I heard perhaps the best rebuke of raw milk last semester after a classmate pitched its benefits to a professor. “But you are an adult human male,” said the professor. “Why do you still drink milk? You’re not a child.”

In this spirit, it is curious this has become such a spirited movement — but here we are. You are an adult. You no longer need to be drinking cow’s milk regularly. Nonetheless, this fad has swept Hillsdale, and it has real downsides. So to that end, pasteurization is real and the purported miracle benefits of consuming raw milk are not worth the hassle or the risk.

Pasteurization is perhaps the soundest nutritional science practice in the country. Merely by heating and cooling our food products, we can kill dangerous bacteria that live in the food we eat. This process has allowed the United States and other developed nations to conquer diseases like tuberculosis, brucellosis, diphtheria, scarlet fever, and control bacteria like Salmonella, Listeria, Yersinia, Campylobacter, Staphylococcus aureus, and E. Coli. Outbreaks of these diseases used to kill hundreds of thousands of people worldwide and have since been relegated to minor outbreaks in developed nations.

Before a homesteader uses that to suggest we no longer have anything to fear from dairy products, recent history shows us these diseases pop right back up when we cease pasteurization. In 2005, an E. Coli. outbreak in Washington state from raw milk sent five children to the hospital, two of whom were in critical condition.

 “From 2013 through 2018, 75 outbreaks reported to CDC were linked to raw milk. These outbreaks included 675 illnesses and 98 hospitalizations,” according to a Center for Disease Control fact sheet on raw milk.

Milk is not worth dying for — it’s really not that good.

I can hear the rebuttal now: “my farmer has free-range, organic, grass-fed, non-GMO cows, and I hear that the bacteria makes it a good probiotic.” 

The problem is that the harmful bacteria in unpasteurized food products are often not the result of poor conditions or mistreatment of animals. These disease-causing agents arise naturally. 

Remember that nature is not what you see in the arboretum. Nature is often trying to kill you. What’s more, the good bacteria — probiotics — that do exist in raw milk can be obtained from safer foods, such as yogurt, which definitely will not end your life.

If you get your raw milk to pour over processed cereal, to bake into sweet pastries, or to sweeten your latte, then you have already undone any of the benefits that advocates claim raw milk has. It seems silly to choose milk as your hill to die on when nutrition is so deeply broken generally.

You probably don’t need milk, period. Mind you, I am not a crunchy vegan — I am a Hillsdale College politics major who mostly does not care what you do. But the fact is that many of these vitalist men who chug milk to get gains are inadvertently harming themselves.

Milk, and all full-fat dairy products, contain large amounts of estrogens which can have negative effects on the body in a whole host of ways, according to the National Institute of Health. These estrogens exist in all milk as a byproduct of lactation. Though many in the raw milk crowd would avoid soy and tofu for the disastrous impact it can have on testosterone and sperm counts, they seem to ignore that high dairy intake is just as dangerous to the male body. The negative effects of high estrogen consumption harm women, too, by disrupting their natural hormone production. Pasteurized or not, high-fat milk is flooding your body with estrogen. Why not just drink water?

Raw milk is like strawberry milk — it serves no purpose. Why put that in your body? Go eat a steak or something. You’re an adult.

Joesph Sturdy is a senior studying politics and French.