Raw milk is real milk.
In 1987, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration issued a regulation that made the sale or distribution of raw milk illegal. Since then, many Americans have viewed raw milk in a negative light.
But humans have consumed raw milk for thousands of years. It became a problem only when industrialization disrupted the natural diet of cows.
“In rural America, milk and milk products were made primarily for home or local use,” according to the National Agricultural Library. “However, with the movement of population from the farms to the cities at the turn of the century, it became necessary to mass produce and improve the quality of milk.”
Before industrialization, raw milk came from local cows with a grass-fed diet, the natural diet of cows. But when people moved to cities and brought their cows, many bad practices were adopted that weakened herd health. One such practice was feeding cattle a grain mash byproduct from liquor distilleries, also known as swills, according to the Public History PDX. This made many people sick and caused thousands of deaths.
Instead of providing cows in the city with a healthy diet to fix the problem of poor herd health and low-quality milk, pasteurization was introduced.
Although people stopped getting sick from the milk they received from the unhealthy cows, pasteurization took away many of the health benefits of raw milk.
Raw milk contains many types of beneficial enzymes, yet these enzymes are inactivated by pasteurization. Commercial processing of milk, including pasteurization, denatures bioactive proteins and RNA molecules and alters bioavailability of fat-soluble components, according to the British Columbia Herdshare Association.
Pasteurization has also caused many people to be allergic to dairy products.
“Raw milk has a superior nutrient profile, whereas pasteurized milk has diminished nutrition with denatured proteins and fats,” according to Sarah Smith, vice president of the Raw Milk Institute and natural healthcare practitioner. “People who are lactose intolerant can often consume raw milk with no maldigestion, due to the presence of a variety of living bacteria which facilitate production of lactase enzymes in the intestines.”
One must distinguish between raw milk intended for pasteurization and raw milk carefully produced and intended for direct human consumption. Raw milk intended for human consumption primarily comes from local farms where cows have a healthy diet, making the milk nutrient-dense. Cows that produce milk intended for pasteurization are often raised in confinement and are grain fed, causing the milk to be unhealthy and even containing pathogens.
Many people are concerned unpasteurized milk may make them sick. Especially, people ask, ‘Can’t raw milk give you tuberculosis?’ Although tuberculosis used to be a serious problem and dairy products were a common source of infection, the disease has since been eradicated from American cows.
In 1900, tuberculosis was the leading cause of death in the United States, and about 10% of tuberculosis cases resulted from exposure to infected cattle or cattle products. At the time, pasteurization certainly helped slow the spread of the disease, but since then, decades of disease control in cattle herds has essentially eradicated tuberculosis in American cows. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, people who now acquire tuberculosis from cows “come from countries where the infection is prevalent in cattle and where they presumably acquired infection”—almost never in the U.S.
Although tuberculosis is no longer a problem for raw milk in the U.S., like any non-processed food, raw milk can become contaminated with pathogens that cause foodborne illnesses. Raw milk drinkers should make sure to get milk from a quality source, but the supposed dangers of raw milk have been extremely exaggerated.
CDC data suggests unpasteurized milk caused 37 outbreaks and 800 illnesses (primarily E. coli and salmonella) during 2000-2007. Since approximately 9.4 million people (3% of the population) drank unpasteurized milk in 2007, there was a 0.00106% chance of becoming ill from drinking unpasteurized milk during that period.
This number is about 10 times greater than pasteurized milk but still unfathomably minuscule, and all kinds of foods carry risks of illness. Since 1972, there have been 82 deaths from pasteurized dairy products, but only two deaths from raw dairy products, and both related to products imported from foreign countries. Meanwhile, about one million people get sick from contaminated poultry every year, and between 2014 to 2021, a total of 78 foodborne disease outbreaks linked to leafy greens (mainly lettuce) led to 2,028 illnesses, 477 hospitalizations, and 18 deaths.
If you fear raw milk is too dangerous to drink, you’d have to give up lettuce too.
Jonah Apel is a senior studying politics.
Lauren Scott is a senior studying history and journalism.
