I think the term is too short for a thread search, or else I just didn’t turn up anything.
My friend in into local, organic foods and took me to her co-op yesterday. I liked the co-op although it was a bit pricier than the grocery store (but less pricy than the farmer’s market).
She also gets free range eggs from her egg connection for 3 bucks a dozen and buys raw milk and raw milk cheese from her milk connection (not the co-op). I think raw milk may be illegal in my state (Texas). The milk, whole, unpasteurized and un-homogenized, is 8 dollars a gallon, so I don’t think I’ll buy it just based on that alone, but is it safe? What diseases were/are prevalent in milk prior to pasteurization? Are they still around now?
Friend says the dairy is inspected every 2 years by the FDA, which I guess means they sell pasteurized milk primarily, but I don’t find that too reassuring. Even if the dairy were inspected every Monday, I don’t see that as any great assurance that you could not get ‘bad’ milk on Tuesday if some illness infected the herd or the milk were not collected and stored cleanly.
A quick perusal of the www has some virulently anti-milk sites and not a lot of unbiased information that I could see on the safety or dangers of raw milk. Any reputable sites, recommendations or experiences regarding the topic?
My friend has been drinking this milk for at least a few months and has not become ill that I am aware of, although my friend did wind up hospitalized with a breathing issue somewhat recently and has a new diagnosis of asthma. She said she thinks this milk is better for her arthritis and as a young woman, she is looking at a possible hip replacement in the nearish future. Very unusual I think for a woman of child-bearing age. These health issues have led her to her current food choices. She is pretty sure she can at least improve her health through diet.
Raw milk is fine if the farmer has a small herd and takes phenomenal precautions. Lots of people drink raw milk and swear by it.
But trying to mass produce raw milk has a long and bad history. As in that other thread, cows are susceptible to many diseases and contamination is almost inevitable. The U.S. alone had hundreds of cholera epidemics traced to milk in the days before pasteurization. Cholera is worse than e. coli and e. coli can kill you. E. coli breakouts still happen with some regularity. The rate of disease per drinker is much higher for raw milk, although the absolute rate is much lower since the numbers of raw milk drinkers are orders of magnitude lower. That allows for endless manipulation of the numbers.
There is no scientific evidence that I know of that shows that raw milk is healthier than pasteurized milk, despite the anti-milk forces making this claim everywhere. Studies by the anti-milk people, like the rabid Weston A. Price Foundation, are worthless scientifically.
Evidence that raw milk is healthier for you is poor. Evidence of its hazards is readily available.
From 1993-2006, there were an average of 5.2 disease outbreaks per year in the U.S. traceable to raw milk. That’s more than double the rate of the previous 19 years.
“During the end of 2005, 18 cases of infection with E. coli O157:H7, mostly among children aged <14 years, occurred in Oregon and Washington states. Five patients, aged 1–13 years, were hospitalized, 4 with hemolytic uremic syndrome. Laboratory and risk factor analyses linked the cases to raw milk from a dairy participating in a cow-share program in Washington. In 2007, 29 cases of S. enterica serotype Typhimurium infection were associated with consumption of raw milk or raw-milk products in Pennsylvania…At least 87 people became ill in Kansas in 2 separate outbreaks of campylobacteriosis during the end of 2007. In both outbreaks, illness was associated with consumption of raw milk or raw-milk products. In 2008, an outbreak of campylobacteriosis in California was associated with consumption of unpasteurized milk supplied from a farm operating a cow-share program.” Quoted from here.
There’d have to be tremendous health benefits for raw milk for me to take the risk of getting seriously ill from it. In the absence of evidence that pasteurization affects milk’s nutritional value in any significant way, I don’t see sufficient reasons to put myself in harm’s way.
As for the taste angle - are there good blind taste tests to show that people can consistently distinguish raw from pasteurized milk? (even if there were, that’s still not enough reason for me to take chances with bacterial contamination).
Raw milk is totally unsuited to modern industrial diary operations. You can’t dump milk from hundreds of cows into one giant tank without pasteurization, because one sick cow would contaminate the entire batch, which would go on to contaminate the entire production facility as milk is piped here and there.
I grew up on a small farm (in terms of cattle, we had anywhere between 1 and 5 milk-producing cows at any given time). We milked our cows and then sent our milk off to the dairy where I assume it was pasteurized, but what we drank ourselves was the raw milk from one of our own. I mean, did you think a dirt-poor farmer was going to head off to the grocery store to buy a gallon of milk at five times what he got for one from the dairy?
Note that I didn’t sat that was a healthy thing to do; it’s just what small farmers did in the fifties.
My college girlfriend’s family ran a dairy farm. Small herd, only family members taking care of them, etc. and they drank raw milk from the herd. They weren’t being foodies – it just seemed silly to go to the store and buy milk when they had hundreds of gallons a day sitting there.
No one ever got sick, but they never sold any, either – the rest of it went straight to the processor.
As for taste, when I drank it I realized that it tasted unhomogenized (i.e., the fat hadn’t been whipped up and mixed evenly throughout the milk), but other than that, it didn’t taste “different.” I guess some people might taste a difference, but it’s much less than the difference between whole milk and low-fat.
There’s a list of bacteria killed by pasteurization here. In the old days, brucellosis (undulant fever) was a big concern, because it spread through the entire herd, as well as to humans. Nowdays, it’s the more common e. coli, lysteria, salmonella, etc. that are bigger health concerns.
If your friend wants organic milk, that’s fine, but pasteurization is a simple heat treatment – it doesn’t involve drugs, chemicals, hormones or anything else. I just don’t see the big deal.
Grew up drinking raw milk. Was so happy when grandpa stopped milking and mom had to start buying milk (not because of health concerns but because raw milk is also unhomogenized. Nothing like getting a clump of cream that made its way through the strainer somehow in a glass of chocolate milk. ugh)
Now still drink farm fresh milk, but not raw. We pasteurize it and only use it for us; it isn’t sold.
Good on you!
Although I’ve never heard of cholera transmitted through milk, E. coli 0157:H7 is a nasty being, as is listeria, Mycobacterium tuberculosis, and all the other beings in the bovine fluid.
No cite, but I’ve heard it posited that the farmer will have antibodies to most of the strains of bacteria in his or her small herd, simply from handling the cows and inhaling aerosols from various of the less savory bovine fluids.
IIRC, the only nutrient raw milk has more of is vitamin C, and it’s a miniscule amount. And, the only good way to incorporate A & D is during the homogenization/pasteurization process.
However, I’ve been known to brave a very well aged raw milk blue or cheddar. Lactic acid is a good thing.
There is no question that the risk of serious disease (E. coli, cholera, others that have already been mentioned) is decreased by pasteurization. Typically, these threads quickly devolve to more or less rabid arguing about the exact amount of risk that raw milk carries and how much risk should or is acceptable. I don’t think anyone with an ounce of credibility would claim that raw milk is healthier - better tasting, perhaps, but definitely riskier.
I think I’ll pass on the raw milk. Besides the expense, the small but real risk of disease coupled with the fact that I work exclusively with pregnant women leads me to think raw milk is not a good choice for me.
We only drink raw milk. We buy as part of a co-op from Organic Pastures. We’ve been drinking it for nearly 4 years now and have never had any problems, but then, OP is the foremost organic, raw dairy in California. They test their milk well beyond what is required by law.
We love the taste and shaking the milk before you use it is just second nature.
The big deal is that they believe pasteurization destroys “enzymes” that are good for you. Some people seem to think it ruins the taste of milk as well. My mother is a big fan of raw milk because she has an irrational fear of “chemicals” in her food. She never really defines what chemicals are bad though.
If you’re interested in the taste difference but not so crazy about salmonella, you might find a small dairy operation that pasteurizes but does not homogenize. We have one locally. Their milk does have a different taste, as does their ice cream. Drinking their chocolate milk is seriously like having a chocolate shake.
I don’t typically buy their milk because I can’t justify the cost difference within our current budget, but I do occasionally buy a half gallon and keep the bottle. They have great half-gallon bottles.
Born and raised on a class B dairy farm. We only drank raw milk on the ranch, never had any problems in my family.
My dad use to tell the story about the passing of the pasteurizes law in Monterey county. One man built a processing plant while using scare tatics to get the people to pass the law requiring all milk for sell to be pasturized. Before the law was passs the local farmers sold most of their milk to families and stores in the area. After the law was passed the only buyer was the proscessing plant. It cost to much for the small farmer to put in a processing unit.
With 5 kids in the family we would bring in over 5 gallons of milk into the house each day. Now as kids all our family had gas. Green clouds we normal for us. As an adult figured out the whole family has a interalance to milk, pasteurized or not.
Life can be funny.
The first part of that statement is probably true (though irrelevant); the second part is wrong.
" The enzyme content of foods has no significance because such enzymes are digested and do not function within the body…Raw food contains no enzymes needed for digestion. All the enzymes needed for human digestion are made in the body."
The claim that people suffer “enzyme deficiency” due to modern diets, “toxins”, chemtrails, alien abductions or whatever is false, but it’s a common theme among the woo-prone.
Pasteurized and homogenized milk is horrid for cheese making. You have to add some chemicals to make it work well. (You can get away with not adding the chemicals but the curd doesn’t form well).
I’d love to have some raw milk to make cheese with but the only way you can (legally) get it in Virginia is through a herd share. I’d never drink it, though, unless I owned and milked the cow myself. There are definitely some bad bacteria that can happily live in there that I don’t want to get.
I was raised on a farm and raw milk. And I started helping milk at a very early age. Always hated milking. I was the youngest of 5 kids with the oldest being 20 years older than me. We all were raised on raw milk. And that was back before we had electricity for refrigeration.
Stop drinking raw milk after I enlisted in the USAF at age 17.