May 9, 2012
Mythology and the Raw Milk Movement
Milk does the body good. It’s the instructive stuff of life; compounds in a mother’s milk can instill lifelong flavor preferences in her breast-fed offspring. (Meanwhile, infants fed cow’s milk formula may gain excessive weight.) Raw milk enthusiasts claim that cow’s milk is more beneficial if it hasn’t been heated and pasteurized. If Dana Goodyear’s recent story in The New Yorker (subscription required) is any indication, this vocal minority’s claims about a milky unpasteurized panacea is increasingly getting mainstream attention.
The raw milk trend has a certain appeal among libertarians, such as Ron Paul, who view the fight against food regulation as a symbol of freedom. But what’s curious about this movement is that Goodyear (and presumably The New Yorker’s estimable fact-checkers) found only one scientific study to support claims about the immune-enhancing properties of raw milk: the GABRIELA study, a survey conducted in rural Germany, Austria and Switzerland and published in October 2011 in the Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology. The study’s authors found that unheated “farm milk” contained a protective protein, although it could only partly explain the reduced rates of asthma. Raw milk might be one variable in a web of confounding factors. (After all, the children lived in rural homes, not in sterile labs.) The authors found no association between the bacterial counts in milk and a child’s health; they also couldn’t say whether those samples were representative of a child’s long-term exposure, nor could they rule out the effects of microbial exposure on a child’s developing immune system.
Perhaps raw milk represents a subset of post-Pasteurian activism opposed to our culture’s blanket war on germs. Since about 1989, when David Strachan advanced the “hygiene hypothesis,” an increasing body of evidence links chronic underexposure to germs and microbes to lasting health consequences. The idea is that encountering low levels of nonthreatening stimuli trains our bodies to fight potential allergens and, without such exposure, our immune systems malfunction. Just last week, a group linked the lack of biodiversity in urban areas for a “global megatrend” in allergies and chronic inflammatory diseases.
The health benefit of raw milk remains speculative and its risks remain high—milk is an excellent medium for the growth of pathogenic bacteria. But the GABRIELA study may hint at something else: the health halo of a nostalgic, if apocryphal, place. What little scientific research there is came from the Alps—a sort of Hunza Valley of the West—a place seemingly removed from the ills of modern society, home to Heidi and the curative powers of her grandfather’s goat’s milk (an idea in Nathaneal Johnson’s blog and forthcoming book, The Heidi Hypothesis). Then again, when has the quest for pure, natural foods really hinged on rational arguments?
Photo (cc) by Flickr user rocket.georg
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Where does the part about drinking the milk of another species fit in? How about drinking milk past the age of weaning?
And please don’t forget the part about children made sick from drinking raw milk – with serious illnesses they may never recover from.
There’s no place for mythology when your job is to protect the health of innocent children from something that we can see daily has a serious potential to harm them.
Getting sick and dying from drinking raw milk may be “natural”, too, but that doesn’t mean that I want to do it.
My wife is not able to comfortably digest pasteurized milk or soft cheeses made from pasteurized milk. We belong to a herd share from which we get gallons of raw milk each month. We make soft cheeses which she can eat and that taste great. We know the people that tend our cows and we trust their care of the cows, the milk and the equipment to ensure everything is sanitary. We know there are risks (we also know there are risks associated with driving our cars and using cell phones, etc.) Why shouldn’t we be able to continue to pay into our herd share and consume our raw milk?
Historically regulation hasn’t eliminated health risks in our food sources, so why not give people the right to choose. I seem to read more about the raw milk producers/sellers getting into trouble with the law than I do the harmful effects of their products. I personally wish the government would step back and allow farmers to sell to those “brave” enough to trust them, and regulate the big guys who add all the harmful stuff to their processed food.
There’s nothing magic about raw milk, other than the fact that it employs the expertise a mammalian body as a nutritionist — which in my estimation far exceeds the expertise of our trained nutritionists. We never have and never will know everything there is to know about nutrition, but our bodies do.
Despite a very active lifestyle and good eating habits (I though), I discovered that my immune system was somewhat lacking when my son started daycare and set me on the path to a 9 month antibiotic-resistant chronic sinus infection. Not until I started consuming raw milk was I able to kick it for good. I was impressed enough that I started my own dairy and now produce it for others, many of who have experienced their own significant health benefits.
It’s so easy to get sucked into the “humans are the only species to drink another species’ milk” and the “if they regulate raw milk, why don’t they regulate cigarettes and Pepsi” arguments.
And I refuse to do that anymore. Why? Because it’s all baloney.
You feel it’s unnatural? Ok.
You feel it’s dangerous? Ok.
Consume or don’t consume as you see fit. I don’t really care either way, no offense.
It’s my body — It’s my choice to make, it’s my risk to take.
The government is not my mother.
Raw milk is vilified for possible contamination by disease-causing bacteria. Pasteurized milk also gets contaminated and causes disease. (See CDC CHERRY PICKS DATA TO MAKE CASE AGAINST RAW MILK: http://www.westonaprice.org/press/cdc-cherry-picks-data-to-make-case-against-raw-milk)However,statistics show that dairy products are not high-risk for food-borne illnesses. (See same.)
Brian,
While I do not choose to take the risk, I will do what I can to support your right to, because, that is what Freedom means.
May we all stay free to Pursue our Happiness.
According to the CDC 3% of the entire population of the USA drinks raw milk every week.
According to the CDC nobody has died from drinlking raw milk in at least 40 years.
According to my knowledge of history, humans have sustained themselves by drinking unpasturized cow/goat/sheep/camel milk for 16,000 years. And now suddenly it is too dangerouse to touch? The whole argument against raw milk is orchestrated by Big Dairy who wants to maintain a monopoly on there adulturated ,antibiotic laced product that no one wants to drink. Fluid milk sales have dropped by 50% in the last 40 years because the stuff is useless, tasteless,overpropocessed rubbish.
What a line: “Then again, when has the quest for pure, natural foods really hinged on rational arguments?”. What’s irrational about choosing to provide food for oneself that is produced locally? What is irrational about choosing to step out of the mass-consumerist mainstream, the one that is destroying our planet with such rapacity? Seems to me that looking for ways to sustain ourselves from within our own communities is the only rational thing to do at the moment.
A little balance in the conversation, please:
http://chriskresser.com/raw-milk-reality-is-raw-milk-dangerous
When I lived in Atlanta in the 1970′s you could have fresh raw milk delivered to your door 3 mornings a week. It came in bottles with the cream on top which we poured off to use in our coffee. Talk about tasty! I never got sick. Just before the dairy closed down, there was a salmonella outbreak which killed several people who were immunosupressed ( think HIV) and were drinking it hoping it would restore their health. I miss that milk, but I support the idea that we just do not have the technology to provide it safely to large populations. A small scrupulously tended herd,with a small number of consumers is probably safe- but where to draw the line? No food regulations? Do people really think that the market would regulate? Try reading Upton Sinclair’s “The Jungle” sometime……..
“Risks remain high”? Can the Smithsonian send a rep to Paris? You HAVE to inform this to the French pronto! Someone have to stop those crazy Europeans from making raw milk vending machines (watch vid below) before they become extinct like the Amish and American farmers!
http://youtu.be/1WkyM_z7ZoA
I drink raw milk that is Pennsylvania Certified Organic. It goes through rigorous testing once per week. The cows are all very healthy, grass fed on organic pastures. I buy the milk from a reputable Natural Foods store.
One should never drink just any raw milk. But if it is certified organic and from cows living in the conditions I described it is safe and it does offer great health benefits over pasturized milk.
Much of the tradtional milk peopel buy comes from grain fed, not grass fed animals. They are sick, some with leukemia. It is homgenized, which many nutrtion experts consider to be bad for your heart. You depend on pasturization to kill serious germs and viruses that comes from sick cows.
It’s less of a risk to drink rigorously tested certified organic raw milk from healthy cows than it is to drink pasturized milk from diseased, grain fed confined cows, like most people drink.