Science Vs - Raw Milk: Secret Superfood??

Episode Date: June 25, 2026

Raw milk is having a major moment, with fans claiming it’s a gut-healing superfood that can prevent everything from asthma to allergies. But others are like HOLD ON — we pasteurize milk to make it safe! Drinking raw milk can kill you. So, who’s right? Could there be some benefits to guzzling milk straight from the teat? Or is it a terrible idea? We talk to food science Prof. John Lucey and pediatric allergist and immunologist Prof. Christine Seroogy to find out. Find us on YouTube at ScienceVsPodcast! You can also find the show on Instagram at science_vs and Wendy on TikTok at @wendyzuk. Find our transcript here: https://tinyurl.com/ScienceVsRawMilk  In this episode, we cover: (00:00) Some people online claim raw milk is GREAT for you (05:36) What is pasteurization?? (07:15) Is raw milk good for your microbiome? (11:06) Can raw milk help prevent allergies and asthma? (24:31) What are the risks of drinking raw milk? This episode was produced by Blythe Terrell, with help from Ekedi Fausther-Keeys, Meryl Horn, Rose Rimler, Michelle Dang and Wendy Zukerman. We’re edited by Blythe Terrell. Wendy Zukerman is our executive producer. Fact checking by Diane Kelly. Research help from Erica Akiko Howard. Mix and sound design by Bobby Lord. Music written by Bumi Hidaka, Peter Leonard, Emma Munger and Bobby Lord. Thanks to the researchers we spoke to for this episode, including Professor Markus Ege, thanks so much for your time. Thanks to Elsevier for sharing your raw milk book.  Thanks to Elsevier for sharing your raw milk book with us. Thanks to the Zukerman family, Joseph Lavelle Wilson, and Jack Weinstein. Science Vs is a Spotify Studios Original. Listen for free on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. Follow us and tap the bell for episode notifications. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hi, I'm Wendy Zuckerman, and this is Science Fersers. After this episode, we're taking a quick break just to work on some future episodes. So if you have ideas, let us know in the comments, things you'd like us to Verses. And we wanted to let you know that we now have a YouTube channel. Yay! It's ScienceVS podcast. There's a link in the show notes. You could also catch us on Instagram, TikTok.

But now, it's time for the episode. Let's jump in. I'm on an illegal mission today. Legal grey area would be more accurate, but for a cold open like this, we're going to say illegal. No, we're going to say grey area. There's no way that would get through fact check.

The point is I'm doing something naughty. A couple of weeks ago, I went on a secret mission. Okay. Here I go. I'm going into the store. There's plants out the front. Plants inside. Organic bananas to my left.

I'm here to buy something that some say is dangerous, and could even kill me. The chocolate milk drops. I bet there's carib somewhere around here. God only knows. Oh my gosh, there's an empty. It's a completely empty fridge. There's one left.

One left. I found it. It's a white substance. in a plastic bottle. There's one left, this one left. Raw milk. Raw milk. Okay.

But should I drink it? Thank you. The card? Yes, please. Sure. A lot of people online are saying yes, that this milk that I've got that hasn't been pasteurized and is straight from the teat has heaps of benefits.

They say, just look at the science. Raw milk, raw dairy in your diet, is definitely going to improve your health. Raw milk protects kids from asthma, eczema, and allergies. It is packed full of gut-healthy bacteria. You heal your microbiome. God intended milk to be raw. If he didn't, he would have put a pasteurization chamber on the udder of a cow.

Raw milk fandom has even hit the other echelons of society. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is a huge raw milk. fan, and it's not just the RFK juniors of the world. It's pretty common to drink raw milk in some countries. You can even find it in some vending machines around Europe. But of course,

there is a flip side to this story, the raw milk naysayers who reckon that raw milk is dangerous. It's actually illegal to sell raw milk for humans to drink in Australia and in some states in the US as well. I had to find it in the

pet food section of the store. So why are people worried here? Some people keep trying to act like drinking raw milk is unlocking some secret level of health. Well, I want to say congratulations. It unlocked diarrhea, fever, stomach cramps, nausea, and vomiting. The only reason to drink raw milk is if you ever wondered, hey, I wonder what it's like to die from having too much diarrhea. So who's right here? Could drinking raw milk be the thing you need to help your microbiome?

your allergies, your asthma, or are you going to die from having too much diarrhea? Today on the show, we're going to squeeze the teat of science until we've filled our bucket with facts around raw milk. Because, you know, there's a lot of... God intended milk to be raw. And then there's science. Science versus raw milk is coming up just after the break. Welcome back. Today, we are guzzling down the science of raw milk, and I'm here with our editor, Blythe Torel.

Hello, Blythe. Hello, Wendy. So I've got it in my hot little hands. Ooh, I'm so nervous. I should say, so it says pet milk only. And what's funny about the health food store that I bought it at is, so you go to the milk section with the regular pasteurized milk, and then they have a sign that says, if you want raw milk, go to the pet food section. But there is no other pet food sold in the quote-unquote pet food section.

Across the store, there's just a fridge with raw milk. And that's it. Wow, that is cheeky. Yeah. Okay, so let's open, let's open this raw milk. Once it's open, Wendy. Then it really becomes like Chekhov's raw milk. Yeah.

Okay, here we go. There it is. So you're just going to put it there next to you, right? You're not having it now. Nope. The question is, Blithe, am I going to drink this? It sounds like maybe you need some science before you can make that call. I believe so. So tell me, Blithe, let's start here. What is different about this raw milk compared to regular milk that you would buy at the store? Okay. So the key difference is that it has not been pasteurized. Mm-hmm. Right? And I can tell you a little bit about pasteurization.

Thank you. So what we do when we pasteurized milk is basically we heat it up, usually to 161 degrees Fahrenheit, 72 degrees Celsius. Thank you. For you, and those like you, for like 15 seconds or less. And when we started doing this at scale, it was about 100 years ago. Okay. And that, Wendy, was partly because milk was making people sick. Actually, a lot of the time with things like tuberculosis.

Like, the cows would get tuberculosis. Oh. And, like, it would come out in their milk and people would drink the milk and get TB. Wow. Oh, I didn't realize TB. Okay. So they start pasteurizing the milk and it works. It kills the bugs.

Right. It kills the TB. Yes. It becomes the thing. We do in the U.S., right, and in a lot of other places. And so I guess now the movement is saying we're killing too much in the mill. Right. Perhaps it's overkill?

Mm-hmm. Overkill. Like, a big argument is that we're getting rid of microbes that actually, like, would make our guts stronger if they hung around. Right. We're getting rid of the bad microbes and the good. And that's where I want to start with this argument about the microbiome. And so to find out if that is true, I called up this guy in the dairy capital of the United States. My name is John Lucy.

I'm a professor in the food science department here at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and I'm also the director of our Center for Dairy Research. And that is not all. John is from Ireland. And also... I grew up on a farm too, so a dairy farm as well. And I also worked for a couple of years in New Zealand, another dairy country. So Wendy, I brought you the dairy.

King. Yeah, he's perfect. He's perfect. And so I asked John about this argument that raw milk is good for your gut, that it's kind of a probiotic, basically. Yeah. And so John told me out of the gate that there's a really good reason to be skeptical of this. And it comes down to the fact that generally, if you've got a healthy cow, the milk doesn't pop out of the teat, chock full of bacteria. there's very little bugs of any description, good, bad or indifferent in milk. That's where the science is right now is not that there's a really important good bacteria flora in the raw milk. That's just not where we're at right now. Just the science isn't supportive about that.

That's interesting, though, because it definitely suggests that this raw milk in front of me isn't that dangerous, right? We're going to get into the details of that later. Mm-hmm. Okay. But like basically, the scientists tend to agree. that when it comes out initially, like it doesn't really have a bunch of bacteria in it. And this actually makes intuitive sense because if you think about like the dairy that we eat

that we know has good probiotic stuff in it, like yogurt, that stuff is fermented, which means that you've added that bacteria to it. Of course. You're thinking about yogurt, kefir, things like that. Yeah. And even if there were like a tiny bit of good gut bugs for the microbiome.

Yeah. It wouldn't be there in the amount that it would need to be in order to actually do anything inside your gut. Yeah. Because for a probiotic to work, scientists generally think that,

like, it has to have a lot of these bugs. Here is John on that. So if you like buy a probiotic supplement and you look at the fine print, they'll say it contains per gram, millions and billions and whatever of bugs. And because numbers are important for these benefits.

It's not like, because you're always, One gut microbiome is in the bazillions, you know. Put it off the chat. Yeah, the analogy that I always hear from researchers talking about the microbiome is that if you imagine your gut like a rainforest and then you drink some milk and say it's like a pigeon comes in to the rainforest, it's not going to change things, it's not going to flourish.

Right, right. That space is taken, right? Well, exactly. So you can't just, like, sprinkle in a few things and expect to, like, fix your shit. Literally. Literally. Right.

So John actually told me that to do the kind of thing that people are claiming that the milk could do. The milk would need a million per gram of bugs, and if the milk had a million per gram of any bugs, it would already start to be sour. Oh. Of anything. They neither.

So to me, this, this is what makes the microbiome claim fall pretty flat. Like, it does not make me want to go running to the local farm for a warm, frothy glass fresh from the utter. All right. So the next time let's look up is this idea that it can prevent allergies and asthma. Yes. Anything to this? This one, Wendy, is, like, a lot more interesting, actually. Oh.

This is the one that made me go, Hmm. Hmm. All right. Can you hear the intrigue? Hit it, five. Yeah. Yes.

This is a big one that people say, right? They say that if you give kids raw milk, it can help prevent allergy, it can help prevent asthma. And actually, if raw milk could do this, it would actually be a pretty big deal because these conditions, asthma and allergies,

they're super common in kids. I talked about this with Professor Christine Serugi. She's a pediatric allergist and immunologist who's also at the University of Wisconsin. And she says asthma can be really serious. It is the number one reason for admission to the hospital for a child. Asthma and reason. Really? The number one reason. Exactly.

And so if you can prevent it in the first place from developing, that's game-changing. Yeah. And we've seen a rise in allergies and asthma in kids. right? Yes. And that's what she pointed out too, is that, like, in a lot of countries, these numbers are going up. So this all is connected to raw milk because a couple of decades ago, we started getting studies relating to asthma and allergies in this particular group, kids who live on farms. So what these studies would do is that a lot of times there were these big surveys coming out of Europe, and they would look at thousands of kids, comparing the health of the farm kids, medical conditions they had to kids who didn't live on the farm. And what they found was

Really striking epidemiologic evidence that the children, the growing up on farms are really protected from developing allergic diseases. Some people say the farm effect. One study out of Austria found that about 1% of the farm kids had asthma compared to about 4% of kids who didn't live on the farm. A study out of Germany found that just over 3% of the farm kids had asthma compared to more than 6% of non-farm kids.

Yeah. It's more than allergies and asthma. It's like skin conditions, stuff like eczema, these histamine things. Yeah. And Christine told me this finding, it's been born out in the US as well. I feel like this story of kids on farms having low allergies.

It's sort of, I feel like the science has known this for a while, but it had in the past been attributed to the hygiene hypothesis and that maybe these kids on farms are, exposed to more dirt and that's really good for them and lowering their risk of getting these illnesses is now the thought moving. Maybe it's because they're drinking raw milk. You have entered the ring on this debate, Wendy. So, John, I walk me through, so with the hygiene hypothesis, let's bing, bing, bing, bing,

so, okay, so what is the up-to-date thinking on that? The up-to-date thinking is that, yes, like these exposures to things on the farm, to, like, dust, to dander, all these things that challenge your immune system at a really young age and sort of teach your immune system, like, what's out in the world and basically strengthens it so that, like, when it encounters that stuff later, you don't have a big allergic reaction to it. The idea is still that that's important. But at the same time, some scientists have also looked closer. And started to think that maybe also the milk that these farm kids are drinking is at play. Okay. And particularly some of these researchers out of Europe started thinking this because they looked at these, they did these big observational studies of a lot of kids.

And they tried to look at kids who were, in some cases, not living on the farm, but who were drinking raw milk. And they tried to control for some of those other exposures on the farm. And they have started to say, we think that there is something going on with the milk. Like we don't, we think that the hygiene hypothesis is part of this, but we also think that the milk is at play. This will just show my ignorance,

living on a farm, growing up on a farm. These kids aren't drinking raw milk. I feel like we're making some assumptions here. I'm guessing the researchers actually asked these families. Wendy, you're such a good student of the challenges of this research. How did you know? Wait, is this an actual question? Yeah, yeah, it is.

So it is not always clear that the stuff that the kids are drinking on the farm is strictly raw milk. Because some of the time, even if kids are drinking milk from the farm, it's getting boiled, it's getting treated some kind of way. And the studies don't always check for that. And then on top of that, some of these studies coming out of Europe are comparing this farm milk to milk that has gone way beyond sort of standard pasteurization. So this is stuff that like has been heated up way higher to a way higher temperature. And that kind of milk is more common in Europe. It's actually like the milk that you get that you don't have to put in the fridge, like the shelf stable stuff. Oh, like the crap you get on a plane. Right. Like sterilized. That's sitting in a hotel room in a little box, that sort of stuff.

Exactly. That can just sit on the shelf for three months or whatever without being refrigerated. So you compare it to that, which is seriously processed milk. Right. And so online, this is what a lot of people seem to get wrong about these studies. You know, they're assuming that, like, farm milk is raw milk. But if you actually read the nitty-gritty papers, you see sometimes that's not true. And sometimes what they're looking at is something else, Wendy, called, quote, minimally processed milk. You want to know what that is?

Minimally processed milk. What's that? So that is pasteurized milk. That's that science versus touch flight getting into the papers working out what all the definitions are. That's right. We love a definition. That's why we're here. And so I will say despite all that, scientists like Christine, they are not like driving a nail through the coffin of this claim that raw milk might do something to help reduce allergies.

So when she looks at all this complexity, she's like, I'm not crying over. as spilt milk. Correct. She doesn't think the science is spoiled. She thinks we shouldn't be lapping up the science out of Europe and using it to bolster claims that raw milk is good for you. But she doesn't think we're ready for a milk shakeup and that we should all be drinking raw milk right now.

She does not think that. So we've done our puns. Where do we go from here then? Well, I'm not going to leave you with just that. Okay. Okay. Because... It would behoove you to tell me more.

I can... Sorry, sorry, sorry. I can squeeze out a few more drops of science. Just... Okay. We've really milked this for all it's worse. Oh, my God. I'm going to put my dipper back into the pale, Wendy,

and pull out more science for you. Okay. So Christine actually was part of a study that I did think does some work here to help us parse out how big of a deal raw milk might be. Like if there's a signal, how much might that matter compared to like the other stuff people are exposed to on the farm, right? And so Christine is based in Wisconsin and she works with a lot of people. She studies a lot of different families who live on farms. And what she did is some research into these two particular groups in the U.S. The Amish and the Old Order Mennonites.

Are you familiar? Yeah. I've been to Pennsylvania, intercourse, big Amish community there. My parents laughed a lot at the name. I didn't understand what was funny. I do now. Tell me more. So, yes.

So the Amish and the Old Order Mennonites are similar in a lot of ways. They often have big families. They live these sort of more traditional farming lifestyles, not big on technology a lot of the time. Yeah. And they tend to drink raw milk. Okay, great. And from the farm. Yes, great.

Raw milk. Perfect. Yes. Yes. But these two groups are different in one important way. So the Amish often don't use any electricity at all. And the Mennonites, some of them do have electricity. So they tend to sometimes use mechanized processes for things.

Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. So Christine's team, what they did is that they surveyed a bunch of families in these two groups. They looked at the rates of asthma. the rates of allergy, and they found... The Amish community is like super protected. They had decreased allergic diseases across the board compared to the old order Mennonites. This might suggest that what matters here

is that they're doing all this stuff by hand with the animals. So that animal contact is what's important. So what you see in like an animal... Amish family, and I'm speaking generally here, right, is that people are in the barn, you know, they're like one-on-one, they're milking the cows by hand, they're in the cow shed. It's not about drinking the raw milk, it's about all that time with the animals. That is a suggestion that the time with the animals could be more important. Which is back to the hygiene hypothesis.

That's Bing, Bing, Bing. Exactly. Hygiene hypothesis. Yes. Yes. Another scientist told me that in Amish households, a lot of times it's the women who are doing the milking. So they're in the barns a lot, including when they're pregnant, maybe including when they have really small babies. You know, and that the kids are involved. And so there's like just a lot of exposure one-on-one with animals that if you have like a mechanical milking setup or like a more mechanized farm, you're on the tractors, all this stuff, you're just like not up in it with the animals nearly as much. Got it. And the thinking is that that might be. we don't know for sure, but that might be the bigger difference maker here. So, like, even away from the Amish and the Mennonites, just sort of bigger picture, you know, Christine's group, they study a lot of farming families in Wisconsin, and they will ask them.

You know, is the child going into the barn? And if so, at what age? I mean, that makes a difference. And getting exposed to that barn environment in the stable, like, that is another protective signal. At what age is it most beneficial for the kid to be in the barn? Yeah, I mean, it's a good question. The data from the epidemiologic studies strongly suggests that this needs to happen early in life. In the European studies have suggested that even begins in utero.

Uh-huh. So actually what we need to be doing is taking our kids to the farm. or go into farms when pregnant to reduce the risk of allergies and asthma. That's where we're at. Yeah, which is sort of a little bit of an annoying answer, right? Like, because not everybody has access to that kind of thing. But the other thing Christine told me is that, like, get a pet, get a dog. Like, that also is a good way for your kid to be exposed to this type of stuff early in life.

So where we're at with the research at the moment, this role. milk in front of me, not packed with good bacteria, and probably not going to be the thing to help me with my allergies or reduce your kids' chance of having exma allergies and asthma in the future. Is that where we're at? I think that's right. You know, it's possible there's some kind of link with allergies and asthma. Not really a slam dunk. Okay. How are you feeling about the idea of taking a big old gulp of that?

I mean, less interested than when we started, I've got to say. But I'm also less worried about it because John said there's probably not that many bad bugs in here. But is that... Ah. Ah. Ah. I'm going to have to stop you right there. Oh, okay.

Let's talk about that after the break. All right, welcome back. I'm here with Blythe. We are suckling at the teat of raw milk research. Absolutely. Yes, we are. Okay, so now we are on to the risks. How dangerous is this glass of milk in front of me?

Because I am getting thirsty, Blithe. I know. My time is running out. I'm parched. I'm parched. Right. Okay, let me tell you. Even though, like John said, the milk doesn't start out with a bunch of bugs in it if the cow is healthy.

Of course, sometimes the cow is not healthy and gnarly stuff can get into the milk that way. So actually, astute listeners of the show will remember from our bird flu episode that cows can get bird flu and that can get into their milk. Yes, that's right. But even if the cow is healthy, you have something else to worry about. because the other big concern is that even if the milk comes out okay, it can get contaminated afterward. Bugs can get in because cows are on farms and the milk comes out of their udders,

which are just kind of like flopping around under their bodies. It's also somewhat close to their butthole, right? I guess. Yes, near the poop shoot. Yes. So they can come into contact with all sorts of stuff. And I dug into this with John Lucy, who's the first scientist that we heard from. I grew up in a farm, we do the best we can, but you try and keep it as clean as you can,

but to think that the ground or the soil or the bedding that the animal is laying down in is sterile is just fantasy. And the problem is the dairy farms are just not a sterile environment. Right, the cow's not in a bubble. The cow's not in the bubble, the soil is not in the bubble, the feed is not the bubble. That's fascinating. So it comes out, let's say, close to sterile.

but as soon as it's out, then it's exposed to all of these other things. And that stuff that can then infect the milk, that tends to be the bad bacteria. Is that right? Yes, exactly. Like, that's what we see. It's a dirty environment because there's dirt, you know. And actually, one thing that John told me that was also kind of interesting is that if this bacteria gets on the teat of the cap, somehow, sometimes it just like hangs out there.

We all see these hospital shows, and we see the doctor about to go into the surgery, and he's washing his hands. And it's not a five-second job. It's like scrubbing of the hands, scrubbing, scrubbing, scrubbing, scrubbing. Why? Because on the hands, they can be bacteria, and it can foremost actually biofilms on the hands and in the environment. And that means it's harder to remove than just a simple little wash-off. The same can be true on the outside of these other, of the teeth that the cow has.

They can actually be permanent bacteria living on the outside of it that are very hard to remove. And remember, this is a sensitive area for the cow, too. So you can't spend five minutes like the doctor scrubbing. And the things we're worried about here are stuff like salmonella, e coli, this thing called campylobacter. And in particular, I want to zoom in on one bacteria, Listeria. So there's a bunch of different types of Listeria, but one of them in particular can make us pretty sick. And it can cause gross stuff like diarrhea and nausea.

But it's actually especially dangerous to people with compromised immune systems. And if you're pregnant, it can kill the baby. And Listeria is kind of all over the farm. You can find it in the soil. You can find it in the cows a lot of the time, at least in their crap. Here's John again. I'll give you just an example.

One of my colleagues here at the University of Wisconsin did a study of a farm here in Wisconsin, and she literally went out and sampled poop from these animals and cows. Mm-hmm. 90% of the animals were carrying Listeria monocetatics. So that's in their poo, though. So then the question is, how often is that

Listeria are any of these scary bugs going from the farm to the milk, right? Right. That's the question. That is the question. Yeah.

That is the question. How often is this grotty stuff actually getting into the milk? Yes, yes. And so one way that scientists try to figure this out is that they look at the milk at the dairy

because it comes out of the cows, it all gets collected up before it gets pasteurized. Mm-hmm, mm-hmm, mm-hmm, right? Yeah. And what happens is it gets collected in this big tank, called a bulk tank.

Okay. And scientists, what they'll do is they'll take samples from a bunch of tanks and they'll actually analyze them to see what's in there. I would say, you know, if you look at the percentage of a different patrogens, sometimes you see 5% of them are contaminated with hysteria, 5% are contaminated, roughly. I'm giving broad ranges with Kemp-Ilobacter, e-cola, etc. Yeah, so when they look at these samples, about 1 and 20 of them have...

one of these nasty bacteria inside them. But if you amalgamate all in when you ask a slightly different question, John, how many bulk tanks in many of these surveys have at least one pathogen? Mm-hmm. Sometimes it's as high as 20 to 30 percent have one pathogen present in the bulk tank. Whoa. Whoa! There's no way I'm drinking that!

You don't like those odds? No way. At the upper estimate of 30% in the bulk tags? Whoa. And why would you give that to your pet? Or your kid, Wendy. Right. So, I mean, the bottom line is like it's pretty common to find creepy stuff in the milk.

Like, John talked about those numbers. I found a study out of the UK that looked at raw milk that was actually for sale. And it found that 40% of the samples they looked at had some kind of problem with a risky pathogen. But then not everyone who will then drink these microbes in their raw milk will then get sick, right? Some of them, their immune system will deal with it. So how often are people getting sick from drinking raw milk? Yeah. I mean, it's a great question, you know, because, like, look, some people drink raw milk and they are totally fine.

You know, it's not like they're drinking arsenic, right? But there have definitely been some disease outbreaks. So this one CDC study looked at about a 20-year period and found more than 200 outbreaks tied to raw milk in the U.S., getting about 2,600 people sick. Just this year, there have been a couple of outbreaks in the headlines. There was an E. coli outbreak that was linked to this raw cheese. In Idaho, almost 60 people got sick from raw milk, a bunch of them from Kampilobacter. And look, when you look at the raw numbers, Wendy.

Yes, nice. People are more likely to get sick from other foods. Stuff like seafood, maybe leafy vegetables like spinach. That is true. But with raw milk, what freaks out scientists like John is that a lot of the time with these outbreaks, the people who get sick are kids. Children end up of being the most largest percentage

of hospitalizations for raw milk outbreaks. They don't have a choice. They don't know anything. They've been mom and dad are feeding it to their kids. Those are the ones that I get most concerned about. And depending on which study you take, sometimes it's like a quarter or more, are sometimes under the age of three and five years old. People are thinking, oh, I've got to expose my kids. Departogens? Are you serious? They could end up in hospital? That's the problem. And earlier this year, this is actually how raw milk kind of got on my radar. Because there was a listeria case. So this woman in New Mexico apparently drank raw milk during her pregnancy, and she lost her baby. Because of a listeria infection. She had a listeria infection. Yeah.

Oh, God. So, like, not common from what we can tell, but these outbreaks, when they happen, people can die. I mean, this is exactly why it's so devastating, right? I mean, I don't know what was happening for this woman during her pregnancy, but more broadly, you see these trends and these influences and people saying, damn, the establishment, what do they know? Raw milk is the answer. Pasteurization is a farce. And then this is the ultimate conclusion.

Of course it is. Then people thinking, oh, I've got to be drinking raw milk to help my unborn child and reduce the chance of them getting allergies. And then they're missing the bigger picture that is hysteria. that is Listeria. Right. And the stakes are just really high because it's not common for those horrible, horrible things to happen.

But when they do... It's awful. They're awful. Yeah. I just want to... Just want to spill that milk right in front of me. But there's carpet. I don't want to have to clean that.

So, I mean, it's really feeling like this raw milk. This raw milk's not coming back from that, right? No, I don't think so. And I mean, you know, just to say, like, some raw milk producers, of course, they'll say, like, listen, we try to avoid this. We keep things clean. We try to test for bacteria. And also, like, there are instances where stuff sneaks into pasteurized milk and makes you sick. Right.

But one study found that when people were getting sick from contaminated dairy, 96% of the time, it was the raw stuff. Wow. Okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah. 96% of the time. Which is why we pasteurize it. Pasterization works really well to kill all the stuff that we are talking about. You had it fast in 2026.

100 plus years later. Pasteurization works really well. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, listen, John was like, it's good that we've been doing it so long, you know? Like, it's allowed us to, like, test it and refine it and figure out, systems for it, figure out how to do it at scale. And all of that has been put in place over a hundred years to show that pasteurized milk is one of the safest food products on the

planet. So I asked him, is there a way to have safe raw milk? You're shaking your head. No, no. It's a foolish and risky thing to do. I don't want to be called foolish by John. So what are you going to do with that milk? I mean, there's this annoying neighborhood cat. Wendy, no. That might be thirsty and pisses on my security gate. If you even. Don't do it.

It says pet milk only. Oh, my God, Wendy. Throw it out, put it down the drain. Tell us in the comments. What should I do with the raw milk? Yeah, I think they'll tell you exactly where you can put it, Wendy. That's science versus. I give it to the cat.

Don't call pizza. I know, you would never. Don't go. Put down the phone. Don't call Peter. It's fine. How many citations are in this week's episode, Blime? There are 72 citations in this week's episode. And if people want to see them, where should they go? They can find a link to our transcript in our show notes. Thank you, Blythe.

Like I mentioned, we just started a YouTube channel, so you can come and find us at Science. V-S-V-S podcast. That's where we are. There's going to be a link in the show notes. And while you are looking at the transcript, you can click on it and find us there, see some of our video episodes. And Blythe, like I said, at the start of the show, we are taking a short break.

Yeah, just a few weeks. We'll be back. In a few weeks. All right. Bye. Bye. This episode was produced by Blythe Tarelle with help from McKinney Foster Keys, Merrill Horn, Rose Rimler, Michelle Dang, and me, Wendy Zuckerman.

We're edited by Blythe Torell, I'm the executive producer, fact-checking by Diane Kelly, research help from Erica Akeko Howard, mixed and sound design by Bobby Lord, music written by Bumi Hedaka, Peter Leonard, Emma Munga and Bobby Lord. Thanks to the researchers we spoke to for this episode, including Professor Marcus Eger. Thank you so much for your time. Thanks to El Cibia for sharing your raw milk book with us. Thanks to the Zuckerman family, Joseph Lbel Wilson and Jack Weinstein. I'm Wendy Zuckerman.

Back to you next time.