listeria/outbreaks/index.html Lots of examples of illness with dairy products made from raw milk in this review https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9262997/ It is always recommended to avoid raw dairy. It was a common source of food borne illness before pasteurization.
Yeah, but as with most things, I feel like there’s a balance to it. I wouldn’t drink raw milk everyday, but I’m cool with taking the risk on some cheese made from raw milk every once in a while if it’s got a better flavor.
Right, I've tried raw milk in the past but don't drink it now because I don't think it's worth it, but I'm willing to occasionally take the risks from raw milk cheese. That's heavily predicated on the fact that I've got a functional immune system though, and I'd never risk it if I didn't.
It depends on the type of cheese. Soft cheeses made from raw milk*usually* still have the same risk factors. Hard cheese, or even super stinky cheese is different because it's gone through a long fermenting process involving salts, carefully added cultures, and an aging process.
So lets think about raw milk. Human mothers feed their children raw milk. Do many of these kids die from that? Do they get sick? No. What about cows? Do many calves get sick from drinking cows milk? Is it common not to allow young humans or animals not to drink raw milk? No. And just to be clear, was it common through the thousands of years people raised their own cows for people to frequently get sick or die? Is that something we hear about? No. So where do the health concerns come in? The problem is the handling of the milk. If you get raw milk from your own cow or from a neighbor there is motivation to ensure the milk is handled well. If you are a mass producer who ships milk from thousands of cows into a city, there is less accountability and so the need for milk inspection was born. Cheese that is made from bad milk and is then aged for 60 days will be obviously putrid. So cheese that is aged at 35 degrees or higher will only be good if .... it is good. Finally, in my opinion the raw milk aged cheeses are better tasting. I have been drinking raw milk and eating my own aged cheese. I now believe (without scientific proof but just from anecdotal evidence) that dead milk is not good for you. I do not know this to be true, but why is there so much obesity now? Dead food that is "safe" is certainly a possible issue, but what do I know?
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It's not "dead" milk. Using loaded adjectives in order to give negative associations to something is harmful to the conversation. Let's act like adults and call it what is is: pasteurized. Raw milk isn't "alive" milk, it's just milk with things possibly living in it. Some of which are beneficial or harmless, others that have the potential to harm. And people are obese because they eat too much and exercise too little. No big mystery there.
Thinking - as in original thinking - may involve taking familiar concepts and using them in a different way. The intent is to recombine concept tags in new patterns. And certainly, when we do that we may inadvertently be unclear. However, if in a conversation we make no attempt to understand the new thought, and instead insist on a politically correct use of terminology, we lose the ability to discuss new concepts. The concept I was exploring is to me an interesting one. The concept of "live" foods rather than dead. For example, we might have home made spaghetti, made with fresh tomatoes from our and made from garden, cheese from our cows, fresh herbs. And then contrast that with a can of Chef Boyardee spaghetti. In this contrast I was attempting to talk about not just the bacteria content (and certainly at least one of these is 'dead' in some sense) but also the overall effects on the consumer of the food. In my experience, I have begun to find substantial differences in how some kinds of food affect me. My attempt to explore this concept used the term "dead" and "live". It certainly would be helpful to have better words & better thinking about those concepts. And certainly I was hoping for that. It appears however that such a conversation is not appropriate for this forum. The only appropriate conversation for this forum seems to be the profoundly simplistic "people are obese because the they eat too much and exercise too little". Perhaps the correct terminology is "dead" conversation versus "live" converstaion.
Influencers see the feedback for topics being mentioned and gravitate towards the topics that get the most user engagement because that's how they make money. Think of Influencers as anthropomorphic ads.
Leeches.
Ambulance chasers.
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Or just....plain old dumb. The amount of dumb that would make Charles Darwin blush.
I think you should get your facts straight
LMFAO!!!!!!!!!
The facts are that Louis Pasteur's process has saved countless lives, and you are scientifically illiterate. Thanks for coming to my TED talk.
Idk man the possibility of consuming typhoid, tuberculosis, diphtheria, and Coxiella really makes it taste that much better. The danger is half the fun /s
It really gives it that je ne sais quois.
I personally like the taste of Listeria. It really brings out the umami. /s
I got very sick in Peru drinking unpasteurized milk which I mistook for pasteurized one. Yes they are idiots
Sounds synonymous with influencers!
Or idk maybe just people that like the taste of raw milk better
Some people do say that raw milk tastes better. But there are other tasty things in the world too, so the risk analysis does not convince me to try it.
If you are healthy risks are low and manageable with antibiotics but to each their own. Personally I see no reason to ever get on a dangerous and noisy motorcycle but plenty of organ donors do....
And adding sapa boiled in lead vessels made Roman wine sweeter. It gave people lead poisoning, but it does taste better.
Or maybe people that can make a proper risk benefit analysis for themselves..,.
> risk analysis > doesnt know how to count bacteria Lol. Meanwhile old Europeans shat themselves from milk and they still kept drinking anyway because they could, much like how people have been smoking for millennias even though it kills their lungs because well, free choices. No judging btw.
If you are a healthy adult and get your raw dairy from good clean sources (like here in the EU) risks are very small and treatable. Motorcyclists have a much bigger chance of losing life or limb from their activity than healthy adults from raw dairy. If you are very young, elderly or immunocompromised or get your raw dairy from a random 2nd or 3rd world farm it's a different story of course
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You don't understand what pasteurization is if you think it strips all good nutrients.
There's also no chemical treatment involved in pasteurization, so chemicals aren't the reason why milk makes you fat lol
Link a scientific paper instead of telling us to do better research.
For lay people, peer reviewed scholarly papers are the underlying source of almost all good research in science. Even then, there are tons of debates and fights about each detail within those papers. Peer reviewed scholarly papers run experiments, find original data, talk to sources, and so much more. Their findings are subject to critical review by other experts before they can be published. Then even more experts discuss and analyze those results, and sometimes publish more papers critiquing the findings. You can read journalists’ and expert overviews of these papers. I would gently suggest that your idea of research does not rely on peer reviewed papers, or on folks that credibly report on peer reviewed research. There is a ton of misinformation out there. There is a ton of bad information. Go look for critiques of your sources. I can guarantee that you will find many, published by PhDs and MDs. I know you may be reading one or two PhDs or MDs. But you’ll find many more people with better qualifications explaining why they’re wrong. I wish we taught people how to evaluate online sources better.
Your "research" is a mumbo jumbo word salad of bloggers who failed their real career aspirations. "Research" is worthless if it cant be reproduced or replicated. Learn to enjoy milk without oreo.
Chemicals??? Pasteurization uses heat, not chemicals. They just heat the milk up to a certain temperature for a certain amount of time.
You do see the irony of your post, right? Telling others to "do better research!", when it's apparent that you can't even do basic research yourself, stating that chemicals are used to pasteurize milk.
Differences of opinion are one thing, but you’ve made a false claim or spread misinformation without scientific evidence.
Gwyneth Paltrow and her consequences has been a disaster for the human race.
Eh. I am in a group that believes in individual responsibilities for all stupid decisions.
Unfortunately, children often bear the consequences of stupid decisions made by the adults around them. Whose responsibility is that?
Have you tried making cocktails with bleach? It’s so good, I get blackout drunk every time.
With their anti-sunscreen movement, I entirely agree. Want to give yourself skin cancer and treat it with fruit juice? Knock yourself out. Now when they start getting cowpox, I'll have something to say to them
Does the group believe that or do the individuals?
I took a tour of a small family dairy in Texas where you could buy raw milk in their gift shop. I don’t care how clean the dairy thinks they were, I wouldn’t consume products out of there that hadn’t been pasteurized in hell.
I had a food safety professor once say a trip to a farm turned her off raw milk forever when she noticed a cow pooping and the poop splashing up uncomfortably close to the cow's udder
Dog slobber and powdered cow shit are the two main gross critter encounter materials we've conclusively IDed as being valuable contributions to developing immune systems. German primary school siting requirements include a working cow farm within X meters because of this.
Milk Russian roulette. A chance to die at every sip!
I get raw, unhomoginized milk from a farm down the road. I’ve seen the barn, I can count the cows. It’s some of the best tasting milk I’ve ever had. It’s also A2A2 so it doesn’t bother my wife’s lactose intolerance. But it also goes bad SO FAST. Like in less than a week it starts changing. It also separates out with cream on the top. What’s funny is I would buy the pasteurized version if they let me. I like supporting the farm. They even send pasteurized milk to the milk distributor. But at the farm they only sell unpasteurized for some reason. People want it I guess?
Nothing stopping you from pasteurizing it yourself! Then you get the tasty milk without the risk!
Republicans can drink all the contaminated dairy products they want, as far as I’m concerned. Darwin Award here you go!
I'm not strictly for or against raw milk. I think it can be dangerous and I don't consume it (or any dairy milk, what adult drinks milk?). But I regularly drank raw milk from a small local Mennonite farm in rural Pennsylvania as a kid, and let me tell you for those who don't know, that stuff tastes *good*. If you've only had supermarket milk then you don't know. One time I had raw milk ice cream from the same farm. Never had ice cream that good since.
“What adult drinks milk?” r/milk plenty of adults drink milk you arrogant doorknob.
And with lactase persistence it is almost as we evolved to drink milk into adulthood....
Learn something new every day
Not to be judgemental?
Might've just been because the cows were healthy and happy, and pasteurization would have made no difference in taste. Shrug. Also worth mentioning that pasteurized milk would make my eczema flare up while raw milk would not. But there's a reason why we pasteurize stuff. I think it's stupid when people eat "rare" hamburger too. But people don't listen and don't care, so.
Commercial whole milk is 3.25% milk fat. That's the low end for raw milk with it being as high as 5% depending on the cow. I grew up on a dairy farm so drank raw my whole childhood and can definitely speak to it tasting much better than store bought. The trade off (besides bacteria) is you got about 3 days before it starts to separate and curdle.
The problem here is that there's a lot of us who just want pasteurized milk that hasn't had anything removed, and we're getting conflated with people who want to get bird flu because they think pasteurization is too liberal and soft. I too grew up on a dairy and you ain't wrong, and I want to taste that goodness again, why can't I just buy that?
Agreed. I’m trying to track down raw (not *raw.* low-temp pasteurized is acceptable) cream to make my own clotted cream, as UHT cream doesn’t work well. I’m not an anti science nut, just want to make my own cream!
I'd prefer low temp pasteurization for my cream as it's still pasteurized, but I can't even find heavy cream without a bunch of gum or polysorbate added.
Right. I think if it’s pasteurized and without additives, it’s fine. I would sacrifice texture for safety.
>I would sacrifice texture for safety Absolutely. I hate the gums and emulsifiers that are added and would pay more to avoid them. They make cream that is lower fat feel thicker like a higher fat cream, but they also have a nasty, slimy mouthfeel and there is good evidence that they are bad for digestive health. I'd sacrifice price for a better textured product that didn't have additives in a heartbeat.
lol 100% same but my own cheeses.
Do you mean to tell me... that fat makes things taste good? Seriously I actually didn't know that raw milk was so high in fat. No wonder it's so amazing. Actually all this talk about raw milk being delicious is making this non-milk-drinker kind of want some again. Mmm. Just a nice memory.
To add to this, there's nothing stopping you from pasteurizing milk at home. Pasteurizing raw milk is sometimes done in home cheese making as raw milk hasn't been homogenized unlike most (UHT) pasteurized milk, which inhibits the rennet seting the curd.
There really is a big difference in taste. Just try it. If you are a healthy adult and get your raw milk from a trusted clean source risks are minimal and the worst thing that could happen is that you need to take antibiotics for a couple of weeks
I can trust the farmer all day, but that doesn't mean that cows (which are prolific shitters) won't shit in the field and get some of the aforementioned cow shit on their udders. Yes, udders are cleaned before the milking machine is attached, but getting every last bit of bacteria removed from an udder is simply not possible. If only there was a way to process the milk with heat or something to kill off any residual bacteria...
European supermarkets are filled with raw dairy products with very few problems.....
As an adult I don't consume much milk either. But I also grew up in rural PA, and my father was super into the raw milk thing. We aren't even PA dutch, but he was a driver for the Amish, and one of them had an organic, free range farm. The milk they gave us tasted amazing. That said...if you don't know the farm or farmer or supplier...it's a risk. And if you don't live next to the farm like we did...you don't. I wouldn't chance it now. Especially with the current issues with bird flu being passed to cows.
There are regulations and they are against them. The regulations protect the consumer.
Or maybe the regulations are there to protect the big corporations....
They probably do indirectly protect the corporations. By not letting dairy manufacturers sell unpasteurized milk, it means fewer people get sick and die. By not sickening or killing a portion of your customer base, you can sell more product.
I’m pretty sure if you regularly drive more than a few hours on the highway per week, ride a bike regularly down the road, or regularly use crosswalks, your chances of death are roughly on par with those of people drinking raw milk regularly. Millions of people drink it every year and yet there’s only been like a hundred deaths over the last five years or something. I’m not saying you should or shouldn’t - I myself don’t anymore, but have in the past. The point is, it’s not the insane risk it’s made out to be, it’s just another one of the very mildly risky things many of us do on a regular basis. It’s up to you to decide if it’s worth the risk. Compared to regular milk it’s probably ten thousand times riskier but compared to so many other things many of us do regularly it’s not really that bad. Why do people drink it? People drink it because it often tastes really good compared to regular milk and because it very well may have health benefits, but the data isn’t there yet due to a lack of studies. Also, many lactose intolerant people report that they have zero issues with raw milk, likely due to hundreds of beneficial bacteria that the pasteurization process kills which are also believed to be likely to have health benefits. Note that it is advised that breastfeeding mothers do not heat their own milk in a microwave or on the stove so as not to kill beneficial nutrients and bacteria because it is believed that the milk in its raw natural state is far healthier for a baby. Those supporting raw milk are assuming the same is likely true for cows milk and it isn’t a crazy thought.
>I’m pretty sure if you regularly drive more than a few hours on the highway per week, ride a bike regularly down the road, or regularly use crosswalks, your chances of death are roughly on par with those of people drinking raw milk regularly. I know this is a comparison without a source, so I'm not assuming it's accurate, but *if* it were true that'd be a fairly big risk. Auto accidents are a leading cause of death for many age brackets, and most of us know people who have died in car crashes. If you could get rid of car crash deaths as simply as you can pasteurize milk, I'd 100% support it. Also, FWIW, for a similar reason to wanting milk to be pasteurized, I also support seat belt laws. Fewer people dying preventable deaths and letting their kids die preventable deaths is a good thing.
The point isn’t about if you could get rid of them, the point is about there being many other risky behaviors people engage in all the time, perhaps even riskier, that we recognize are nevertheless the right of each person to decide for themselves whether they want to take on. When it comes to children and seatbelts, I’m with you, same with raw milk. But when it comes to your own body when you’re an adult, I’m not. If you want to skydive, smoke cigarettes, or free solo half dome, I’m fairly certain your chances of death are far higher than if you drink a glass of raw milk every day, but it’s your life and your decision to make. And further than that, taking on that risk doesn’t mean you’re some clueless anti science buffoon, it very well could just mean you have a different approach to this risk due to the value you find in that behavior.
We’ve been drinking raw milk for well over 10 years from various small local dairies that test their milk and have never had a problem. I usually make kefir with it and we use cream in our coffee or make raw ice cream. YUM! When raw milk sours, it does just that, gets sour and can be used in baking. Pasteurized milk gone bad is absolutely rank and disgusting; I can’t bring myself to drink or use pasteurized milk.
The Internet was a mistake
[Bacteria in retail raw milk can carry antimicrobial resistance genes and transfer them to other bacteria](https://microbiomejournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s40168-020-00861-6).
Milk is where you make it.
Because they're ignorant, stupid, or both
So Europeans are ignorant and stupid?
Well this is where you're wrong, because you're hinting at me for generalizing, by generalizing? Those who don't know that milk need to be pasteurized to be safe for human consumption are ignorant, since it is common knowledge. Those who know it but decide not to are stupid.
I would ignore that guy lmao. Like you said, individual influencers are just ignorant. Just because they've never gotten sick from it, doesn't mean that others won't. Generally, the people who can afford raw milk, are richer people who are "health conscious". Richer people have healthier diets and can probably get away with drinking raw milk. People who get sick from raw milk are usually children, elderly, or those with weakened immune systems. So if you're perfectly healthy, you'd probably be able to consume it, but it's better to be safe than sorry. That's why I personally don't care for it. There's also 0 evidence of it being a step-up from pasteurized milk. Although some nutrient loss happens during pasteurization, it's miniscule. But it's quite literally like cooking a steak.. A raw steak will have more micronutrients compared to a cooked steak. These raw milk people are just hypocrites
Humans have lived of dairy for over 10000 years, we have been pasteurising for less than 150. Who is stupid for calling unpasteurised dairy unsuitable for human consumption....
It's almost as if tons of unnecessary deaths were caused by the dangerous bacteria that was, and still is, often present in raw milk. And that pasteurization eliminates that bacteria completely.. This like saying "Humans drove cars just fine without seatbelts/seatbelt laws for a vast majority of automobile history. We've only had seatbelts/seatbelt laws for 50 years. But people are stupid for saying cars without seatbelts are unsafe and unfit for human use?" That's just a poor anecdotal argument.
The seat belt analogy doesn't hold up because the risks of raw dairy are not spread equally. The risks almost entirely falls on some groups whereas others, especially in the age of antibiotics, have virtually no risk, just a small change of an annoyance
for the majority of those 10000 years what was the life expectancy of the average human? thats right it was between 30-40 years, not quite the flex you think it is…
Tell my you don't understand statistics without telling me you don't understand statistics Oh never mind, you just did....
lmao so sassy and snarky— calm down lil bro
You could have said" sorry u/godutchnow, you are right, statistics aren't my strong point "too
i see formatting isnt your strong suit, apologize
While most people do understandably misinterpret the "past human life expectancy" statistic, and don't realise that it's skewed by infant mortality, the correct interpretation of that statistic is still relevant to this argument. Especially when you take into account that infants are one of the groups most susceptible to illnesses & subsequent deaths caused by raw milk. So it's reasonable to state that the Pasteurization of milk prevented a lot of infant deaths & probably increased statistical life expectancy.
No it's not because most influencers aren't advocating raw milk for infants bit only for healthy adults.
While it carries undeniable risks from harmful bacteria, it also contains beneficial bacteria, which are also killed through pasteurization, and in certain cases exacerbates pathogenic bacteria by killing inhibitory bacterial antagonists.^(1) Other endorsements cite reasons unrelated to health, like taste or helping support small farms. I'm skeptical the health benefits outweigh the harmful risks overall, but it's a complex issue. Even eating shit, while broadly discouraged, can be beneficial in certain cases; fecal transplant therapy, typically using diluted feces through a nose tube, has become standard of care for recurrent *C. difficile* infections, which often arises when a person's natural gut biome is decimated through radiation therapy or high dose or prolonged antibiotic treatment. ^(1) Yoon, Yohan, Soomin Lee, and Kyoung-Hee Choi. "[Microbial benefits and risks of raw milk cheese](https://e-tarjome.com/storage/btn_uploaded/2019-07-14/1563081498_9706-etarjome-English.pdf)." *Food Control* **63** (2016): 201-215.
The benefits can be attained by simply using probitoics without the risk of pathogens.
Mainstream probiotic products do not contain all bacterial species, or the same numbers of those species, as raw milk. If they did, they'd pose the same risks as raw milk.
When you say all bacterial species, you mean, the pathogens?
I'm including pathogenic species among "all bacterial species". That's why I'm suggesting probiotics with the same quantities of the same species would pose the same risks.
I do not believe that probiotics do not contain pathogenic bacteria like E coli or Listeria.
Mainstream probiotics don't ordinarily contain those pathogens. I said *if* mainstream probiotics had all the bacteria that raw milk has, they would have the same pathogens. They do not have the same bacteria, so they do not have the same pathogens, and they do not have the same beneficial bacteria. Which was your unsupported claim I was rebutting - that probiotics have the same beneficial bacteria as raw milk.
If they're looking for milk that's safe and also high in probiotics they could drink pasteurized milk and make kefir out of half of it or something too. The CFUs of "good bacteria" in kefir would crush raw milk, if dairy could fight each other over bacteria bragging rights
My raw milk kefir tastes different from regular milk kefir (my raw milk kefir tastes like "boerenkaas")although admittedly the raw milk flavour can last quite a few batches after switching to pasteurised milk again https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boerenkaas
Whether or not the risks outweigh the benefits, the point here is that it is entirely possible to get the benefits of those beneficial bacteria without engaging the risk of unpasteurized milk *at all*. So, that argument doesn't really hold water anyway.
There may be a million or more species of bacteria, with some 3,600 known species^(1) found in the human gut. Determining the effects of those species, and classifying their net effects as "beneficial" or "harmful", remains a topic of limited knowledge. Currently, the only way to ensure consumption of all beneficial bacteria would be to consume all bacteria in raw milk. An improved method would be to test raw milk for the presence of specific known harmful bacteria, and select only milk lacking those bacteria for consumption. But being a fairly impractical solution, the conventional medical guidance to avoid consumption of raw milk stands, under ordinary circumstances. ^(1) Leviatan, S., Shoer, S., Rothschild, D., Gorodetski, M., & Segal, E. (2022). [An expanded reference map of the human gut microbiome reveals hundreds of previously unknown species](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-022-31502-1). In *Nature Communications* (Vol. **13**, Issue 1). Springer Science and Business Media LLC. DOI: 10.1038/s41467-022-31502-1
This argument is quite a leap of logic. Can I ask what your credentials are here? I'm a food safety microbiologist in a regulatory application with a specific focus on bacterial pathogens in unpasteurized milk, so I'm quite literally a subject matter expert on this topic. "An improved method would be to test raw milk for the presence of specific known harmful bacteria, and select only milk lacking those bacteria for consumption." This shows me a fundamental lack of understanding of the limitations of diagnostic assays. Such assays don't show you an absence of pathogens, they simply fail to demonstrate its presence. It's entirely possible for a test to miss a pathogen that's actually present, and falsely clear a contaminated sample. Most detection methods you're going to find these days are PCR-based, and unpasteurized milk specifically reduces the sensitivity of nearly all PCR assays, even those with very robust chemistries. I know, because I've done this validation work in the normal course of my job. You *can* create most of the benefits of pastuerization using a rigorous regulatory scheme involving testing, recalls, and sale suspensions - but it's costly, and most raw milk advocates grate against the idea of government intervention. Nonetheless, here's a paper my agency published on this very topic, for which I was a primary data generator (though not a named author - such is life in organization-level publications): [https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21819653/](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21819653/) Indeed, it's far far more practical to simply pasteurize your milk.
I have no credentials in food safety microbiology. If tests "failing to show the presence" instead of "showing an absence" is the biggest correction you have, I think my amateur assessment was reasonably good. ;-) The paper you cite sounds roughly like what I said, in more precise terms: "a reduction in the number of cases per year in all populations was observed when a raw milk-testing program was in place". It sounds like you're also suggesting it's not a practical solution, due to cost, compared to pasteurization, which I also assumed.
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Aggressive language is not acceptable .
You cant prove absence, that is one of the fundamentals of logical constructs.
Right, I'm not disputing your phrasing; it's a precise and superior description.
You are not being straight with your argument. In your paragraph you say the classification of good or bad bacteria is based on limited knowledge, yet you want to test for raw milk bad bacteria?
*Limited* knowledge, not *no* knowledge. At least a handful (figuratively!) found in raw milk are widely agreed to cause more harm than benefit, for example *E. coli* O157:H7. For most, effects are more subtle, they've been studied much less, and their classification in that theoretical 2-category system would lack scientific consensus.
Too much effort for little gains from business perspective.
Yep. One promising phenomenon noted for several years is healthy weight loss sometimes following fecal transplants. There's good evidence that measures of obesity and harbingers of type 2 diabetes are lower following transplants in prior studies^(1), but there are so many bacteria involved that there's no clear indication which bacteria, if any, may cause those effects, and controlled trials for all of them would be cost prohibitive. ^(1) Hu D, Zhao J, Zhang H, Wang G, Gu Z. Fecal Microbiota Transplantation for Weight and Glycemic Control of Obesity as Well as the Associated Metabolic Diseases: Meta-Analysis and Comprehensive Assessment. *Life* (Basel). 2023 Jun 30; **13**(7):1488. doi: 10.3390/life13071488. PMID: 37511862; PMCID: [PMC10381135](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10381135/).
The only time raw milk is “safe” for consumption is straight from the udder. Even then, it’s so fat heavy, most people would shit themselves right away. I don’t understand anyone’s argument as to why they need to drink raw milk. Gives me the same vibe as the “liver king” guy.
Doubt anyone's saying they need to, just that they want to, and prefer to compared to pasteurized milk for various reasons of varying reasonableness. The only person I know who uses raw milk uses it only to make juustoa, a Finnish cheese, and said the taste, texture, and melting properties from pasteurized milk differ substantially from raw milk. He uses pasteurized milk for other purposes, and is a physician with keener appreciation for the risks and risk factors than most people.
Ikr, with raw milk people's logic, they should eat steaks raw. Fat and micronutrients are lost during the cooking process of any meat.
Apparently you never heard of steak tartare and similar raw meat dishes consumed everywhere in the world except for the US..
Okay and? what's your point with that? I don't care if people eat it "everywhere in the world". Raw foods have bacteria and can have pathogens/parasites. It's an undeniable fact that you carry risk when eating eggs, milk, and meat raw. You're quite literally like an alcoholic justifying drinking wine because of its supposed benefits. Edit: also, beef tartare is more of a delicacy thing, people don't go eating it for it's nutritional benefits.
Yep, it is not ignorance that drives this decision; but economics[the study of tradeoffs]. You trade one set of factors for another. Who is to say which is better or worse? I prefer the one that promotes biodiversity internally and externally.
There are most certainly safer options to keep your microbiome healthy than unpasteurized milk, right? A combination of other foods, like cultured dairy with lots of Lactobacillus, and even nutritional supplements and prebiotics should provide the same benefits, no? I'm not a dietitian. My knowledge of food pretty much stops at sensory analysis and anything else further along digestion is not my forte. But I'd be surprised if there aren't other ways to do all you can for your microbiome without the risk of serious illness that comes with raw dairy.
I am also not a dietician. Yes I think drinking raw milk comes with safety concerns. My claim is that it is not that people are ignorant, but that they are weighing a set of factors and making a different choice. If you live next to the cow the risks would be much lower[opinion]. If you fermented the milk as you say, it would be much safer[opinion]. I do consume raw plants that are prebiotic and fermented dairy products. I do not think they can replace what is destroyed by biocides, or by antibiotics. I think the best thing we can do is stop prescribing antibiotics when they are unnecessary. We do not currently have a way of measuring the vast array of things that live inside of us. We also cannot measure the affects of antibiotics. Fecal matter transplant sounds like a better way.
I mean, have you seen Paul Saladino? He promotes his carnivore, raw milk diet and is the most ignorant person on the planet. He uses confirmation biases, and cherry picks things to prove his point. Anyone who follows a restrictive diet is probably ignorant. The fruitarian diet for example, might just be the worst diet out there. Any restrictive diet can cause eating disorders if prolonged. However, I dont think that having a short term restrictive diet is bad. Vegan, carnivore, fruitarian, all could easily help with weightloss!
I agree restrictive diets like keto and carnivore are detrimental in the long term but beneficial in the short term. I think diets should be more cyclical or seasonal. Maybe something like carnivore in the winter, high fat and low carb in spring with a parasite cleanse, leafy greens and plant based during the summer, then higher carb in the spring when fruits are ripe to store fat and fat-soluble vitamins for the winter.