WRFH/Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7 FM - The Social Mediators: Raw Milk

Episode Date: October 8, 2024

This week we discuss raw milk: is it safe? is it evil? should we even drink any milk at all ever? Tune in to hear takes from the world's best TikTok microbiologists (oxymoron), the how-to on drinking raw milk without instantly dying, and the pros and cons of that raw milk lifestyle.  

This is the social mediators on Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7 FM, where we examine the truth disparity between what's on social media and what's actually true. I'm Julian Parks. And I'm Gary Gulesby. And today we're talking about raw milk. Woo! I love raw milk. So Garrett loves raw milk. I've never had raw milk, but I'm surrounded in my life by a lot of raw milk haters.

Are you really? My mother would probably be sad about that. I think my mom is probably pro- raw milk. Maybe if I were just going to go off of her trajectory in life. It's a raw milk trajectory? Yeah, it is. Fantastic. But everyone I know hates it, the concept of, they don't drink it, just the concept of raw milk.

And so does the internet shocker. Oh. And so I'm hoping I can leave this. You didn't find any really pro raw milk stuff? I did. I found plenty of pro raw milk stuff. But I found a lot of vitriolic hate for pro raw milkers. So everyone's going to have to deal with.

The phrase raw milkers really. I hate so much. I have to go on it. It has nothing to do with the people doing the milking here. Gosh. Do we have to cut that out or are we fine? No, I think the people need to know about raw milkers. No, we can't.

Moving on. So here's the deal. I'm going to tell you right now right off the bat, everybody who's anti- raw milk starts off their video by saying they are a microbiologist. And let me tell you everyone's microbiologists. There are so many of them. There are 100,000 microbiologists. and they all look like they probably aren't microbiologists.

And maybe they are. It's a hard thing to be. What I found... What I found was, while the frequency of videos about raw milk is more positive, the videos that come up first are all negative. Interesting. And the ones that get the most positive attention are negative. Does that make sense?

It does. So we have this one guy who basically just says straight up, and this is repeated a lot. on the internet. There are no benefits at all to drinking raw milk. You can only die from it. It's the only, like, thing that comes out of drinking raw milk is that you will go to the hospital, you will get a disease, you will die eventually. He's very, like, it leads to hospitalization and death, is what he says. Is he a microbiologist? He is a microbiologist? Well, then we have to believe him. He says that, I don't know, he basically said he wrote his 100-page thesis on this,

and that cows get bacterial infections all the time. And so we can get it too. There's also another video of somebody saying that when cows get tuberculosis, which I didn't know the thing. When cows get tuberculosis, they give it to us. When they have tuberculosis, they give us tuberculosis with their milk. I'm going to do a little fact check on that, so keep talking. Apparently, there's a woman who wrote a memoir about how she got tuberculosis in her bones from drinking milk.

That is not how that works. I know. I was like, okay, but that's what John Green said. And I love John Green, so I believe him. So another thing that happens is like these negative videos get a lot of comments. And the comments are basically all like, I'm a dietitian. I work at a children's hospital. And kids from homesteads always get sick from raw milk.

I'm a microbiologist. I test milk all day. And I'd never drink it. Like that sort of thing. And then it's a lot of people being like, why is everybody so anti just heating up your milk? Where are you so mad that everyone's just up gently aplomb? heat to your milk. Why is that a big deal? And then there's the pro people who are like, because it ruins the enzymes. That's what they always keep saying is that there's enzymes and

probiotics and probably proteins too that exist in raw milk that get ruined by heating up, which I believe because I took one biology class one time where you learn about how enzymes work. And if you heat them up, you can de nature them. So that makes sense to me, but you'll have to talk a little bit more about how that works. But people keep saying there are no, there's actually no added information. You just get one side of people saying there are no benefits at all to drinking raw milk. And then that's where they leave it. And then people on the other side saying there are so many benefits to drinking raw milk, why wouldn't you just do it? And then there's people coming in and saying like, well, they don't sell raw milk in stores. It's illegal. And there's a reason for that.

And then people being like, well, don't trust the government. And that's the whole conversation. It's literally just people speaking out into the world and not addressing each other in any regard. There's a lot of anecdotal evidence on the raw milk side. That's typically what you use to be pro raw milk is like I had eczema or I had a sickness or I grew up drinking raw milk and I never had any digestion problems with lactose. And there's a lot of that side of social media that's like anecdotal evidence about how raw milk saved their life. and then the opposite is like these people who are like it's really bad for you and a lot of people are dying from it and you're like a lot of people I learned a little bit about the history from some of these people that are pro raw milk and they were talking about how like everything was raw milk until like the 1920s when milk exploded everyone wanted milk and they started using I guess unsafe or just gross cows I don't really know how that works but the cats

Cows were, oh, they were being fed, like, grain that from the alcohol or something like that. I don't remember. But it was something that they were being fed grain that was bad for them. And that led to the milk being bad, so they had to pasteurize it. That's what the lady said. It was actually a man. I don't know why I said lady. But that's what he said about it.

And then it's just a lot of people saying that we can't, humans can't digest milk because it's pasteurized. It makes it hard to digest when you pasteurize it, so raw milk is easier to digest, which I believe. One thing that makes me laugh a little bit is that you kind of, once you go down the rabbit hole of no raw milk, get to this weird subset of people

that's no milk at all. You can't drink any milk. All milk is bad for you. You should only drink plant-based milk. And it's like... How do you milk a plant? I wish I could tell you. you um but it's like people being like the dairy industry has spent millions of dollars convincing people

that milk is good for you milk has never been good for you um it's all a ploy drink plant milk and that to me is never going to be a compelling argument ever because what are you even talking about you're saying almond milk is the way to i like almond milk but it's just weird to go the non-milk route i've said milk so many times and I'm pretty sure I say milk and milk. I don't really know which one I say which so whatever. There's some stats that people brought up, but they change depending on who's saying them. You're either 640 or 840% more likely to go to the hospital from raw milk than pasteurized milk. And one woman said infant mortality rates dropped 50% when pasteurization entered the scene. I don't even know if that's true.

They showed us a headline that made it look like that's probably a study that somebody did. Then there's this woman, there's this really condescending video of this microbiologist. They're all microbiologists standing in the corner of this woman's TikTok. And he's just like making faces as she speaks. And she's like, did you know that raw milk never goes bad because it just turns into buttermilk. And then he literally just gets back on the screen and goes, that's not possible. that's impossible does this woman know what buttermilk is and that's the end he doesn't explain to us what that means nor where buttermilk comes from nor why raw milk does not turn into buttermilk maybe he's right

but i just don't know why he's right i wouldn't know why he was right even if he was um there's also lots of diseases that people say that raw dairy contains naturally i guess um salmonella wow i said that the worst way you could have said that um e coli and then like I think, well, it kind of looks like bruschetta, but I think it's probably bruschella, um, Listeria, you know, those ones and then a bunch of ones I can't say.

Um, but a lot of diseases, I guess you can get from raw milk. People basically, I would say by and large, if you're doing a basic scroll, you're going to get raw milk hate for sure. And then the people that are really into raw milk

don't really care too much because it's a lifestyle thing. Like raw milk is not just something they drink casually. It's like something. they have to go to their dealer for, kind of like drugs. So for those of you who are just tuning in, this is the social mediators on Radio Free Hillsdale 101.1.1.7 FM. I'm Julian Parks. And I'm Garrett Gulesby.

And I just talked about raw milk for like seven minutes. And I still don't really know if it's good or bad because I really have a lot of stuff that says it's bad from the internet. But there's a lot of people in stories that say it's good and that swear by it. And I don't like to think that those people are insane. But the people who are anti-seem to make it seem like it's a, insane choice to drink raw milk. So Garrett's going to come in and help. Go Garrett. So what I'm going to do is give you essentially the path that milk has to take in order to become

dangerous for your health. Okay. So you have kind of three main players in causing disease through dairy, three common ones, E. coli, salmonella, and Listeria. I said those. Yes, you did. But those are kind of the three most common bacterial outbreaks you see in dairy products. Just for some context, Each of these bacteria has a set range of temperatures in which it grows most readily. This will be important in a minute. So for E. coli, it's between 69 and 118 degrees Fahrenheit. So that's a big range, right? That's room temperature and then up to a little bit hotter.

Salmonella grows best above 40 degrees. So basically any, you know, it dies at a certain temperature, probably up over 150 degrees. But if it's above 40 degrees, salmonella will grow pretty readily. And then Listeria, assuming it's present. So this is like if I have one little bacteria, if it's in the right conditions, it'll make babies and make a bunch more. And that's a problem for you as a human if you have them in you. Listeria. This one's really dangerous because unlike the other ones, it can grow in refrigeration conditions.

It can't get too cold, can't get below freezing. I believe it bottoms out at about 4 degrees Celsius, which is like 35 degrees Fahrenheit, something like that. Got it. So it can't freeze. right? Freezing is bad for Listeria, but it can grow in pretty cold conditions. Now, the reason why I have prefaced what I'm going to say with that information is I'm going to talk now about why we pasteurize and then what maybe makes raw milk safe or unsafe and what are the conditions that cause it to be such. So given that bacteria multiplies in this range of temperatures, if we're in that range,

it's bad, right? Bacteria can grow. It's not naturally in milk. Okay. So, So cows, it's not just like automatically in the milk and then pasteurization kills it, but it gets in milk very easily through a couple of different ways. The first way is that a cow can be sick with, you know, a cow can have salmonella bacteria in it. Can it have tuberculosis? Cows can have tuberculosis. I did confirm. I was a little bit skeptical about that, but they can.

And they can transmit it to humans. But in the bones, I don't know about that. So anyway, the cows can have the bacteria in their digestive system, but more commonly the way that bacteria, gets into dairy products is through an uncleanly environment. So, you know, bacteria is everywhere all around us in all kinds of different environments. It's probably on this microphone, right? Probably. Yeah.

I don't know about Listeria, but, you know, if you are in, let's say an environment, let's say an industrialized dairy environment where you have all these cows, they're kept in, you know, let's not get into humanitarian issues here, but they're kept in stalls, whatever. Maybe they have enough room. Maybe they don't. Yeah. But if it's dirty at all, so if there's feces lying around, if there's dairy, you know, if there's dairy spoiled dairy that's uncleaned in like a milking apparatus or something like that, Listeria, salmonella, Ecoli can grow in all of these settings. So oftentimes what will happen is in the milking process, bacteria gets in because of some uncleannliness in the environment.

Okay. So that's how bacteria would get in in the first place. Now, this became more of a problem in, let's say, let's paint a broad brush and say 1860 to 1920 because people started to become, the world, the United States particularly started to become more urbanized, right? And because of that, people were further away from farms. And people needed milk really bad. And people needed milk, right? They would drink milk, but the milk was coming from a longer distance. And so what you think about what that means is it's transported potentially in conditions that are conducive to bacterial growth.

So there starts being all these problems with people getting really, really sick from dairy, right? Like huge, huge incidences of people dying from sickness from dairy because now it's not coming from the cow that's outside my door. It's coming from the cow that's 10 miles away on somebody else's farm and it has to get here on a truck and maybe it's refrigerated, probably not. and, you know, gets a little warm bacteria grows, you get sick. Makes sense. So Louis Pasteur, doing something completely unrelated to dairy, found out that if you heat up through kind of a series of ramping up the heat in a substance, you can kill the bacteria and make it safe to drink.

This was initially done with alcoholic substances, with beer, because they wanted to increase the shelf life, right? Beer gets cloudy. If bacteria starts to grow in it, it's no good, right? So they wanted to preserve it for longer. It's no good anyway. But what Pasteur discovered is by pasteurization, the process is named after him, you can eliminate the bacteria and increase the shelf life. And somebody, I don't know if it was him or someone else, said, hey, what if we did that with milk?

And it worked like a charm. So pasteurization gets introduced into milk. These bacteria are being killed off. And all of a sudden, all these people can drink milk safely. it is easily one of the biggest public health kind of successes in the last 150 years because so many people stopped dying from milkborne illnesses. Yay, that's great.

And so now what we have is all of these people, all these scientists and things saying, okay, well, then raw milk must be bad. It made all of these people sick. There's no way you can safely drink it. And pasteurized milk is the way to go. So I'm going to kind of give you some pro-con. for raw milk and pasteurized milk.

I'm excited about this. So nutritionally, they're pretty similar in terms of macronutrients. So that's carbs, fats, proteins, those kinds of things. These things you read on a nutrition label. They're fairly similar, right? Except that when you get raw milk

straight out of the cow, it has cream in it, right? So you know when you buy heavy cream, that's separated off from milk. If you buy a gallon of raw milk, the top layer of that is just heavy. cream. Are you serious? I'm serious. That's like a pro. That's so

awesome. This is why kind of a benefit to buying raw milk is you don't have to buy heavy cream if you have raw milk. And also it just, like if you're drinking this this is just a personal personal thought. It's delicious. Like it's so, it tastes so much better. The raw milk? Yes.

Than store milk. I feel like that's a benefit we should have brought up on social media. Why didn't they bring up it taste better? It is very good. Although they called it liquid gold a couple times. I just thought they meant it they like. it, but I guess it means it tastes good. It does taste way better than store milk. You can tell a difference. Store milk is so nasty. It tastes like creamy water. It can, yeah. Zero out of ten. And so a couple other things. Both raw milk and pasteurized milk have good cholesterol, right?

They have healthy fats. They have a gram of protein per ounce, which for a liquid is a great protein density. Like, that's fantastic. And a whole host of vitamins and minerals and all kinds of other things. You mentioned enzymes. People that make cheese are really upset about raw milk bans because enzymes are really important in making cheese. If you don't have the right enzymes in the milk you're using, it's hard to make certain kinds of cheese. So when raw milk is banned, this was actually, I think there was a minor, like, not a war war, but people got really upset in France when raw milk was banned because there are all these little French towns that their thing is to make a specific kind of cheese. And if they can't do it,

through raw milk. You know, if raw milk is banned, their cheese may not be of the same quality. So anyway, look up the Camemberar Wars if you want a little fun Google rabbit trail. Nice. A boon in favor of raw milk is that it possesses an enzyme that helps you digest lactose. That's exactly what people are saying. Yes.

Then why are people saying that there's no benefit to drinking raw milk? Because, so here's the thing about lactose digestion, and not that we would do an episode on this podcast about this, but I think it's interesting. It's worth its own 20 minutes is that the ability to digest lactose is genetic. And so there are certain genetic populations that possess the gene that will produce lactase,

the enzyme that breaks down lactose. But the cool thing is, when you drink raw milk, your body is helped along in this process. Now, if you possess no genes whatsoever to produce lactase, you know, tough luck. Your body's not going to make it. Even with raw milk, it doesn't help? Even with raw milk.

I mean, maybe over. time that I don't there's nobody nobody's ever studied that so that's kind of a question that science maybe still needs to answer okay um okay let's really quick talk about can i safely drink raw milk uh if it has these benefits because you know it tastes better it can help you digest lactose um and there's some enzymes in it there's also probiotics which gut health baby like there's a whole another episode to be done there with gut health yes um it can stave off a myriad diseases and help in a variety of ways. So it contains these probiotics, right?

And that's a good thing. And you kill them when you pasteurize the milk. So they're gone in pasteurized milk. That being said, raw milk really can only safely be consumed. By safely, I mean you are at a relatively low risk for contracting one of these bacteria, which, by the way, some of them can lead to sepsis, which will kill you. It's essentially just a really nasty infection, and you'll be feeling it at both ends of your body. Yeah, I don't want that.

Yeah, that's bad. So in order to avoid that, the conditions that have to be met in order for you to drink raw milk safely is that the environment that the cows are milked in and the cows themselves have to be very clean and the cows have to be very healthy. Right. So if you are milking a cow off of a really grubby, dirty farm, you know, and the people milking them are, you know, there's no hygiene involved. You're putting a lot of risk into this process, right? But if the cow is kept very healthy, the environment it lives in is kept very clean, and it's transported. The milk is stored safely and transported safely. I would say you can have reasonable confidence that what you're drinking is safe, and many people do, with no adverse effects. Are people smart enough to do that?

Yes. That's good. Sometimes I worry that there maybe aren't very smart people out there that are doing things like this. If you don't know what you're doing and you just jump right into the raw milk thing, you're just putting yourself, at more risk. Again, there may be a chance that you could drink raw milk for a long time and not get sick without doing this. But, you know, we're talking about percentage is hard to put on it, but scientists have found between 5 and 30%, which is a huge range. But less than half the time, which is if you drink milk every day, not great odds, even if it's less than half the time,

that you would get sick. But you lower that percentage of getting the chances of getting sick way down when you do all these practices of keeping the cows clean, keeping the milk stored properly. So yeah, there you go. It feels like it's a drink at your own risk sort of thing. It is. But it's worth it, I guess, for a lot of people. A lot of people it is. And their health things and the taste and the cream.

Perfect. Let's, we're ready to give it a grade? Yes. Okay. Three, two, one. C. Well, I thought it did bad. I thought I had enough information to understand that it was like,

a more nuanced issue than just good and bad, which I appreciate when, sorry, I just said Sophia because I got an email from Sophia. Which I appreciate when Sophia sends me an email. But I also appreciate when, like, social media is capable of kind of making the argument seem like maybe something that should be taken off of social media. Because sometimes I think it presents things as all or nothing. Like, you got all the information you need here on social media.

You don't need to go anywhere else. I did not get that vibe from social media. lot of like, this is all pretty confusing. I should probably go look up an article or something. So I liked that part of it. And some of the info is fine. I got the right diseases, which is awesome. Enzymes was in there. You know, science words, blah, blah, blah, but also I feel like, they also did a bad job in a lot of ways. So that's why I said C and not F. I gave it an F because I don't like it when scientists of any persuasion get on social media to disseminate information, especially when they do it dogmatically. Because if you were a

You should know better than to say, this is always bad. Science almost never works that way. I know, but so many scientists talk like that. At least on social media, I shouldn't say in real life. I have no idea. But if you go on there, you're like, I'm a microbiologist. This is really bad. And if you do it, it's always really bad and you're going to die.

What? What? Freaks. That's almost never true. Maybe that's why they're doing social media instead of being in the lab. Am I right? Yeah. Got them.

Okay. Thanks so much for tuning in this week to Radio Free Hillsdale, 1-1.1.7 FM. I'm Gillian. And I'm Gary Goosby. And we will talk to you next week.