Raw Milk Literally Kills People

Why you should avoid raw milk and never give it to children

Pictured: White, milky, probably milk. Photo by Eiliv Aceron on Unsplash

If you're enjoying my writing, consider becoming a paid subscriber. The more people who sign up, the more I can bring you health-related content like this!

Raw milk is one of those perennial topics that comes around every year or two. Sooner or later, people will forget the last time that raw milk caused an infectious disease outbreak, and everyone will listen to some sort of wellness influencer who claims that drinking the stuff will make people drastically more healthy or give them superhuman powers.

This time is no different. People on Tiktok are going crazy for raw milk, and promoting the stuff as a delicious way to improve your health. The problem is that raw milk not only has no health benefits, it’s actively dangerous for people and regularly kills children who drink it.

The Science

If you’ve ever done a high school science class, or gone shopping at a supermarket, you’ve probably heard of pasteurization. It’s a simple process named after a French scientist called Louis Pasteur who, about 200 years ago, was one of the first to develop the idea that microbes could cause issues with human health.

Pasteurization is a really simple thing to do. Basically, you’ve got a bunch of bacteria and other nasty stuff that naturally occurs in milk and other liquids. These germs can’t survive high temperatures, so we heat the milk up to kill them. This used to be by boiling, but we’ve discovered that you can actually heat liquids for longer times at lower temperatures instead, which means we now pasteurize stuff by heating it to about 60 degrees Centigrade (145 Fahrenheit) for 30 minutes which has the same effect. In practice, this has minimal impact on the flavour or content of the milk, but kills all the nasties.

Pictured: Often present in raw milk. Photo by CDC on Unsplash

This is a basic and commonly accepted way to both extend the shelf-life of milk - because fewer bacteria means it goes off less quickly - and also reduce the risk to human health. There are innumerable pathogens present in unpasteurized milk which can cause issues, including fun things like bovine tuberculosis that most people don’t even realize exist.

These problems are also not entirely preventable without doing something to the milk itself. A lot of people will say that if you get your milk from healthy cows, this isn’t a problem, but that’s simply not true. Milk can be contaminated by bacteria that aren’t harmful to cows but do cause disease in humans; it can have germs introduced by the cow’s skin; it can even get some bacteria simply from the environment where the cows are milked. Even the best of facilities only reduced this risk, and a small number of bacteria quickly becomes a much bigger number in a fertile growing medium like milk.

The problem is that people regularly forget just how bad the diseases caused by raw milk can be. If you live in our modern world where infectious diseases are very rare, it’s hard to conceive of just how common it was to get really sick from eating or drinking something just a few generations ago. We think we’re invincible because we’ve never really had our health tested in the same way that our grandparents did.

Pictured: Nasty stuff, found mostly in raw pork. Still a problem today, although thankfully much less than in years past. Photo by CDC on Unsplash

And make no mistake - raw milk is dangerous. There are species of E. Coli which produce very harmful toxins which are commonly found in milk prior to pasteurization.

Its’s relatively easy for adults to shrug off many of these infections, but they can be really deadly for kids, especially infants. In Australia, raw milk has been banned for decades because of a large number of deaths in younger children. The last time that raw milk was widely available - due to a loophole in the legislation at the time - a toddler died and several kids were hospitalized.

Try Not To Die

So what about raw milk benefits? Well, from an evidence-based perspective, there really aren’t any.

One common claim is that raw milk is less allergenic than other kinds of milk, but this has not been borne out in experimental research. This ties back into the hygiene hypothesis, which posits that children will develop fewer allergies if they are exposed to more diseases when young. The problem is that this hypothesis has never been proven - yes, there are some very vague theories about how it might work, and weak epidemiological evidence that children who live on farms are less likely to get asthma, but there are many possible explanations for these findings.

More broadly, the idea that hygiene - at least in the common perception of the word - is bad for human health has largely been abandoned. There are complex ways in which bacteria and other pathogens interact with our wellbeing, but there’s no evidence that exposing yourself to dangerous diseases improves your health long-term.

The thing about raw milk is that, unlike most health issues, it’s really not a question of risk and benefit. There is a fairly large risk, and only vague, theorized benefits. Despite making up a tiny fraction of milk sales in the US, raw milk causes the majority of milk-associated outbreaks in the country. While it’s still low in absolute terms, your risk of getting sick from drinking raw milk is somewhere in the range of 50-150x higher than drinking pasteurized milk.

To put it another way, it’s potentially possible that drinking raw milk could slightly reduce the risk of some diseases, maybe, but that doesn’t mean much to your child if they die of haemolytic uremic syndrome caused by ST E. Coli at age 3.

Pictured: Potentially deadly. Photo by Kim Gorga on Unsplash

So my advice is to just avoid raw milk. It’s more expensive, goes off much more quickly, and could potentially kill your children. Even if you prefer the taste, pasteurization is simple, easy, and mitigates almost all of the risks.