OT: health benefits of drinking raw milk

Hi,

Raw milk is healthier than pasteurized milk according to this new study:

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cheers, Jamie

Reply to
Jamie M
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The confound is that the only people silly enough to feed their kids raw, u npasteurised milk live in small, primitive, isolated rural communities. The operative word here is small. With only a few people around the chances of exposure to colds and airborne nose-and-throat infections are reduced.

Medical education isn't great on inculcating critical thinking - my feeling is that the educational institutions try to avoid it to minimise the chanc es that medico's will get depressed when one of their mistakes kills somebo dy - and the peer-reviewed medical literature is consequently full of confo unded nonsense, of which this seems to be a prime example.

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Bill Sloman, Sydney
Reply to
Bill Sloman

Noting new under the sun. This has been known for ages. But government agencies have run amok so badly that it is almost like using an a-bomb to kill an ant. Do NOT tell anyone you want a decent supply; find a farmer and get it on the sly. And STILL tell nobody. It is in the farmer's best interest to not rat on you, as everything he owns would be subject to complete destruction, he would be subject to outrageous fines, and possible imprisonment; you would be #2 in the rampage. It has happened; Kill-a-fornia more well-known for this shit.

Reply to
Robert Baer

Raw milk, and raw-milk cheese, occasionally kill people; that's why we have Pasteurization.

Odwalla killed a bunch of people with unpasteurized apple juice.

Their theme "Drink it and Thrive" became "Drink it and Die."

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John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 

jlarkin att highlandtechnology dott com 
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Reply to
John Larkin

This is good advice - not for you, nor for your loved ones, since unpasteurised milk can infect you with a variety of diseases, but for the community as a whole, which needs mechanisms which allow the intellectually unsound to win Darwin awards for subtracting themselves and their inferior genes from the gene pool.

It's a bit tough on their kids, because some of the intellectual defects may have come nuture - the side effects of drinking unpasteurised milk when young - rather than nature, but nobody every said that evolution was fair.

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Bill Sloman, Sydney
Reply to
Bill Sloman

Chlorine in the water is bad for you too, but prevents dysentery and worse things. It's all about the tradeoffs.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

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Dr Philip C D Hobbs 
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Reply to
Phil Hobbs

Pasteurization is a safety process, not a nutritional one.

Still, it isn't anything that the government should be involved in. If you want your milk to give you the s**ts, that fine by me.

Reply to
WangoTango

"Early life consumption of raw cow's milk reduced the risk of manifest respiratory infections and fever by about 30%. *If the health hazards of raw milk could be overcome*, the public health impact of minimally processed but pathogen-free milk might be enormous, given the high prevalence of respiratory infections in the first year of life and the associated direct and indirect costs."

Emphasis added. You clearly are very selective in the facts you read. This study does *not* say raw milk is even "healthy" much less "healthier" than anything.

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Rick
Reply to
rickman

Right. And, that's a point which the article summary explicitly acknowledged with a nice big "if" clause:

"If the health hazards of raw milk could be overcome, the public health impact of minimally processed but pathogen-free milk might be enormous, given the high prevalence of respiratory infections in the first year of life and the associated direct and indirect costs."

According to the CDC:

"From 1998 through 2011, 148 outbreaks due to consumption of raw milk or raw milk products were reported to CDC. These resulted in 2,384 illnesses, 284 hospitalizations, and 2 deaths. Most of these illnesses were caused by Escherichia coli, Campylobacter, Salmonella, or Listeria. It is important to note that a substantial proportion of the raw milk-associated disease burden falls on children; among the 104 outbreaks from 1998-2011 with information on the patients' ages available, 82% involved at least one person younger than 20 years old."

According to the abstract of the article cited, there do seem to be some reductions in infant illness associated with drinking unprocessed milk. Unfortunately I don't have access to the article itself, so I can't see how well the research project controlled for other variations in the test population (size of the household, income, smoking, environment, other aspects of diet) to eliminate factors which might confuse the results.

The big question (which the article abstract does explicitly raise) is whether there's a way to gain the health benefits of "raw milk immunology" (to coin a phrase) *without* subjecting the children to the known, and well-documented risks of pathogens in the milk (as summarized by the CDC). Simply shouting "raw milk is better!" (or, to be fair, "pasteurized milk is better!"), without looking at the whole picture, is less than entirely honest.

A batch of milk which was accidentally contaminated with a hemolytic strain of E. coli (e.g. O157:H7) could kill a lot of children, or leave them with permanent kidney damage. There isn't a particularly good treatment for this, unfortunately. Not the best tradeoff for "fewer colds", perhaps.

Reply to
David Platt

If he wants raw milk, let him buy a cow.

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Reply to
Michael A. Terrell

For human babies use their mother's milk. More benefits and far less risks. Note the convenient and attractive containers (well, most of the time).

?-)

Reply to
josephkk

Hi,

To gain the health benefits of raw milk without the risk, it is best to have pasture fed cows and avoid the factory farmed cow milk, which is unhealthy as the study shows, not just because it is pasteurized but because the cows are unhealthy due to the conditions that require the pasteurization in the first place!

Pasteur would be against Pasteurization if he was alive today.

cheers, Jamie

Reply to
Jamie M

Hi,

There is no danger of drinking raw milk from a healthy cow, the danger comes from drinking raw milk from a modern industrial factory making cow milk. I would never drink raw milk from there too risky.

cheers, Jamie

Reply to
Jamie M

Pasture-fed cows can still get bovine TB - the UK went through a phase of killing off TB-infected badgers to minimise this. Pasteurisation kills the TB bug.

It's unlikely. He was an evidence-driven scientist, rather than new-age fad addict.

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Bill Sloman, Sydney
Reply to
Bill Sloman

Unfortunately, you don't know which cows are healthy. Free-range cows can still get bovine TB and other infections. They may get them less often than factory-farmed cows confined in stalls, but they still get them.

I grew up in north western Tasmania, which was a dairy-farming area, long before the days of dairy farming. Our doctor was on the committee that went around inspecting pasteurising plants and he had plenty of horror stories.

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Bill Sloman, Sydney
Reply to
Bill Sloman

Which came first, the chicken or the egg? I think people got sick from drinking raw milk a long time before cows were raised in "industrial factories". But clearly you wish to believe what makes you feel good rather than what the facts tell us.

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Rick
Reply to
rickman

That is certainly an option, but there is no reason he should be barred from finding someone with a cow and buying raw milk.

Reply to
WangoTango

I hear the argument often that we should let people do what they want as long as it only affects themselves. But do we extend that to all aspects of our existence? No, we draw lines to protect us from ourselves.

The most obvious example of this is in drug use, both illegal and prescription. We don't allow the indiscriminate use of drugs because of the huge risk of harm which few people are actually able to judge.

So do we draw the parallel to the consumption of raw milk and not allow it under any circumstances? Or do we throw the door wide open and allow anyone to buy and sell raw milk as they see fit?

I think the answer would be to look at history and see just how many people were made sick by drinking raw milk before Pasteurization was common. Clearly there is at least one person in this conversation who does not grasp the fact that there are risks involved.

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Rick
Reply to
rickman

Why then did Louis Pasteur invent Pasteurization? There were no industrial milk factories in his day.

Joe Gwinn

Reply to
Joe Gwinn

From the article, "Early life consumption of raw cow's milk reduced the risk of manifest respiratory infections and fever by about 30%. If the health hazards of raw milk could be overcome, the public health impact of minimally processed but pathogen-free milk might be enormous, given the high prevalence of respiratory infections in the first year of life and the associated direct and indirect costs."

My thinking is, that the additional bacteria the infant gets from the unpasteurized milk is what primes the immune system to give the benefits listed. So I don't know that pathogen-free milk is the answer.

It is depends on the definition of Pathogen. Is it all bacteria, just disease causing, or disease causing but in low enough levels not to cause disease. Just stop being fanatics about germs, that will help develop the infants immune system. Boiling the bottles before use? nah. Mikek Mikek

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Reply to
amdx

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