Raw milk doesn't seem to me the most anti science thing to me
But I believe the premise that financial interests aren't being challenged
But I believe the premise that financial interests aren't being challenged
However pasteurized milk allows for factory production and raw milk does not. That’s the real reason why it’s banned.
The same government that banned raw milk allows Doritos to be sold in the billions and even bought with Snap/EBT, btw.
Their farms can’t get away with the same conditions we put American cows in. Because of regulation.
Same reason chicken sashimi can be safe in Japan.
The problem with this kind of thing is that the story looks different at the level of a government than at the individual level.
The FDA article mentioned 2,645 illnesses and 228 hospitalizations in a 20-year period, and that was a period during which raw milk was heavily regulated, so would be likely to be significantly higher otherwise.
Still, the odds of you as an individual getting sick from raw milk would be relatively low. Does that mean it shouldn't be regulated? It's not a purely scientific decision.
Perhaps another way to go would be warning labels on raw milk. Still, I bet that would produce much higher illness numbers than the ones quoted above.
In the end the question is whether the government should be trying to help people stay healthy or not. If the goal is actually "Make America Healthy Again," then requiring milk to be pasteurized is an obvious choice.
I would even appreciate government making sure that companies selling raw milk to me are taking additional (but reasonable) precautions. But anyone just trying to ban raw milk for being unsafe and "unscientific" is just stupid.
The HHS Secretary of the United States does. https://www.wsj.com/health/rfk-jr-what-is-terrain-theory-66b...
Excerpts:
> “The ubiquity of pasteurization and vaccinations are only two of the many indicators of the domineering ascendancy of germ theory as the cornerstone of contemporary public health policy,” he wrote in the book. “A $1 trillion pharmaceutical industry pushing patented pills, powders, pricks, potions and poisons and the powerful professions of virology and vaccinology … fortifies the century-old predominance of germ theory.”
> As his political profile grew, Kennedy made his war on germ theory part of his public platform. As a presidential candidate in 2023, he promised to tell the National Institutes of Health to “give infectious disease a break for about eight years,” NBC reported. On a 2023 episode of Joe Rogan’s popular podcast, Kennedy said “it’s hard for an infectious disease to kill a healthy person with a rugged immune system”—an assertion that runs counter to modern medical consensus. When Rogan said that wasn’t true of the 1918 Spanish flu, which killed more than 50 million people globally, Kennedy replied: “Well, the Spanish flu was not a virus.”
I'm not sure how to share a society with people who think it's OK for the HHS Secretary to be a quack.
If banning the sale of raw milk saves a life is it still stupid and unscientific? What if it saves 10,000? A million?
People act like these things are a personal attack on them and their freedoms. Like they happened in a vacuum. Like a bunch of bros got together in the 40s - 70s and thought to themselves, "how can we deny future raw milk aficionado dpc_01234 his druthers decades from now". Pay no mind to the thousands of lives that could be saved from terrible diseases like tuberculosis.
This type of thinking and commentary (propaganda?) just constantly being thrust into the world is not only ignorant but it's dangerous. Good luck to you and yours man, I hope the worst that happens to you from this willful lack or regard for both science and history is the inevitable food poisoning you'll get from blindly ignoring food safety because "germ milk yummy".
The problem is that the stringent production standards that would be required to make raw milk "safe" are incompatible with factory production and the profit motive. Unless you're personally vetting the sterilization of everything the milk comes into contact with and its immediate cooling to a temperature non-conducive to bacterial overgrowth, you probably shouldn't drink it.
If you don't understand the science behind pasteurization, you should absolutely "trust the experts", aka scientists, or if you prefer, trust the old wisdom of previous generations who knew the value of pasteurization and watched people die of preventable illnesses before it came along.
> Powerful anti-vaccine advocates and people selling potentially harmful goods such as raw milk are profiting from the push to write anti-science policies into law across the U.S.
But we don't regulate milk for the people who boil it.
We regulate it because of the ones who don't.
Same reason we have airport security even if I personally don't want to hijack a plane.
If the fear is actually the drinking of raw milk then they should ban that, not the buying/selling of it.
There are very few things with serious health impacts that are completely unregulated. The closest we get is probably guns.
> To go after something as niche as raw milk is weird in my view.
It wasn't niche when we regulated it. It's niche now because we did.
> Heart disease leads to quite a few deaths and we don't ban McDonalds.
We take plenty of regulatory steps to reduce heart disease. McDonalds is required, for example, to provide nutrition facts. The burger meat gets USDA inspected. The restaurants get health inspections. (And we do try to do more. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sugary_drinks_portion_cap_rule)
Guns are more regulated than most everything else? Background checks, age verification, licensed dealers, rules on transporting and storing guns, etc.
> It wasn't niche when we regulated it. It's niche now because we did.
Just not true. It is niche in places where it is not regulated as well and some portion of those who buy raw milk pasteurize it themselves so we don't even know how many people drink raw milk.
> We take plenty of regulatory steps to reduce heart disease. McDonalds is required, for example, to provide nutrition facts.
Almost nobody reads that at a McDonalds...
> The burger meat gets USDA inspected. The restaurants get health inspections. (And we do try to do more.
And yet you can go to a McDonalds and die from a heart attack. Many places do not let you take that risk with raw milk.
Despite all these regulations you mentioned, McDonalds has more stores than ever before. With your reasoning that should be turning McDonalds into a niche place.
Kind of related I was really shocked when I saw people eating raw pork mince in Germany when I lived there. My first reaction is that I would never do that based on my upbringing but if natural selection is a thing it's working fine for them I guess.
The act of making cheese is processing the raw milk. Fun fact Pasteurized milk was also once raw.
Same with meat but basically no one advocates eating raw chicken.
Why am I explaining that things change from a raw to a processed state and becomes safe to consume...
pasteurization and vaccination are the crown jewels of modern civilization
Which is also why in the other direction cheese was invented for time stability of milk.
It seems pretty anti-science to me, going against such foundational food and health science.
It also seems directly related to anti-vax anti-science efforts because Louis Pasteur was also a critical early scientist involved in vaccines (through efforts against Cholera and beyond).