Hacker News Reader

Comment by oifjsidjf | Hacker News Reader

The sad state of nutrition (and pharma and fake meat studies) is that this is everywhere...from meat to diary to plants to Adventist Church sponsoring studies which (obviously) confirms their vegeterian-interwined faith.

The same goes for "plant milk" studies etc...which people like to compare real milk to.

Some extra info on diary:

Traditionaly most cultures eat fermented diary (cheese, kefir,...) NOT raw milk.

Mongols etc... who are known to drink milk drink horse milk, which has a different nutritional composition than cows milk, so eg people saying "Mongols drink milk bro so you should also bro" forget to mention that they don't drink the same milk as we on the west do.

View on HN

Your “most cultures” claim ignores most of eastern Europe where it’s perfectly traditional to drink milk straight from under a cow.

Urban population doesn’t do it anymore, same way how most people no longer use an outhouse or bring their water from the well, but visiting traditional rural villages in my childhood I was offered milk straight from a bucket from a freshly milked cow that just returned from a pasture. They also made cheese, butter, cream, fermented kefir, etc, for the same reasons Irish have a million potato dishes.

What I described is true for Belarus, Ukraine, Russia, Poland, but I strongly suspect is widespread everywhere where people own cows in their household.

It’s just odd to see a claim that “most cultures mainly drink fermented milk” declared with such certainty.

> Traditionaly most cultures eat fermented diary (cheese, kefir,...) NOT raw milk

Raw milk is sorts of dangerous and unpractical, that's why we pasteurize it first, most cultures didn't had access to pasteurization so they managed in other ways to preserve it longer

It is important to differentiate normative from prescriptions

Raw milk is very dangerous and impractical if you're living in an urban area in the early modern era, when the milk had to be transported long distances to get to you, particularly before refrigeration.

But if you live in a pre-modern dairy farming community, then raw milk is very practical and not particularly dangerous. There's no doubt that people in such communities drank a lot of it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com