I recently wrote THIS POST about the health benefits of raw milk.
Followed by THIS POST about the reasons we don’t drink pasteurized milk.
So today I’ll be addressing a very common question: WHY is raw milk the subject of so much criticism and fear-mongering in our American culture?
I believe that this answer lies in both corporate greed and archaic science and research that is over 40 years old. The more people pull away from conventional methods, the more these mega-giant farms and companies are threatened financially.
They are also tied in very closely with politics, which is why raw milk is illegal to sell in stores in most states, but cigarettes are not. Cigarettes are big money, small family farms are not, so the farmers have no power.
I remember seeing on the news a while back where several politicians toured a big beef manufacturer and ate burgers made from “pink slime” produced there in effort to convince the public that it is a safe, healthy food.
WHY in the world would they spend the time and money to do that?
These large companies support politicians financially; Politicians keep laws in place that benefit the large companies, as well as prosecuting and shutting down small, family farms often without proper or substantiated evidence of any wrongdoing or contamination.
These small farms lack the resources to defend themselves, and so they rarely win. Imagine an Amish farmer without access to even the internet, trying to defend himself against the FDA.
I believe most doctors truly believe that they are doing the right thing by warning people of the “dangers” of raw milk, because it is what they are taught in schools. Much of what our healthcare providers are taught is based on information that comes from big government agencies like the FDA & CDC, so I really don’t blame your local family pediatrician here.
Do you see the problem? Money, not health and nutrition, drives many of the recommendations and warnings that are given to us. I wrote more about that in THIS POST.
Plus, there is almost zero instruction concerning nutrition in traditional Medical School. In one source I read, a medical student stated that they studied nutrition for 6 hours total in the entirety of his medical schooling. It is simply not valued in the system.
Doctors that I know who have studied raw milk on their own are supportive of it.
There are the good ones out there, like Dr. Ron Paul – both a medical doctor, and politician, who is supportive of raw milk.
So then there are the stories of people getting sick, or dying from consuming raw milk.
Consider this: if your child were to get sick, and you tell your doctor that they consumed raw milk, they almost certainly blame the raw milk.
I’ve seen it happen.
A friend of mine knows a child who got a virus that was not even transmissable through food or animal products, only human-to-human contact, yet raw milk was immediately blamed for the illness. Not only does this cause inaccurate statistics, but this misdiagnosis is dangerous as the actual cause of an illness may not be discovered, and thus, is improperly treated.
To be fair, there are documented cases of illness linked to e.coli that had contaminated raw milk causing kidney failure. But you must to go back to the source. Were the cows grass fed? Were the bottles sterilized properly? Were the workers using proper cleanliness procedures?
Contamination is everywhere. A friend of ours got salmonella from prepared chicken at a major health food store, and I have a friend whose daughter actually got sick from e.coli from a toy in the church nursery.
There are dangers out there, but for me, the benefits of raw milk far outweigh the risks, and the risks of pasteurized milk far outweigh the “safety”.
The statistics against raw milk are also grossly inflated. When investigations into the research is done throughly and objectively, it is clear that the vast majority of the illnesses can not be directly related to raw milk.
You also rarely hear about the thousands illnesses every year caused by pasteurized milk, nor of the outbreak in 1984-5 that affected 200,000 people, nor of the 3 people who were killed by it in one state in a single year.
In November of last year, the CDC, finally did admit that no one had died from consuming raw milk in the last decade. DECADE!
This means that more people die from the flu shot, lightning strikes, tylenol, skateboarding, scuba-diving, baseball, rock-climbing, hot-air ballooning, kayaking, or rollerskating than from drinking raw milk.
Even these flawed or hyped-up statistics say that you are more likely to be in a plane crash than to get sick from consuming raw milk.
Between 1998 and 2008 there was one death blamed on raw milk. However, after a lot of pressure the CDC admitted that that death was actually from raw queso fresco cheese, an adulterated raw milk product that is illegal to produce.
According to Food Renegade, Every single outbreak of salmonella from contaminated milk in recent decades have occurred in pasteurized milk.
I hope this is helpful in answering some of the most common fear-related questions concerning raw milk!
Let’s go back to the basics. It’s better there.
live well. be well.
