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Raw Milk Reality: Is Raw Milk Dangerous?

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Full Bottle of fresh milk and two glass is wooden table on a blue background

Back in February, the Center for Disease Control (CDC) published a study targeting raw milk as dangerous and unsafe for human consumption. The media jumped on it in typical fashion. You may have seen headlines like this:

“Raw Milk Causes Most Illnesses From Dairy, Study Finds.”
– USA Today

“CDC: Raw Milk Much More Likely to Cause Illness.”
– Food Safety News

“Raw Milk is a Raw Deal, CDC Says.”
– LiveScience

While two of these headlines are technically accurate – raw milk is responsible for more illnesses than pasteurized milk when the number of people who consume each is taken into account – the concern they convey about the risk of drinking unpasteurized milk is dramatically overstated.

I’m going to break this series into three parts. In this first article, we’re going to examine what the research really says about raw milk safety, and compare the risks associated with drinking unpasteurized milk with other foods and activities. In the second article, we’ll explore the benefits of drinking raw milk from several different perspectives: nutritional, health-related, social, environmental and ethical. Finally, in the third article I’ll make recommendations and provide guidance on finding a safe and responsible raw dairy producer in your area.

This series is called “Raw Milk Reality” because, as is the case with other hot button issues like vaccination and homebirth, propaganda and hype have overshadowed facts and common sense.  If you only saw the headlines from the CDC and FDA reports, you’d be left with the impression that raw milk is a dangerous food and anyone that consumes it or gives it to their children is reckless and irresponsible.

The purpose of this series is to present the other side of the argument, and give you the bare facts without bias or hyperbole so you can make an informed decision about whether unpasteurized milk is a good choice for you and your family.

I’m not here to convince anyone that they should drink raw milk.  That’s a decision each individual has to make on their own by weighing the potential risks against the potential benefits.  But to do that, you need an accurate understanding of the risks (which we’ll cover in this article) and the benefits (which we’ll cover in the next.)

Just how “dangerous” is raw milk? A little perspective…

Before we do that, however, let’s put the current discussion of unpasteurized milk safety into a wider context. Foodborne illness is a concern for many types of food. According to the most recent review of foodborne disease outbreaks in the U.S. in 2008 by the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI), seafood, produce and poultry were associated with the most outbreaks. Produce is responsible for the greatest number of illnesses each year (2,062), with nearly twice as many illnesses as poultry (1,112). Dairy products are at the bottom of the list. They cause the fewest outbreaks and illnesses of all the major food categories – beef, eggs, poultry, produce and seafood.

According to the CDC, during the period from 1990 − 2006, there were 24,000 foodborne illnesses reported each year on average. Of those, 315 per year are from dairy products. This means dairy products account for about 1.3% of foodborne illnesses each year. That’s not exactly an alarming number, considering that more than 75% of the population consumes dairy products regularly.

It’s also important to note that the outbreaks and illnesses associated with dairy products are generally mild compared to other foods.
According to the CSPI report above, approximately 5,000 people are killed every year by foodborne illness. From 2009 − 2011, three high profile outbreaks involving peanuts, eggs and cantaloupe alone accounted for 2,729 illnesses and 39 deaths. (1) Yet there have only been a handful of deaths from pasteurized dairy products in the last decade, and there hasn’t been a single death attributed to raw fluid milk since the mid-1980s, in spite of the fact that almost 10 million people are now consuming it regularly.

The takeaway is that thousands of people are killed each year by foodborne illness, but they’re dying from eating fruits, nuts, eggs, meat, poultry, fish and shellfish – not from drinking unpasteurized milk.

Why the CDC report can’t be taken at face value

The CDC report claimed that unpasteurized milk is 150 times more likely to cause foodborne illness than pasteurized milk, and such outbreaks had a hospitalization rate 13 times higher than those involving pasteurized dairy products.

According to senior author of the CDC study, Barbara Mahon:

When you consider that no more than 1% of the milk consumed in the United States is raw, it’s pretty startling to see that more of the outbreaks were caused by raw milk than pasteurized.

But can these claims be taken at face value? No.

There are several problems with the CDC report:

  • First and foremost, the CDC doesn’t include the dataset they used, so we can’t analyze how they reached their conclusions. Fortunately, the CDC data for foodborne illness, as well as data from other institutions and peer-reviewed studies, are readily available online.
  • There are about 24,000 foodborne illnesses reported each year. Yet by the CDC’s own admission, this represents only a tiny fraction of the true number of foodborne illnesses that occur. In 1999, CDC scientists used an estimate of the overall prevalence of diarrhea and vomiting to calculate the “true” incidence of foodborne illness as 76 million cases per year! Put another way, 99.97% of foodborne illnesses go unreported.
  • A food vehicle was identified in only 43% of the reported outbreaks and only half of these were linked to a single food ingredient. What this means is that the true prevalence of foodborne illness that can be attributed to a particular food is much higher than what is reported. It also means that the data linking specific outbreaks with specific foods is such a tiny sample of the total that even small errors or biases in the reporting of outbreaks would seriously skew the results.
  • To calculate the number of people that drink unpasteurized milk, the CDC used an older, lower estimate (1%) of the number of people that drink raw milk. This is curious because a FoodNet survey done by the CDC itself in 2007 found that 3% of the U.S. population – about 9.4 million people  – regularly consumes raw milk. That number is likely even higher today with the growing popularity of raw milk. (In 2010 alone, raw milk sales increased by 25% in California.) Why did they do this? If you’re a cynic, you might conclude that they used the lower estimate to exaggerate the risk of drinking raw milk.
  • They combined data from outbreaks and illnesses associated with “bathtub cheese” (i.e. Mexican-style Queso Fresco made illegally at home) made from raw milk, and raw fluid milk. Queso Fresco is inherently more dangerous than raw milk, and is associated with more serious outbreaks and illnesses. Again, this distorts the data and makes raw milk seem more dangerous than it really is. (Note: commercial, properly aged raw milk cheese has never been implicated in a disease outbreak.)

(For a more detailed analysis and critique of the CDC report, see this article from the Weston A. Price Foundation.)

In light of these weaknesses, I decided to conduct my own analysis using a more comprehensive data set including the CDC foodborne disease outbreak surveillance tables, an online outbreak database published by the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI), public health reports such as the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly (MMWR), a CDC line list produced in response to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request to CDC by the Farm to Consumer Legal Defense Fund (FTCLDF), and peer-reviewed studies in the scientific literature (2,3,4).

I purposely excluded outbreaks associated with Queso Fresco cheeses, because we are concerned here with the safety of raw milk and not raw cheese made in a bathtub, which I would never eat and would never advise anyone else to eat. I chose to focus on the most recent data available, from 2000 – 2007, since unpasteurized milk consumption increased significantly over the last decade.

I also included two notable outbreaks in California that were missing from both the CDC and CSPI databases: a large outbreak of campylobacteriosis in 2006, involving over 1,644 illnesses among prison inmates that was linked to pasteurized milk produced by an on-site prison dairy and another campylobacteriosis outbreak in 2007, that caused 8 illnesses following consumption of commercial raw milk and/or raw colostrum. (5,6)

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What does this more reliable, peer-reviewed dataset tell us about the safety of raw milk?

The chart below lists all outbreaks and illnesses associated with unpasteurized milk from 2000 − 2007. Click the link to display the chart.

Raw milk data

There were 37 outbreaks and 800 illnesses from unpasteurized milk during from 2000 − 2007, with an average of 100 illnesses per year. The estimated U.S. population as of today is approximately 313,500,000. Using the CDC’s own 2007 FoodNet Survey data indicating that 3% of the population consumes raw milk, we can estimate that approximately 9.4 million people drink unpasteurized milk (as I said above, the number is likely higher because of the explosive growth in the popularity of raw milk over the past 5 years, but 2007 is the latest reliable estimate we have).

This means you had a roughly 1 in 94,000 chance of becoming ill from drinking unpasteurized milk during that period.

Now let’s compare this to pasteurized milk, as the CDC did in their study. The chart below lists all outbreaks and illnesses associated with pasteurized milk from 2000 − 2007. Click the link to display the chart.

Pasteurized milk data

There were 8 outbreaks with 2,214 illnesses, with an average of 277 illnesses per year. According to the CDC FoodNet survey, 78.5% (246,097,500) of the U.S. population consumes pasteurized milk.

This means you had a roughly 1 in 888,000 chance of becoming ill from drinking pasteurized milk.

According to these data, it’s true that you have a higher chance of getting sick from drinking raw milk than pasteurized milk. But the risk is 9.4 times higher, not 150 times higher as the CDC claimed.

Perhaps this is a good time to review the difference between absolute and relative risk. When you hear that you have a roughly 9 times greater (relative) risk of getting sick from drinking raw milk than pasteurized milk, that might sound scary. And indeed it would be, if we were talking about the absolute risk moving from 5% to 45%.

But when the absolute risk is extremely small, as it is here, a relative 9-fold increase is rather insignificant. If you have a 0.00011 percent chance of getting sick from drinking pasteurized milk, and a 9.4 times greater risk of getting sick from drinking unpasteurized milk, we’re still talking about a miniscule risk of 0.00106% (one one-thousandth of a percent).

But to truly gauge the risk, we should ask how serious these illnesses are.

An “illness” in these data can mean everything from an upset stomach to mild diarrhea to hospitalization for serious disease.  One of the reasons most foodborne illnesses go unreported is that they are only a passing nuisance.

When is the last time you had a bout of diarrhea that you suspect was caused by something you ate?  Did you report it to your doctor or the county public health department?  Probably not.

The statistic we should be more concerned with is hospitalizations for serious illnesses such as kidney failure and hemolytic uremic syndrome (HUS) caused by unpasteurized milk.  This does happen, and children and the elderly are particularly vulnerable and more likely to experience a serious illness.  That said, hospitalizations from raw milk are extremely rare.  During the 2000 − 2007 period, there were 12 hospitalizations for illnesses associated with raw fluid milk. That’s an average of 1.5 per year. With approximately 9.4 million people drinking raw milk, that means you have about a 1 in 6 million chance of being hospitalized from drinking raw milk.

To put this in perspective, according to the U.S. Department of Transportation, you have a roughly 1 in 8,000 chance of dying in a motor vehicle accident if you live in the U.S..  Therefore, you have a 750 times greater chance of dying in a car crash than becoming hospitalized from drinking raw milk.

The risk of dying in a plane crash (1 in 2,000,000) is orders of magnitude lower than dying in a car accident (1 in 8,000) – and yet most people who are afraid of flying don’t hesitate to get in their car. But as unlikely as dying in a plane crash is, it’s about 3 times more likely than becoming hospitalized (not dying) from drinking unpasteurized milk.

As I said earlier in the article, there has not been a single death attributed to drinking unpasteurized milk since the mid-1980s. There were 5 stillbirths attributed to an outbreak linked to bathtub-style Queso Fresco in 2000 in North Carolina. These were the only deaths during the 2000 − 2007 period I analyzed.

How does the risk of drinking raw milk compare to other foods?

Now let’s put some of these abstract numbers into perspective.

According to the CDC Morbidity and Mortality Weekly (MMWR), from 2006 − 2008 there were an average of 13 outbreaks and 291 illnesses per year associated with shellfish and mollusks. According to the CDC FoodNet Survey, about 5.7% of the population (17,869,500) consumes shellfish. This means you had a roughly 1 in 61,000 chance of becoming ill from eating shellfish. That’s about 1.5 times the risk of becoming ill from drinking raw milk (1 in 94,000).

The risk is even greater – and more serious – if you eat raw oysters. 7.4% of people who eat oysters consume them raw (1,322,343). There are 15 deaths a year on average attributed to raw oyster consumption. This means you have about a 1 in 88,000 chance of dying from raw oysters. In other words, you have a greater chance of dying from eating raw oysters than you do of getting sick from drinking unpasteurized milk.

What about other more commonly eaten foods?  Check out the chart below, from the 2008 CSPI report. It shows the relative incidence of foodborne illness from 1999 – 2006, adjusted for consumption.

As you can see:

  • Seafood caused 29 times more illnesses than dairy
  • Poultry caused 15 times more illnesses than dairy
  • Eggs caused 13 times more illnesses than dairy
  • Beef caused 11 times more illnesses than dairy
  • Pork caused 8 times more illnesses than dairy
  • Produce caused 4 times more illnesses than dairy
What this chart clearly shows is that when it comes to foodborne illness, dairy should be the least of your concerns.

I hope this helps you understand the true risk of drinking unpasteurized milk within the context of other risks most of us take on a daily basis without a second thought.  Of course, the next question that naturally arises is why someone might be willing to take any additional risk with raw milk – however miniscule it is on an absolute basis – when pasteurized milk is readily available.

In Raw Milk Reality: Benefits of Raw Milk, I’ll address that question by exploring the benefits of raw milk from a variety of perspectives.

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597 Comments

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  1. Well written, but you have not changed my thought about pasturized vs. raw. I do agree that organic is better but I will never drink raw or serve it to my family.

    • As I said several times in the article, my intention wasn’t to change anyone’s mind. My intention was to present the fact in an unbiased way so people have the information they need to make up their own minds.

  2. Chris, are you going to talk about the history of pasteurization? Maybe because I’m Canadian, but I’m a little protective of pasteurization, in the way one is protective of one’s old gently misogynistic grampa
    .
    Pasteurization is a thing which makes sense, and for once isn’t coming from a malicious place. It makes sense in the way that Jewish prohibitions about eating cloven-footed things and shellfish make sense. Back in a more primitive time (in terms of technology) it was harder to keep things safe. Back when factory farming was a tiny baby, and they started doing things like shipping food across the state, people *were* getting really sick and dying. Why? Because raw milk can go bad if it’s left just sitting around for a week. But we have refrigerators now. And you’re likely getting your milk from somewhere an hour or so away, not three days away in the summer heat. So it’s not the same kind of risk. It’s not the same kind of choice between dead milk or spoilt milk.

    (This kinda reminds me when I first started buying better quality meat and it kept rotting in the fridge. I didn’t realize how much I depended and meal planned based of preservative content in my dead meat, until I started having to throw out whole chickens that went green on me. You handle raw milk differently than pasteurized milk. Not even more carefully exactly, but it is alive and that’ll catch you up to begin with.)

    But it helps to be able to see it from their point of view. The last time raw milk was common, a lot of people died. Why risk it? When you can show people what’s different and answer their fears, instead of just calling them stupid (I’m not saying you are, Chris. I <3 you, totes.), you can convince more people.

    Plus, Pasteur was a ruddy genius. He didn't invent germ theory, but he basically beat it into people's heads. He proved and explained the science of fermentation, so we can all explain why sauerkraut is bubbly.
    Iunno, like the vaccine debate, I just get really tired when conversations split into two factions. We can both be right and both be missing something.

    • I must disagree. My understanding is that clean, raw milk does not “go bad”, it simply starts to sour or “clabber” and many primitives without refrigeration drank this type of milk rather than the sweet or fresh milk we have become accustomed to. I also understand that most of the world that drinks untreated milk either ferments it purposefully with a culture or allows it to sour on its own from the bacteria present in the milk. Pasteurization became a necessity in the early 1900’s because of the “swill” or “distillery” dairies that fed their herds spent grains and mash from liquor production. That dangerous milk was a pale blue, and calcium carbonate (chalk) was added to make it white. These cows were sick, and so would you be drinking that milk without treatment to kill the pathogens. Not only that, they were hand milked over open buckets and not by family members careful not to cough over them! Everyone must understand that from a pasture-based operation with a properly managed healthy herd and good sanitation in the milking parlor (esp. with refrigerated bulk tanks and stainless tubing), raw milk is perfectly safe. This describes the dairy in Oregon where I get my raw milk via a herd share. It is tragic what happened at Foundation Farm, and I am curious to know their mistake with the E. coli contamination. No news since the April outbreak. Please do not think that modern day factory-farmed CAFO dairy cows eating citrus peel cake, bakery waste, gum IN the wrappers, and GMO grains doused with broad-spectrum sub-therapeutic antibiotics will give us a safe beverage to drink right from the udder! It is interesting to note that industrial agriculture seems to have a very short memory. Once again conventional dairies are feeding their herds “spent” grain waste in the form of corn leftover from ethanol production. How did we forget? Cattle = ruminants = herbivores = grasses, forbes, legumes… Milk to be consumed raw must be produced under a different set of rules!

      • Lynn, you make great points here. I don’t know what it takes for clean raw milk to go bad, if it ever does. I’m sure at some point you wouldn’t want to eat it, lol.

        I’m keenly interested in the history of pasteurization but I don’t know much yet. Where did you get your information?

        I often think about primitive people consuming raw milk. I’m sure they would have stopped consuming it if people were getting sick. They were pretty smart like that. And yet, milk-consumption survived, so they must have done well on it. But the time before pasteurization was a time when people liked to mess with what was natural, as you mentioned the type of feed they were given on distillery farms. Obviously, this causes problems. I don’t think milk is inherently dangerous–I think people make it dangerous.

        • I learned a lot of the history from, “The Untold Story of Milk” by Ron Schmid, ND. I have also asked myself this question: if raw dairy was inherently dangerous, why did mankind continue to drink it? It is not without considerable effort tending cattle, goats, sheep, camels, water buffalo…

          • Exactly! And funny–last night after I asked you about your info, I was searching my library catalog for a book about pasteurization, and that one came up, so I put it on hold. I’m so excited to read it!

      • This is so true! I actually learned about the disgusting blue milk in history a couple quarters back. Of course, they didn’t talk about raw milk vs pasteurized. They just briefly described how industrialization affected the milk production and how, at that time, they began pasteurizing the milk and adding chalk. I was amazed. The answer was right there in front of my eyes and at that moment, I knew that the information regurgitated to us about the “importance” in pasteurized milk was highly exaggerated and we were being ill advised.

  3. Well done. It is quite useful to do side by side probability comparisons. Thank you.

  4. Hi Chris,

    I really wanted to get into raw milk, but just when I moved to Oregon where it’s legal, a small farm that sold raw milk and did everything so well (or so they thought) got an e coli contamination and one of their kids is in the hospital with kidney failure and on dialysis. That totally cured me of wanting to drink raw milk or feed it to my son. I think that the risk of dying is super low, but there are other things than death than make it a not-so-good option. I’m super bummed about it. Do you know if there’s any way to kill e coli and salmonella without heat? I heard that freezing for 2 weeks kills pathogens, but some research didn’t convince me it kills e coli. What do you think?

    Thanks!
    Joanna.

    • If you’re concerned finding a vat pasteurized (lower-temp) alternative from grass-fed cows might be a good idea. Down here in the Bay Area St. Benoit produces a milk like that – we use it to make yogurt with.

  5. Thanks for doing some research and de bunking some myths.
    We took the plunge last September and have only used raw milk since then. I had surgery in August to remove and diagnose ( I knew ) severe endometriosis. My gut was severely eaten up with lesions as well as my bladder. So, I did not tolerate any dairy products until I became so laden with gut pain that I drug out my copy of Nourishing Traditions and went on a rampage : Fermenting all kinds of food. My gut quit hurting and I got so much better, that I can enjoy cold raw milk now on occasion. We make butter every week from the thick, rich cream. ( There have been a few times we tossed the milk or just cooked with it when the cow ate some onions 🙁 but we get it from a family not a big farm, and they are very clean, and use sterilized jars. Keeping it cold all the way home is important as well.

  6. Its funny how the position of the US government, the industrialized diary industry, and many brainwashed Americans is that Raw Milk will kill you or at least make you so sick that your organs will fail. In other countries Raw Milk is perfectly ok to consume, you can even buy it out of vending machines in France!

  7. Nice job Chris. I also thought the CDC report on raw milk illness was fishy. At the same time, I’m fairly convinced that raw milk is more likely to make you sick than pasteurized milk, which your analysis confirmed. I don’t know why this issue gets so politicized and distorted.

  8. I eat a fair amount of local queso fresco where I live in Mexico. My image of “bathtub cheese” (a term I’ve never heard before – yuk) will probably keep me from eating it now more than the fear of getting sick from it. Bummer, I used to love that stuff.

  9. I have heard that there is beneficial bacteria in raw milk which is killed off during the pasteurization process. I’m not very learned in the field of bacteria and the roles that good and bad might play in all this, but would it be plausible to suggest that since there is beneficial bac., couldn’t it over-crowd or even consume any bad bacteria that might contaminate the milk? Whereas with sterilized milk, bad bacteria could get in it and grow unhindered by anything?

    Maybe it’s a fallacy to suppose that good bacteria could act like an “independent immune system” for the milk, but I have heard (and seen for myself) that in the case of ourselves, good bacteria on the skin lends a measure of protection – like a barrier, against bad bacteria infiltration. Could the same be said of raw milk, which has live beneficial bacteria and enzymes in it too?

    So basically what I’m wondering is, could the good bacteria/enzymes in raw milk do either or both of the following: Prevent dangerous bacteria from thriving. Kill dangerous bacteria somehow?

    • I will be covering this in more detail in the next article in the series.

  10. Okay, so raw milk is at least 9.4 times more risky than pasteurized milk. Got it.

    • 9.4 times next to nothing is still next to nothing. Chris, you can lead them to water, but you can’t make them drink. Jesus some people.

      • If I have a choice between two products, one of which is maybe 10 times more likely to make me sick, I’m going to choose the one that is less likely to make me sick, if all else is the same. That seems like the obvious thing to do.

        Now presumably Chris is going to say that all else is not the same, but we’ll have to wait for his next article to see why, so I’m sticking with my summary so far.

        • Ten times negligible is still negligible. The point about a risk being negligible is that you can take it out of the equation when balancing costs and benefits.

  11. Thoughtful research Chris, well done. I like your specific answer to homestead and suggest they try less appeal to authority and generalizations. Are you a fan of tragedy and hope, Andrew Grove, Jan, Brett and the gang? I imagine you’ll be approached about a show if you haven’t already.
    Thanks again

  12. Great article Chris, your thorough attention to detail in the analysis of these things is always appreciated.

    On a slight tangent from this subject, I have used kefir applied topically to clear up tinea, in myself and others and it works more effectively than anything I’ve ever come across, including some of the very potent OTC pharmaceutical creams/sprays, tea tree oil and lemon myrtle oil.

    • Many years ago, i was prescribed a to[ical cream called Calmurid for dry, cracked skin on my heels. The active ingredient was lactic acid – the exact stuff produced by kefir and other lactobacilli- though I did not know that at the time.
      Amongst all the information you could ever want about kefir on Dom’s Kefir Insite, he recommends it for skin conditions, and I put 2+2 together.
      Quite likely the ancient luxury of a “milk bath” was a kefir/fermented milk one also.
      Kefir is amazing stuff.

      You can also get kefir cheese, made in NY state, from raw milk, of course (and aged 60 days as per USDA rules) at kefircheese.com. Interesting story there about getting a gov grant to start the process and how they almost lost it because they were using raw milk. The grant was approved but their project was the only one NOT made public.

      As Kris says, if you were a cynic you might think that was more than just some clerical omission…

  13. Hi Chris,
    All you’ve shown is that with your modified data, people who drink raw milk are one order of magnitude more likely to get sick instead of two orders of magnitude with the CDC data.

    The fact remains that there is no way to get rid of these harmful pathogens other than pasteurization. As others have mentioned, these pathogens are nasty and can lead to organ failure, especially in children.

  14. From talking to a friend of mine who worked at raw milk dairies for years, the diet of the cattle is very important to the safety of the milk. He advised me to only ever consume raw dairy products from 100% grass-fed dairies, and to avoid those who even use grain just to get the cattle in the barn. (Grain-feeding leads to a more acid environment in the cow’s digestive system, which encourages more acid-resistant bacteria who can more easily survive our very acid stomachs to make us sick.)

  15. Thanks Chris!

    As you deal with a lot of chronically ill patients, how much greater do you think the risk of consuming raw milk is for these people? Do you recommend avoiding raw dairy to these people?

  16. Nearly finished 5 weeks on raw milk only. Here in Australia it can be bought as organic bath milk.
    Feel great, don’t want to go back to solid food’s as this is just so convenient.
    Many cravings have gone, and I no longer desire coffee.
    I am doing it because of an articel by Dr J E Crewe from the 1920’s about the milk cure used at the Mayo Foundation, now the Mayo Clinic. Specifically to reduce the size of my enlarged prostate. Unbelievably this is exactly what it has done !! Very hard to believe something so simple will do what my urologist says can only be rectified by surgery…………….. but that is what has happened…….

    • David, that’s amazing!

      I’m not surprised, though. The medical profession doesn’t want anyone to stop using its products and procedures.

    • Hi David, thats amazing! and sorry to butt in here…I am also from Australia and was wondering where you purchase your raw milk from?

      • Natalie, I’m also in Australia. Many health/natural foods shops sell ‘bath milk’ (aka raw milk), and it also can be found at many farmer’s markets.

  17. While I am also in the camp of allowing people to do what they want to without their own bodies, I believe in the phrase “don’t poop where you eat.” Cows defecate, and they carry all kinds of pathogens in their feces. A producer may do their absolute best to prevent the cow from contaminating their milk, but once they contaminate, then the person who drinks the feces contaminated milk can have the option of dying or suffering from lifelong renal failure. Maybe you can address this in another post.

    I find the logic of this post to something like swine flu hasn’t killed millions of Americans so we should import H1N1 pigs. Increasing the number of raw milk producers may increase the number of E Coli infected strains of milk..

    • You seem to have missed the point of this post. Cows defecate wherever they are. Water contaminated by cow poop then runs off into nearby spinach crops, which people eat and get e.coli from. This happened in California recently. Should we stop eating spinach?

      It’s possible to use proper sanitation methods and produce raw milk with less risk of illness than other more common food commodities. And in fact, the statistics I outlined in this article suggest that is what’s happening in most cases.

    • Cows don’t *eat* their own feces. They also avoid grazing where they or other cows or animals have defecated, which is why grazed pastures look lumpy (not mowed) – grazing animals naturally avoid eating grass around piles of poop.

      Staying healthy isn’t about absolutely avoiding certain pathogens anyway, it’s about managing risk *when* exposed, because pathogens of some sort are always present. Healthy cows on properly managed pasture have very little routine exposure to pathogens – enough to develop immunity, but not enough to get sick. Their immunity shields consumers of their milk.

      • I agree with Angel. There are many dairy producers in my family, and every good farmer knows that pasture rotation is of the utmost importance. A responsible dairyman will rotate his herd to new pasture every single day, which is pretty easy these days thanks to the invention of portable electric fencing. The best way to determine if your raw milk is safe is to know your farmer and be familiar with good farming practices, so that you can ask the right questions.
        My grandfather sold raw milk for decades all around his county, and never ever had any problems.

    • Yeah “don’t poop where you eat.” How about this one: “don’t milk your cow where it poops?” Do you have any idea how cows are milked in a traditional small farm? They are taken to a milking shed that is cleaned after each milking and are milked.

      You have to pasteurize industrial milk because the risk of contamination is so high. You couldn’t industrially produce raw milk, that is when you would have high increase of illnesses.

      • I was kind of getting to that point. But after doing some extensive reading, I have also concluded that udders can be infected too. E. Coli is transmitted by feces, but campylobacter can come from the udder of a clean cow. Also, a small amount of bacteria is enough to get people sick so assaying bacteria does not necessarily eliminate the possibility. In the end, it all comes down to risk assessment and I don’t mean to make anyone paranoid about raw milk, but pasteurization is not altogether evil either. I do not see a huge risk to getting raw milk from a small farm, and I am certainly less inclined to eat raw oysters in months that don’t end in -er, but at the same time, I buy most of my dairy at the store using light pasteurization with culturing because I do not see an overwhelming benefit from store bought raw milk.

        • Oh yeah, I would never buy raw milk from a store. I go straight to the farm and buy it about 20 mins after it came out of the cow. Plus, I trust the farmer because I drink the same milk that he, his wife, and all of his 9 kids drink. And $3.00 a gallon isn’t a bad selling point either!

          • Yes, we also get our raw milk from a local dairy farmer, and the whole family — mom, dad, nine kids — all drink it themselves.

            Most of the complaints about “raw milk” that people are making here, are regarding factory-farm milk that is on its way to the pasteurization facility. In other words, it was never meant to be consumed without pasteurization. That affects everything about it, and how it’s handled, etc.

            I’m 64 years old. I started buying raw milk four years ago, when I was 60. I’d never tasted it before. My dad was a milkman, and a shop steward for the Teamsters. Some old folks used to tell him how much they missed the taste of milk the way it used to be, before pasteurization. He would always dismiss their claims, and say it was dangerous. He told me these people didn’t make sense.

    • What part of the chicken do you think the egg emerges from? I’ve kept chickens and it’s sure not their wingtips. And chickens are much dirtier critters than dairy cows (I lived on a dairy farm as a kid, before modern factory dairies)

  18. I scuba dive, climb mountains, and mountain bike but I have never seen my mother the microbiologist more animated than when I told her I was eating cheese made from raw milk. For about 15 minutes she railed about the dangers. I don’t remember her arguments. I had recently gotten a case of food poisoning from raw vegetables…I think. It’s hard to trace down causes. It all depends on the bacteria what the gestation period is before getting symptoms. Anyway I threw out the cheese. Obviously I am not going to tell anybody not to drink raw dairy products.

    When switching to grass fed beef, free range chicken, and wild fish we tend to improve our chances of not getting a food born illness. Interestingly switching from pasteurized dairy to raw dairy increases our chances. When it comes to improving our food system raw dairy is not where I am going to make a stand.

  19. I appreciate what you are trying to do here, I really do.
    I’m glad you don’t go so far as Sally Fallon to say raw milk kills pathogens or that babies should drink raw milk formula…
    Congratulations on coming out of the raw milk closet!

    • I understand that raw milk can indeed kill pathogens. I have heard of experiments where good-quality raw milk has been inoculated with known pathogens, allowed to sit, then retested and none of the pathogens remain.

      • Lynn,

        There has been considerable discussion on this topic within the raw milk community, but as Chris is the myth buster here I am sure he can talk about it in greater detail…Chris?

    • My former sister-in-law had a baby boy a couple of years ago, and even though she **lived and worked on a farm that produces high-quality raw milk from pasture-fed Jersey cows, which she and her whole family drink daily** she was feeding him store-bought formula. He kept vomiting it up, though, and finally she switched to feeding him raw milk … and he stopped vomiting. He’s a thriving, beautiful boy.

      Maybe babies spit up so much because they are being fed bad food. It’s probably not a “natural” habitual behavior.

      I’ve been drinking raw milk from that same farm for 4 years, and have never had any illnesses from it. I also went on the raw milk diet 2 years ago, for three weeks, drinking this milk, and had no problems.

      • Maybe the babies weren’t being burped properly. You have no evidence, only anecdotes. Raw milk has harmful bacteria that can make kids sick because they have weakened immune systems. Babies have trouble processing food because their body is not developed yet. Raw milk has Listeria becateria in it, which can lead to childbirth problems in pregnant women. That’s a fact.

        • Sam, as a scientist, how long do you think it would take to prove it had nothing to do with burping? Even though it is theoretically possible for raw milk to contain unwanted bacteria there is no evidence that it actually does. The fact is pregnant women are prone to diarrhea. There is no evidence linking raw milk to diarrhea in pregnant women.