I saw an "opportunistic" article posted online urging people to not drink raw milk as they might get bird flu from it... which I thought most people would shrug off as obvious propaganda against raw milk, but I saw it posted in earnest elsewhere so I decided to post this here
Raw milk has a lot of alleged health benefits; the author makes the ridiculous plea for "no one to drink raw milk for any reason"...
Please don’t drink raw milk at any time, especially not now
The problem with pasteurization, as with antibiotics, is the process also kills good nutrients like antibiotics kills good bacteria
So by drinking raw milk you can get the good nutrients without them being destroyed. I know of dairy farmers who would drink pretty much straight from the cow without getting sick. The milk tastes totally different (better, a lot of people think)
The elderly or children or sickly might avoid drinking raw milk, but otherwise it's a healthy consideration for a lot of people
Example pro-raw-milk article: https://www.rawmilkinstitute.org/updates/letter-to-medical-professionals-about-raw-milk
Numerous scientific studies have shown that raw milk is correlated with decreased rates of asthma, allergies, eczema, otitis, fever, and respiratory infections. Raw milk also aids in recovery from antibiotic use, and provides many gut-healthy probiotics and enzymes.
Here's the biased fearmongering article in contrast: https://gizmodo.com/raw-milk-sales-up-bird-flu-h5n1-tiktok-usda-cdc-fda-1851476916
It all depends on the cleanliness of the dairy farmers milking sheds and storage, if they are lax in their cleaning routines then people could be seriously injured by infected milk.
Pasteurization stopped a lot of harm being done to milk drinkers, it can render infertility in women for starters.
I thought of this as a completely valid point...
until you apply it to other "raw" foods routinely consumed like fruits or veggies, which could also and do have some diseases spread on them due to dirty conditions
So, raw milk requires clean conditions to produce it at one further level back (the point being that pasteurized milk for example could be contaminated by dirty conditions after being pasteurized - ultimately food production requires keeping things clean on multiple levels)
Migrantsl farm workers shitting in the fields is not healthy for us
In states where "raw” or unadulterated milk is “permitted’ the farmers are subject to muchh more stringent documentation and inspections than the gross bulk milk homogonizers in those same states....
True, the Los Angeles County Health Department allowed Alta Dena dairy to sell raw milk but they were regulated to the hilt.
Didn't Alta Dena "voluntarily" stop production of raw milk in the late 70's / early 80's because the gov't inspections were too burdensome? Have they begun producing raw milk again?
I was in the food safety business way back in the early 80's, but I don't know what happened after that. Another problem for raw milk is that it doesn't have much of a shelf life, so that's a marketing disadvantage. I noticed the shelf life of regular milk nowadays is longer than it used to be. Some processing may have changed.
You can say that about all foods processed, meat, vegetables, honey, etc.
Pasteurization allows large scale commercial dairy farms to operate huge networks of unsafe food production facilities, they nuke the product beyond all recognition to prevent themselves from being sued, then they label this product as "Milk" and put it on the shelf.
p.s. You can also just test the milk at the production facility itself to tell if it's infected or not.