Drinking it on the farm or close to when it’s very fresh isn’t super high risk. My family was in dairy and did it all of the time. Once it’s off the farm, all bets are off.
It is highly unlikely to be dangerous enough to have a significant, or even measurable, effect on life expectancies.
It usually tastes great and is often ultra pasteurized, as it’s a low volume product.
Assuming you are a normal healthy adult who gets plenty of nutrition - like someone in the modern world. If you are eating near starvation your immune system won't be as strong. If you are otherwise unhealthy the potential bacteria can overwhelm you...
Online arguments about anything like this since COVID boil down to “if you don’t die, it’s ok”. An old or sick person can easily die from food poisoning. If you are hearty and hale, you’re going to feel like crap and get stuff like violent diarrhea.
It’s a risk. There’s a long history of sick and dead people associated with raw milk.
26 deaths, 356 hospitalised, and less than 1% of food borne disease outbreaks over a 26 year period in England and Wales: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6805749/
ANY food would be safer cooked, but most people eat quite a lot raw.
The risk lies in certain diseases (TB is the highest risk) which can kill. However, there is a TB vaccine.
https://www.cdc.gov/tb/vaccines/index.html
The BCG vaccine is not commonly used in USA.
I'm wondering if it is the freshness that partially makes the non-pasteurized milk taste good, since it is illegal to sell over state lines and possibly to sell at all, it is probably much fresher.
Do you think that profit mongers are going to waste energy and time overcooking it?
I think pasteurising it yourself would be worse as its harder to control temperatures precisely without the right equipment.
Homogenisation is a separate process and it is possible (at least in the UK) to buy not homogenised pasteurised milk which should have the same far content.
To me filtered milk (which is filtered to remove bacteria and other things before pasteurisation to keep it fresh for longer tastes very good, which favours the argument it is the freshness that matters.
Of course, that level of care wasn't economically practical for milk back when the laws were written.
Which it frequently doesn't? Nothing more fun than grabbing a pint of ice cream and then discovering it's full of ice crystals at home, because it thawed and refroze somewhere in the shipping chain or at the supermarket.
Of course it's more of an issue with Haagen-Dazs since it doesn't use the stabilizers like guar gum. And more of an issue with smaller supermarkets and shops with less staff where they're more likely to leave the ice cream sitting around for hours between delivery and loading into the freezer.
This is mostly a consumer problem.
You (or, the HN demographics being what they are, more likely your SO) toss it in a cart and then proceed to shop recreationally for some time, toss it in the back of your potentially hot car, stop to get Starbucks and then eventually sometime later it gets into a freezer. It might've been out of the freezer for over an hour. Almost certainly 15-20min
The next longest time it spends out of the freezer is the pallet jack ride from the walk in in the back of the store to the frozen food isle, typically single digit minutes, tops.
>Of course it's more of an issue with Haagen-Dazs since it doesn't use the stabilizers like guar gum.
Package size and resultant thermal mass has a big effect on it. Higher end ice creams suffer this more than cheaper ones bought in bigger sizes.
>smaller supermarkets and shops with less staff where they're more likely to leave the ice cream sitting around for hours between delivery and loading into the freezer.
This is just not how it works. The delivery person will put refrigerated goods specifically into the fridge specifically to avoid "well you left it on the dock and didn't tell us" accusations.
I'm sure somewhere there's a foodservice supplier that doesn't do this but that's a them problem and it's the exception rather than rule, their suppliers are likely wheeling the stuff right from reefer to walk in when they deliver to the supplier.
I'm a 10 minute walk from them, tops. I put it straight in my freezer. It's frozen solid when I buy it and frozen solid when I put it in my freezer.
And yet, 5-10% of the time, when I go to eat it, it's icy crystals throughout.
The frozen supply chain is not as reliable as you seem to think it is, and it seems like it's mostly a retailer problem. I'm glad it seems to be better where you are though.
My family on both sides were dairy farmers for generations, I have pasteurized, non-homogenized milk delivered to my house. I’m a huge advocate for dairy. But commercial raw milk is dumb.
I think a lot of the noise about this is from folks who would like to bypass the dairy industry and their abuse of farmers. I’d love to see regulatory changes where small scale dairy processing would enable farmers to operate direct to consumer models more safely. The folks I get my milk from do that, which was only possible because their mom in the previous generation was an attorney who could navigate the regulatory nonsense.
So the industry had a choice: go back to keeping cows on pasture, which would mean the expense of transporting the milk further into the city from distant farms, or use the new technology of pasteurization to kill all life in the milk, good or bad. As always, industry went with the cheaper option. Which is fine; I wouldn't drink raw milk off the grocery shelf if I thought it came from a large factory dairy. Milk produced that way should be pasteurized.
But it wasn't necessary to criminalize doing it the other way. That's just an industry trying to protect itself from competition. If your raw milk comes from cows on pasture, milked by people who make an effort to keep the cows healthy and the milk clean, there's nothing to worry about.
From their mother. Human breast milk is very bitter and I'm sure protein wise very different than cow milk. I doubt scientists have really studied this. Humans are not supposed to be drinking bovine milk. As a visitor to this planet I find it strange. Milk has a lot of lactose and will have interesting affects on adults including but not limited to insulin resistance whereas babies are developing very fast and need simple quick energy.
Humans aren't "supposed" to eat anything. You think we're supposed to eat flour or sausage or arugula or lentils?
But because we like to survive, we eat anything and everything that gives us nutrition and helps us live. Also, there are pastoral tribes like the Maasai in East Africa that historically have lived on bovine milk as a staple food. Is that authentic and traditional enough for you that you might no longer consider it "strange", but rather as traditional as it gets?
We are not. The dumb grazing animals are supposed to eat the various forms of grass. Their guts and stomachs are designed to convert those to energy correctly. Humans since time immemorial have eaten mostly vegetables and meats when they can catch them. Only recently did we start poisoning ourselves for the profits.
This is just not true. Since time immemorial, humans have eaten meat and fish constantly as a main part of their diet. Catching fish and animals isn't that much different from digging up roots. We've eaten everything we can, not just vegetables.
And humanity has been drinking bovine milk for many millennia. Long before even the concept of capitalist "profits" existed. Again, see the Maasai for example.
And it's still the wrong thing to do. Humans got that wrong and stuck with it. They will argue till they are blue in the face and so will I.
Humans are not "supposed" to eat and drink most of what we do (maybe fruits are an exception). However, we have evolved to consume a lot of things - including, if we have the right genes, milk.
That said, we've coevolved with technology of one sort or another (the broadest definition, to include cooking, plant breeding, hunting with weapons, domestication and animal husbandry) ever since we began to master fire, a million years ago give or take.
As many people do and get a fatty liver and ultimately Cirrhosis.
Aggressively incorrect.
Please note I am not advocating for raw milk, I think it is not a wise decision but I also don’t believe it to be poison.
Its not a huge effort to at least try to add some source with such a claim, besides the comment does not even bring anything of value to the discussion.