Got Raw Milk? UCLA Professor of Medicine Says ‘No Thanks’

During the previous couple of years, bureaucrats and public well being officers have been quiet about uncooked milk, however then Iowa legalized its sale in May. The accompanying publicity — in The New York Times and USA Today,^1,2 plus many different publications — has resulted in a flurry of pro-pasteurization, anti-raw milk Internet posts.

One of those appeared on December 8, 2023,³ written by Claire Panosian Dunavan, professor emeritus of drugs and infectious ailments on the David Geffen School of Medicine on the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) and previous president of the American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene. Dunavan can’t perceive the “risky allure” of uncooked milk. “Is it buyers’ faith in ‘nature’s perfect food’ or sellers’ pure, naked greed?” she asks. The most important claims in her article:

In the Nineties, Nathan Straus (co-owner of Macy’s) began a non-public basis to dispense pasteurized milk after his son died of typhus throughout a trip in Italy — the dying blamed on uncooked milk. (Dunavan then credit Straus with a drop in U.S. toddler mortality from 125 per 1,000 to fewer than 16 per 1,000 between 1891 and 1925.)

Raw milk shoppers are 840 occasions extra more likely to endure sickness than those that drink pasteurized dairy.

Recent outbreaks of sickness blamed on uncooked milk have occurred in California, Utah and Idaho.

Raw milk incorporates harmful pathogens like campylobacter and salmonella.

Raw milk might trigger Guillain-Barré syndrome.

People are avoiding pasteurized milk due to milk allergy “as opposed to a serious, even life-threatening infection.”

The actual villains are the individuals who promote uncooked milk “because they believe there’s an audience out there that will buy it,” although they “know” that uncooked milk will hurt some individuals.

Are Raw Milk Farmers Driven by Greed?

Let’s have a look at these factors one after the other, beginning with the accusation that uncooked milk farmers are motivated by pure, bare greed. (In the spirit of full disclosure, I’m a dairy farmer who sells uncooked milk.)

Conventional dairy farmers immediately obtain about the identical value as they did throughout World War II, even whereas their prices have skyrocketed. Typically, they get $1.45 per gallon, which prices them $2 to provide.⁴

This explains why the variety of licensed dairy operations within the U.S. has steadily declined by greater than 55%,⁵ from 70,375 in 2003 to 31,657 in 2020. More than 3,000 dairy farms stopped manufacturing throughout 2020 alone — that’s eight per day.

Some of those farmers have prevented going bankrupt by switching to uncooked milk gross sales. Typically, shoppers are completely happy to pay from $5 to $10 per half gallon — sufficient to save lots of the household farm, particularly if the farmer reduces his prices by nourishing his cows on grass (the pure meals for cows) fairly than feeding grain.

Dunavan refers to farmers’ want to make a good residing as “pure, naked greed,” however let me offer you an instance of actual greed. Dairy firm CEOs sometimes make salaries upwards of $3 million per yr. They do that by maintaining milk costs as little as attainable — therefore the heartbreak of shedding the farm inflicted on hundreds of dairy farmers. That is what most of us would name pure, bare greed.

True Causes of Infant Mortality

About Nathan Straus shedding his son to typhus and blaming it on uncooked milk, based on that font of standard data, Wikipedia, typhus is attributable to micro organism unfold by lice, chiggers or fleas.⁶ Since Dunavan is a public well being professional, she ought to know this. (I’ve not been capable of finding any reference to uncooked milk inflicting typhus, aside from the case of Straus’ son.)

Typhus reigns in filthy situations and it was an actual drawback, particularly in cities, earlier than the appearance of contemporary housing, sewage methods and washing machines. Even immediately we see outbreaks of typhus, however public well being specialists sometimes blame them on rats, by no means on uncooked milk!⁷

As for the decline in toddler mortality within the U.S. on the flip of the twentieth century, it was throughout this era that public officers labored to scrub up our cities with the set up of sewage methods, garbage assortment and clear water.

This was additionally the interval when the automotive step by step changed the horse and mule — earlier than the automotive, our cities have been stinking cesspools of manure and dirt. Immigrants huddled in crowded housing with out operating water and refrigeration, and with solely rudimentary sanitation. The dying price by the age of 5 was 50% — and this was blamed on uncooked milk fairly than unsanitary situations — officers referred to as it the “milk problem.”

Raw milk might certainly have contributed to the excessive dying price as a result of it got here from distillery dairies — interior metropolis confinement dairies of unimaginable filth the place cows have been fed distillery waste. The milk was so poor and watery that chalk was typically added to make it look white — this was the milk that Straus needed to pasteurize.

However, pasteurization can not take the credit score for the decline in toddler mortality because it was round this time that distillery dairies have been banned. The actual hero was not Nathan Straus, who did nothing for public clean-up efforts, however Dr. Henry Coit, who labored to deliver clear uncooked milk from the countryside to the cities.

Public well being officers on the time lauded Coit’s licensed uncooked milk with saving kids’s lives and famous that kids in orphanages introduced up on uncooked milk have been more healthy than these given pasteurized milk.

Questioning the Reports

About uncooked milk security, Dunavan repeats the current declare that individuals who drink uncooked milk are 840 occasions extra more likely to contract food-borne sickness than those that don’t.⁸

But an evaluation by epidemiologist Peg Coleman, based mostly on knowledge thought of by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS), discovered that on a each year foundation, out of 23 meals thought of, pasteurized milk ranked second highest and uncooked milk ranked seventh highest in inflicting extreme sickness.⁹ The actual query that one should ask, nonetheless, is how correct are reviews of sickness and dying from uncooked milk?

The Weston A. Price Foundation analyzed a 2007 PowerPoint presentation by John F. Sheehan, then director of FDA’s Division of Dairy and Egg Safety, who contended that pasteurization is the one method to make sure the security of milk.¹⁰

Table 1 exhibits that the 15 research Sheehan referenced (by 2005) both have been methodologically flawed or that bias or outright fabrication guided the conclusions that he drew; not one of many research cited by the FDA really proved that uncooked milk precipitated the sickness.

We must do the identical evaluation for reviews of uncooked milk sickness from 2005 to the current — one that features the claims of sickness from uncooked milk in California, Idaho and Utah. It’s protected to imagine that lots of them are bogus, given the alacrity of public well being officers guilty uncooked milk for any sickness and not using a thorough examination of all the information.

Table 1: Unfounded Conclusions From Raw Milk Studies

LAW OR BIAS	NUMBER	PERCENT
No Valid Positive Milk Sample	12/15	80%
No Valid Statistical Association with Raw Milk	10/15	67%
Findings Misrepresented by FDA	7/15	47%
Alternatives Discovered, Not Pursued	5/15	33%
No Evidence Anyone Consumed Raw Milk Products	2/15	13%
Outbreak Did Not Even Exist	1/15	13%
Did Not Show that Pasteurization Would Have Prevented Outbreak	15/15	100%

According to the late Dr. Ted Beals, who analyzed reviews of foodborne sickness from 1999 to 2011,¹¹ authorities knowledge report a median of 42 diseases from uncooked milk per yr out of 90,771 diseases from all sources.

Using these figures, Dr. Beals concluded that one is 35,000 occasions extra more likely to turn into in poor health from different meals than from uncooked milk. Beals additionally famous that there isn’t a solution to quantify whether or not anyone meals is safer than one other from the information we’ve got, however on the similar time, it’s clear that there isn’t a foundation for singling out uncooked milk as “inherently dangerous.”

Recently, melons have ranked excessive in inflicting sickness — together with an outbreak from cantaloupe that resulted in over 300 diseases, over 100 hospitalizations and 4 deaths. Where is Dunavan’s outcry towards grasping melon growers? And what about uncooked oysters, which kill 15 individuals per yr?¹² Where are the warnings to oyster lovers to not eat these horrible issues?

Pathogen Facts

Dunavan implies that uncooked milk could cause Guillain-Barré syndrome (GBS) — a degeneration of the nerve cells that causes muscle weak point and paralysis — as a result of uncooked milk can carry campylobacter, and campylobacter typically will get the blame for GBS.

Of course, many, many meals harbor campylobacter. In 2019, there have been over 100,000 reported instances of GBS worldwide;¹³ a fast Internet search doesn’t discover any of those instances related to the consumption of uncooked milk.

By the best way, campylobacter and salmonella, the 2 pathogens mostly related to uncooked milk, don’t develop in refrigerated uncooked milk. In a pilot examine sponsored by the Raw Milk Institute, refrigerated uncooked milk inoculated with excessive and reasonable counts of those pathogens suppressed their progress.¹⁴

Inoculated listeria did develop in uncooked milk, however an affiliation of this pathogen with uncooked milk is extraordinarily uncommon. Moreover, a current systematic overview discovered that the dangers of extreme listeriosis an infection have been higher for pasteurized milk merchandise than for uncooked milk merchandise.¹⁵

Consumers Shunning Pasteurized Milk

Dunavan wonders why individuals would indulge within the dangerous conduct of ingesting uncooked milk. There are superb causes for ingesting uncooked milk, however first, let’s contemplate why fewer and fewer persons are ingesting pasteurized milk. In each the UK and the U.S., consumption of pasteurized milk has declined by 50% since 1974 (Figure 3). (I might like to know whether or not Dunavan herself drinks pasteurized milk!)

To discover out why consumption of pasteurized milk is declining, let’s contemplate a 2019 examine out of China, entitled “Processing milk causes the formation of protein oxidation products which impair spatial learning and memory in rats.”¹⁶

The researchers subjected milk to 4 processing strategies: boiling, microwave heating, spray-drying and freeze-drying. (Boiling takes milk to 212 levels F; ultra-pasteurization takes milk to 280 levels F. Most milk offered immediately is ultra-pasteurized.)

All 4 strategies (even freeze-drying) precipitated oxidative harm to the milk proteins and resulted in “various degrees of redox state imbalance and oxidative damage in plasma, liver, and brain tissues.” Feeding broken milk proteins to rats resulted in studying and reminiscence impairment — no marvel IQ ranges are falling!

The researchers concluded, “humans should control milk protein oxidation and improve the processing methods applied to food.” But easy methods to enhance these processing strategies? What varieties of processing strategies would they counsel? How about no processing in any respect? Why not simply deal with milk fastidiously and cleanly and let the numerous pure antimicrobial compounds in uncooked milk do their work?¹⁷

Milk Proteins Are Easily Damaged

Milk proteins aren’t robust like muscle or collagen proteins; they’re extraordinarily fragile and simply broken by warmth and stress (as in heated drying). No marvel the consumption of business pasteurized milk is declining — the physique sees processed and broken milk proteins as international proteins and mounts an immune response.

This explains why milk protein is the number-one allergy and why research hyperlink consumption of pasteurized milk with digestive problems, rashes, bronchial asthma, diabetes … and even sudden dying.

Based on statistics offered by the Allergy & Asthma Network,¹⁸ one can deduce that pasteurized milk causes roughly 20 deaths from anaphylactic shock per yr! The sort of milk that’s really harmful is pasteurized milk. Yes, certainly, a superb “reason not to” drink pasteurized milk is allergy — life-threatening allergy. Parents are determining that they shouldn’t give this junk to their kids … or drink it themselves.

Pasteurized milk is the milk that causes well being issues, whereas uncooked milk is certainly Nature’s Perfect Food — in any case, it’s the meals in Nature that nourishes all mammals, loaded with nutritional vitamins and minerals, every one in every of which has a particular enzyme that ensures 100% assimilation. When milk is pasteurized, these vitamins are largely destroyed, or rendered very troublesome to soak up (Table 2).

Table 2: Destruction of Nutrients and Nutrient Assimilation by Pasteurization

Vitamin C — Raw milk however not pasteurized can resolve scurvy. “Without doubt … the explosive increase in infantile scurvy during the latter part of the 19th century coincided with the advent of use of heated milks.”19

Calcium — Longer and denser bones on uncooked milk. (Source: Studies from Randleigh Farm.)

Folate — Carrier protein inactivated throughout pasteurization.20

Vitamin B12 — Binding protein inactivated by pasteurization.

Vitamin B6 — Animal research point out B6 poorly absorbed from pasteurized milk. (Source: Studies from Randleigh Farm.)

Vitamin B2 — Completely destroyed.21

Vitamin A — Beta-lactoglobulin, a heat-sensitive protein in milk, will increase intestinal absorption of vitamin A. Heat degrades vitamin A.22,23

Vitamin D — Present in milk sure to lactoglobulins, pasteurization cuts assimilation in half.24

Iron — Lactoferrin, which contributes to iron assimilation, destroyed throughout pasteurization. Children on pasteurized milk are likely to anemia.

Minerals — Bound to proteins inactivated by pasteurization; Lactobacilli, destroyed by pasteurization, improve mineral absorption.25,26

Reasons to Go Raw

More causes to drink uncooked milk: much less bronchial asthma and respiratory infections, fewer allergy symptoms and rashes. These are the conclusions of quite a lot of European research, which pasteurization proponents within the U.S. dismiss, however which public well being officers in Europe have taken significantly. These embrace:

• A 2001 examine printed in The Lancet — Less bronchial asthma, fewer allergy symptoms²⁷
• The 2006 PARSIFAL examine (Clinical & Experimental Allergy) — Less bronchial asthma, fewer allergy symptoms²⁸
• The 2011 GABRIELA examine (Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology) — Less bronchial asthma, fewer allergy symptoms²⁹
• A 2012 examine (Current Opinion in Allergy and Clinical Immunology) — Less bronchial asthma, fewer allergy symptoms³⁰
• The 2014 PASTURE examine (Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology) — Less respiratory an infection^31,32

In the U.S., bronchial asthma kills 9 individuals per day, lots of them kids. When mother and father see that uncooked milk relieves bronchial asthma of their youngster, they exit of their solution to receive this magical product from grasping farmers.

There’s extra: early research point out that uncooked milk given to rising animals confers longer and denser bones in comparison with pasteurized milk.³³ I’ve heard from a number of gals recognized with osteoporosis who began ingesting uncooked milk every day and handed their bone density check two years later.

Raw milk additionally contributes to robust, wholesome tooth.³⁴ And many individuals who can’t tolerate pasteurized milk can take pleasure in uncooked milk with out issues. I’ve even had mother and father inform me that their kids’s conduct improved after they made only one change of their food regimen — switching from pasteurized to uncooked milk.

Looking to the Future

For these and different causes — akin to the truth that uncooked milk tastes so good — uncooked milk gross sales are booming. Our web site realmilk.com will get virtually 400,000 visits per thirty days, most of them to the Raw Milk Finder web page.

When we arrange realmilk.com in 1999, we had solely a handful of listings; immediately, the web site lists over 3,000 locations to get uncooked milk within the U.S., and there are numerous extra not listed. Raw milk farmers inform me that they’ll’t produce sufficient uncooked milk to fulfill the demand — which signifies that these grasping farmers aren’t charging sufficient for it.

The fact is, pasteurization is a Rust Belt expertise — a bit like hitting a pile of manure with a sledgehammer. It lets the trade get away with elevating cows in filthy, crowded situations, however it doesn’t make milk any safer, and it ruins Nature’s excellent meals.

We have come a good distance because the days of Nathan Straus. We have the expertise to provide clear uncooked milk — stainless-steel, fast cooling, on-farm testing, an environment friendly nationwide chilly chain — and get it to each rising youngster within the nation.

Raw milk is the longer term. I predict that inside 20 years, pasteurized milk will probably be a factor of the previous. Small, grass-based dairy farms will proliferate to fulfill the demand, and no couple will begin a household with out ensuring there’s a provide of uncooked milk close by. Health officers like Professor Dunavan can protest all they need, however fewer and fewer persons are listening.

About the Author

Sally Fallon Morell is creator of the best-selling cookbook “Nourishing Traditions” and lots of different books on food regimen and well being. She is the founding president of the Weston A. Price Foundation (westonaprice.org) and a founding father of A Campaign for Real Milk (realmilk.com). Visit her weblog at nourishingtraditions.com.