Raw Milk Is Gaining Fans, but the Science Says It's Dangerous

I grew up on raw Milk and I've suffered no ill effects from it at all. Personally I prefer raw milk as compared to pasteurized milk. especially if it is completely hormone and chemical free milk. WHY would you want to put the chemicals into your body if there is a more natural way to drink the product your body needs to stay healthy? I think all the hype from Government is to continue to have consumers pour their money into the economy. Will they tell us next that eating vegetables from your garden isn't healthy either? I understand the argument of e coli. BUT you can get E coli from almost any where let alone milk & vegetables. Will our tap water be unclean soon too by government standards? People drank & ate raw vegetables from our gardens & livestock long before pasteurization. They survived, what is the big deal now?

Jo Amero of NY 11:20AM September 26, 2011

Your article neglected to mention that the degree of pasturization that USA dairy producers use now is known to kill all (or almost all) of the probiotics that are necessary for the people's digestive tracts to function properly.

I have been suffering from probiotic deficiency for years. Probiotic deficiency such as mine means that I literally am unable to digest _any_ food (even dairy and wheat free foods). I feel full even after eating a very small breakfast, and I continue to feel stuffed for the rest of the day, and I am consequently unable to eat properly. I then become lightheaded and sick from not eating, and I lose weight, which in my case is a _very_ bad thing.

When I was in Sweden over the summer I ate their dairy products (by which I mean their milk and cheese), which are _much_ less heavily pasturized than the USA dairy products, and _all_ of my digestive problems went away within a matter of days. I was able to eat normally for the first time in years, without the help of pills or activia.

Since returning from their, my digestion has gotten much worse. I can't digest anything without following it with Kefir, a heavy-duty probiotic drink (activia and pro-biotic pills are not strong enough to help much). The problem is that kefir, unlike the lightly pasturized milk and cheese that I was getting in Sweden, is very, very acidic--so now I have horrible heartburn with every single meal every day, which is also making it hard for me to eat.

I'm on heartburn medicine, but why should I have to take medicine and kefir to get rid just to be able to eat food, when if our dairy were less pasturized, I wouldn't have a problem at all??? And even with the medicin and the kefir, I still have some trouble eating.

The way my digestive system is now, I am worried that I won't ever be able to have a healthy baby, because I can barely eat enough to keep myself alive, let alone myself and a baby too. For someone who wants to get married and have kids, this is a major problem.

I'm not a health wacko or holistic nut. I actually don't believe the stuff about the cures for asthma and autism, but I know that the ultra-pasturization of dairy in the USA and Canada is making it so that I, and many other young people, can't eat properly.

Perhaps we don't need raw dairy. I think that returning to a lighter pasturization process would be sufficiant. But less pasturized milk has got to be availible to people! I am not the only person I know who has this problem. It is an increasingly common one.

Jessica of RI 5:10PM May 10, 2011

Is it good logic to generalize? It's faulty logic to say that if raw milk has ever been bad, it will always be bad, especially since for thousands of years many cultures have survived (sometimes solely) on the milk of their animals. There are more common sense things to consider. To exemplify my point, I once ate Chinese food that made me sick, but this does not mean that all Chinese food is dangerous and will make me sick. Can we say the science says different when the same science is using poor logic? How about we consider the source of our milk? Is the cow healthy, or diseased? Does the farm have good sanitation practices? What are the cows fed? Can we really say that a healthy grass-fed cow, milked in a clean environment will produce dangerous milk??? I think Not! Shall we regulate meat and eggs? It is my understanding that the meat industry gets there meat from diseased, unhealthy animals. I know of people and cultures who consume their meat and eggs raw and uncooked (not meat from the grocery store, of course), but does this mean we should force them to buy precooked eggs and meat because of the inherent danger of the vast majority of uncooked meat that comes from diseased animals? No! It all comes down to the source and the FDA knows this! How do I know this, you ask? Sushi!! They have standards for sushi grade fish, so they believe that the source of our uncooked meat matters. They know that if raw meat meets a certain standard, it isn't inherently dangerous. This logic directly translates to raw milk!! Raw milk isn't inherently evil. It's the source that makes the difference, but then again, this goes for anything! I've been drinking raw milk for awhile now. The FDA believes Raw milk (from healthy grass-fed cows) to be dangerous. If by dangerous they mean, your skin will improve, you'll always have regular BM's, you'll lose weight, and you'll feel better...then yes it's dangerous...because that's all raw milk has ever done for me. I've certainly never been sick from it! At it's basic level, it's still a choice that the consumer should have a right to. This attempt to ban raw milk sounds more like an attempt to ban common sense and logic. The question remains for the powers that be: What are you after? There is plainly a discrepancy with many other things they could be regulating, but without trying to speculate, though i've made up my mind, i leave you to make up your own mind.

Mark of MN 10:33PM December 15, 2010

@ Sarah

Stop misinforming people by spouting a dumb comment like that. E. coli is part of a cow's (and ours for that matter) natural intestinal flora. When it gets into the milk, that means that it has been contaminated with fecal matter. It doesn't matter whether the cows are fed corn or hay, or whatever. You should NOT drink the milk before boiling it. You don't have to get it pasteurized, but drinking it "fresh" is a very stupid thing to do. Cows may be infected with TB and be asymptomatic. Furthermore, no matter how clean the dairy is, it can never be completely aseptic. So the milk can get contaminated by many sources. I had a grandmother in an overseas country who had a farm. She had never heard the word pasteurization, nor did she know what it meant. Even she had the good sense to boil the milk before consumption. Do we, educated people from a first world country, really have less sense than villagers from rural areas of the third world?

James of LA 11:26AM September 30, 2010