Raw Milk

[DrDeth]

@Skott

Okay, breakfast and seeing this on Wikipedia without fact checking: “Pasteurization … kills some of milk’s naturally-occurring bacteria, such as Lactobacillus acidophilus, useful for the culturing of yogurt.”

Without a cite. Wiki has a great amount of value, but in a hotly debated topic, it’s value as a source is = to the cite that back it up. In this case, there is no value.

[Long_Time_First_Time]

The notion that happy, healthy, uncrowded cows do not shed pathogens in their milk is completely unfounded.

Also, over crowding and poor sanitation might make some problems like Salmonella and E. coli more common, but have nothing to do with other diseases including Listeriosis.

Raw milk drinking is a lot like not vaccinating your kids, IMHO. The only reason anyone thinks about drinking it is because the overall level of the really, really bad diseases people used to get from drinking raw milk are so low in the US that they don’t seem like any sort of a threat. These are diseases that come from cows that are have no symptoms (until the end stage of the disease, many months or years after they started to shed the bacteria in their milk).
Tuberculosis and Brucellosis are the reasons why milk is pasturized. They were enormous public health problems until regulated pasturization.
In both instances, most of the cows producing milk full of this stuff look completely healthy. How would Farmer Brown tell that Bossy has TB while Elsa does not? At the slaughter plant Bossy would have some abscesses in her body, but until then they’d look exactly alike.

The one thing that raw milk does have in it that pasturized milk does not is live white blood cells from the cow. If the cow is positive for the virus that causes Bovine leukemia, those white cells will have her Leukemia virus. If she’s like 90% of the cows that carry the virus, she will be completely asymptomatic.

I once treated the goat of a producer who had a small, very well loved herd of Oberhasli goats. He drank their milk raw until he caught toxoplasmosis. What do you suppose the odds are of a doctor figuring out that this man with “flu like symptoms” actually has toxo. and treating him appropriately before he developed neurologic complications? If you guessed zero you would be correct.

[Exapno_Mapcase]

@Skott

Saying that information in a book is wrong because it’s from 80 years ago isn’t a fact, it’s a fallacious argument… even if the book is wrong.

My point is that if you have to reach back to a 1938 book to find any publication that backs up your contention, that contention is likely wrong. I cannot think of a single other field in the sciences or medicine in which you could not find a single cite from 1939 to 2010 and still be taken seriously.

@Jackmannii

@Chronos

Some enzymes are denatured in the stomach, certainly, but not all of them. If they were, then how would products like Bean-o work?

A better question is, does Beano work? Its advertised active ingredient, an enzyme derived from an Aspergillus fungus species, supposedly breaks down complex plant sugars in the human body to relieve gas and bloating. There’s some preliminary findings suggesting that happens, but I haven’t seen convincing evidence demonstrating it.

The logic behind Beano is sound. It is the analog to lactase, the enzyme that does digest lactose. Lactase is a beta-galactoside; Beano is the alpha-galactoside. Beano was developed by Lactaid, a firm with an excellent track record.