Raw milk: what to think?

So, seeing as I am on a campaign against raw milk (and after being questioned by my dear Melissa about it...) I thought it might be time for me to do a little research.  Nothing came up in terms of a "raw milk" search through research articles on my school's library site, so I had to settle for an online search.  Which is a scary thing.  There's a lot of stuff out there... most of it unfounded on research and full of politics and opinions.

Like this:

He makes some CRAZY claims on what raw milk can do for you and fails to mention ANY health risk you take in doing so... which IS scientific and is DOCUMENTED by the Centers for Disease Control.

Would you eat raw chicken?  Maybe you do, I don't know. But you probably don't because you know it's unsafe... and while you MAY not get sick... there's the risk for it because it's raw and filled with all sorts of microorganisms.  Would you ever feed that to a child?  Or an elderly person?  Or pregnant woman?  Probably not.  No one questions whether or not raw meat can cause illness.

I view raw milk in a similar way.  Milk began to undergo the Pasteurization process over 100 years ago.  That simply means that it is heated to a temperature that can kill germs and then sustained there... and then cooled to a temperature that milk should be stored at.  Milk from the store is also homogenized to make it creamier... this just means they sift it through teeny-tiny holes to smoosh the fat, protein, and sugars together.  This makes it creamier and the "fat-globules" smaller to keep the milk from separating.


So is raw milk dangerous?  Here is a graph that depicts the dairy-related disease outbreaks from 1973-2005.

I wish I could give better credit to whomever wrote the wonderful article I found, but they didn't say who wrote it!  They simply list over 55 sources used to collect their data on this hot topic.  But what we see in this graph is that, although only 1% of the population are raw milk drinkers, they account for almost HALF of all dairy-related disease outbreaks. That is seriously disproportionate. 

Raw milk promotors claim these unbelivable benefits, yet look at their summary nutrition:

There is very little difference between each of the categories. 

Another concern is that Raw Milk contains probiotics (like yogurt) that are killed during the pasteurization process.  I may need to do more research on this topic, but from what I can tell, milk is sterile (that means there is nothing living in milk) when it exits the cow... but BECOMES contaminated by environment:
• Mastitis and shedding of the pathogen directly from the cow’s udder into the milk
• Entry of bacteria into the milk from the cow’s skin, or via manure and dirt in the dairy environment
• Transfer of pathogens by vectors if they come in contact with the raw milk (for example, flies may carry pathogens on their legs and mouthparts)
• Human carriers transferring pathogens from their hands to the milk 


This not only means that probiotics would not naturally be present in raw milk, but that they would enter milk in the same way as E. coli or Salmonella.  In my opinion, it's not really worth the risk of getting E. coli along with a little healthy bacteria.

There is also some suggestion that grass-fed cows have lower risk for infected milk, but this, too needs more research.

In summary, if you DO decide to drink raw milk, be careful!  Know that you ARE taking a health risk with no proven benefits.  It is very clear that you are at increased risk of illness if you do so and that pasteurization exists for a reason!