article on raw milk

[treelizard]

I know it's a controversial issue, but I wrote an article on raw milk that has the basics in it; check it out:

Some Like It Raw - Urban wilderness survival, Martial arts training, Medicinal plant, Human nutrition, Sacred herbalism, Weight lifting woman, Womens health, Creative writing - DirtTime.org!

[eXcessiveForce]

You might want to research a bit more for you blog, here's something that could lead you towards a more rounded outlook on it.

A look at the raw milk debate
December 14, 2006

Burp!

Oh, excuse me. That is the impolite sound of my mind reacting like a massively upset stomach as it tries to digest the recent furor over unpasteurized milk.

It all seemed so simple at the beginning. An Ontario farmer who sold "raw milk" was arrested under the Milk Act for endangering public health. He began a hunger strike and in so doing cast himself as a potential milk martyr, a Galahad willing to give his life to defeat an evil state bent on quashing the virtue of the unpasteurized.

Not exactly knowing where the preponderance of right lay, I thought I would use the incident as an example of how people can use the internet to educate themselves about health matters. Only when I got on Google, everything became very confused. While almost every public health source you could find pilloried, poo-pooed, and dissed the food safety claims of raw milk, around 30 U.S. States, numbers of European countries and many places elsewhere in the world allow the sale of unpasteurized milk. And while there have been regular outbreaks of food poisoning associated with raw milk, statistics from the U.S. suggest that today they barely amount to one per cent of all food-borne disease cases, down from 38 per cent in the 1930s.

Still, that might simply be a chicken and egg phenomena. If you pasteurized milk, the milk-borne disease rate falls. Yes, but on the other hand nearly everyone also agrees that there seems to have been a significant decline in the average amount of bacteria and other noxious microbes which are found in raw milk sampled by health authorities. Falls of tenfold are quite common. So clearly coincident with pasteurization, what has also happened is that farm workers have become less disease ridden and cows are healthier.

Even more confusing

Moreover, if you are looking for not just illness but also deaths, well, things were even more confusing. In the U.S, between 1988 and 2002 (it's the country that seems to keep the world's best health records in this area), there were 88 recorded deaths where "food-borne diseases" were listed as the cause.

If one per cent of these related to milk products, then the numbers of people killed by raw milk in the U.S. over a five-year period is somewhere between one and a big, aggressive zero.

Now, everyone in the food-borne illnesses monitoring game thinks that diseases which make it onto death certificates vastly under-report real incidence rates, especially when an estimated two-thirds of food poisoning involves microbes presently unknown to medical science. One iconic U.S. government figure has extrapolated from this loosey-goosey situation to estimate there are 5,000 food-related deaths a year there. But as I said, that is a guess and golly number.

So what you have is a situation where you can say definitely that unpasteurized milk poses a health risk of some sort, but you can't tell exactly how big a risk it is.

Not to mention the other side of what seemed to me to be a nine-sided coin. I am referring to the argument on the part of some raw-milk advocates that our world has become too clean, and this has led to the rise in childhood asthma and allergies.

This isn't all self-justifying mental cotton candy.

Key in the words "hygiene hypothesis" into Google Scholar and you will get a host of scientific papers providing evidence backing this world view up. Ergo, maybe, but not definitely, pasteurization equals other illnesses.

Now you know why I said all this Googling created the equivalent of an upset stomach of the brain. So I stood up, signed off the internet, and went to the library.

There I took a look at the history of milk-borne diseases and experienced a eureka moment. Almost all the milk-borne diseases we fret about today — lethal E. coli growing in a cows' gut, the Campylobacter bacteria which generally is the leading cause of food poisoning — weren't on anyone's health radar screen when officials started considering pasteurizing milk. At the end of the 19th century, the big ills associated with milk weren't today's "outbreaks," they were pandemic plagues — tuberculosis, scarlet fever, diphtheria, and typhoid fever. Indeed milk was so rife with disease that some people started referring to it, along with TB, as "the white death."

It was into this plague-ridden world that the notion of pasteurization took hold. While there were calls to clean up farms and farm workers, pasteurization's advocates argued that was too piecemeal to work.

I quote here Nathan Straus, pasteurization philanthropist and part-owner of Macy's Department Store: "Thousands of infants lives are needlessly sacrificed annually by impure milk. No system of milk test or examination now in operation or capable of being generally applied is sufficient to protect the lives of young children against the noxious germs present in a large portion of the milk delivered in its natural state in cities."

There were complaints about the change that mimic those of today — pasteurization will change milk's taste, its nutrient content, and its all-natural status. But pasteurization's advocates responded: Given the choice between keeping children alive and these other things, we choose life.

Death rates fell

So pasteurization came in and the white death's plagues took a holiday. After pasteurization was adopted in New York City, death rates for children under the age of five fell from 96.5 per thousand in 1891 to 34 per thousand in 1916.

British statistics suggest that between 1938 and the early 1950s there were 19,000 deaths from milk-borne TB. And then next to nothing. Pasteurizing milk stopped the epidemics in their tracks.

Historically it is now obvious that what pasteurization did is allow us to reconfigure our collective concerns about milk-borne disease, from plagues to today's periodic outbreaks. It allowed us to worry about the hygiene hypothesis instead of whose child had died yesterday.

So where, you might ask, does that leave us when it comes to governing the risk of letting people drink raw milk in today's generally much cleaner world? I tend to be a libertarian in most matters, particularly when it comes to individual health, but I also believe you have to tell the truth. With the hygiene hypothesis still an hypothesis, there is no convincing evidence that raw milk is better for you health-wise than its pasteurized cousin.

Still, it would be reasonable to allow those who aren't afraid of its potential ills to buy raw milk. Only I think each carton or bag should carry a large and burly warning sign: "Beware! This product may contain germs that can make you sick. In some cases that sickness will lead to long-term illness or death. The elderly, the very young, and pregnant women are particularly at risk. Drink at your own peril."

My guess is something that honestly advertises itself like this is going to move at warp speed from this year's health food hit to last year's wilted broccoli.

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[Tant01]

I grew up on raw milk. Seemed good at the time. I really enjoyed making butter and ice cream with it....

Ahhh, the good old days!

[eXcessiveForce]

yeah we had raw milk around our area too, since I grew up in a farm town and most of our family friends were dairy farmers.

But there are definite risks with raw milk.


Of course there are some people who think drinking milk from cows is completely unhealthy how ever it is, and completely unnatural.

Raw milk isn't like taking a sip and then dying, but the risks are there.

[treelizard]

I've researched raw milk pretty extensively; if you look at the link I cited it talks about the natural mechanisms in place in case raw milk does get contaminated with things like E.coli, which are not in place for pasteurized/processed milk. I personally only drink raw milk from pasture-fed cows. It is legal in 28 states, including mine...

You may want to check out this power point: http://www.realmilk.com/documents/Sh...ntResponse.pdf

[eXcessiveForce]

ecoli is only a contaminate, it's things like TB that can be based through the milk that is more the problem.

[treelizard]

Originally Posted by eXcessiveForce

ecoli is only a contaminate, it's things like TB that can be based through the milk that is more the problem.

That's why it's good that TB skin tests are performed on dairy cows. But TB in cows has been correlated to overcrowding--luckily most pasture-fed cattle aren't kept in the same conditions as other dairy cattle. Interestingly enough, research shows that children who consume raw milk have more resistance to TB.

Anyway, here's another article on that:
The Risk Of Bovine Tb From Raw Milk Consumption With A Focus On Michigan by Ted Beals

[Sachi]

You don't want to take a chance on possible large amounts of bacteria of many species.. That is why milk is 'pasteurized' nowadays.





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[treelizard]

Sachi, did you actually read the article?