Some raw truths about raw milk
If you or anyone in your family has asthma or milk allergies, you'll want to read this well-researched, fascinating article.
Despite the serious risks of drinking it, a growing movement — including the potential health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — claims it has benefits. Should we take them more seriously?
This new NYT article is chock-full of information most of us have never heard, and opens the door for curiosity, not just reactivity on either side of an issue that exploded politically with the nomination of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. to head Health and Human Services, and has been further magnified because of bird flu. (See my previous posts on the connection to bird flu.)
Science is never static. Challenges and findings change, and this article does a great job pointing out what we’re missing if we plant a flag on only what we know or think now. The author is not a novice on the issue; Moises Velasquez-Manoff wrote An Epidemic of Absence: A New Way of Understanding Allergies and Autoimmune Diseases. I’m posting as a gifted article and hope you can get past the paywall; it’s well worth the read if you’ve ever had to deal with allergies and asthma in your family or friends. Some key points:
We’ve known for a long time that nasty diseases like small pox likely originated in domesticated animals and spread to humans; that’s why all the concern now about dairy cows and the spread of bird flu. (See my earlier posts on bird flu.)
Research from outside the US indicates that kids who grow up on dairy farms drinking raw milk have fewer allergies and asthma overall, including to milk. Kids who live nearby appear to also have fewer allergies and asthma.
This echoes newer peanut allergy data indicating early exposure—versus keeping kids away from peanuts—may help prevent peanut allergies. That’s the opposite of what we’ve believed in the past.
What we don’t know is whether the decrease in allergies and asthma is from being around “the microbially rich environment of farms with animals, particularly cows,” or from drinking raw milk from those cows, or both.
The research we do have was conducted outside the US, following up children who grew up on small alpine dairy farms with cows eating differently, and living in a very different overall environment, than in our large dairy farms here.
Kids and adults have died from drinking raw milk; there is no doubt about that. And you’ll remember that cats—who, like us, are mammals—are definitely dying from drinking raw milk right now in the current bird flu situation, More than 50% of cats who drank raw milk on a Texas dairy farm died from bird flu. That 50% death rate echoes the worldwide mortality rate among humans known to have had bird flu. So far the US mortality rate is far lower. But the two most recent sickest patients (including one death) both had mutations of the bird flu virus that indicate the virus may be becoming more potent.
Prospective research—research that tests the effect of doing or not doing something—hasn’t been done and is all but impossible to do. You’d ordinarily prefer studies that contrast what happens to kids in two groups (treated and untreated control) over time. But the risk to the kids is a huge barrier to that. Mouse research, however, holds clues: raw milk does seem to change the how the mouse immune system responds to allergens. It also seemed to blunt reaction to dust mites, a common respiratory allergen.
Pasteurized milk is safe; we also know that. But pasteurization—invented in 1864—heats milk, and we also know heat destroys microbes. There are some indications in the research that kids with milk allergies tolerated unheated milk better than pasteurized. Do we have to heat it as much? How else could we destroy pathogens that might not also destroy helpful microbes? Would ultraviolet radiation to kill pathogens work better? Or membrane filters to remove them?
Velasquez-Manoff also notes the need to recognize “the vein of truth running through the raw-milk movement: the health value of raw milk may be greater than the basic nourishment it provides. It may contain ingredients that benefit human health in extra-nutritional ways that haven’t received much consideration in the past, mostly because no one knew they mattered.”
As usual, more research is needed. I’m firmly on the side of science…but science can and should progress; it’s never static and we make a mistake when we write it into law and then don’t review new ideas and findings. What I loved about this article was that it opened my curiosity—not tugged at my resistance to any idea not already substantiated by our US science. Let’s hope scientists feel safe enough in the current political environment to have the same reaction.