Let’s Consider The Benefits Of Raw Milk

As reported this past week in the New York Times and elsewhere, more than half the states in the U.S. now allow the sale of raw milk. In some states, you can only buy raw milk at a farm, but in 14 states you can buy it in stores.

So why are some people excited about raw milk? Well, the implication is that if’ it’s less processed, it must be better, right? After all, we learned recently that ultra-processed foods are pretty bad for you. (There’s pretty good evidence for that.) And milk is one of those products that people associate with health. For the first few months of life, we humans live entirely on milk–but that’s milk from a woman’s breast.

Cow milk is a different matter. It’s not nearly so, shall we say, clean.

It only took a minute for me to find claims that raw milk has all kinds of benefits: supposedly it helps you digest food better, it has more vitamins and minerals, it boosts your immune system, and it’s better for people with lactose intolerance. (I won’t link to any of those claims because they’re all bogus, and I don’t want to give scammers any more web traffic.)

Before listing some of the special properties of raw milk, let’s consider how it’s processed. The main thing we do to milk is pasteurization: a very simple process where the milk is heated just enough to kill any bacteria in it. It’s not boiled, and the mild heating doesn’t destroy any of milk’s nutrients.

Pasteurization is named after the French scientist Louis Pasteur, who invented the process in the 1860s. Originally it was used to preserve wine, but people eventually discovered it worked just as well for milk and other foods. Back in the 1860s, people didn’t even know that bacteria caused disease, and Pasteur was one of the pioneers who figured that out.

So what does raw milk have in it? Well, it can carry a long list of delightful bacteria, including the ones that cause tuberculosis, brucellosis, scarlet fever, salmonella. And of course there is E. coli, including strains that can cause terrible diarrhea.

Bacteria just love milk, it turns out. Raw milk is teeming with them, and many of them are really not good for humans. Fortunately for most of us, pasteurization kills bacteria very effectively.

And there’s one more special thing you get in raw milk that you won’t get in pasteurized milk: cow poop. Funny thing, though: on the advertisements I found for the benefits of raw milk, none of them mentioned this.

So sure, get your raw milk and live like it’s 1850 again! Never mind that pasteurization has saved countless millions of lives. Seriously, folks: there’s no reason whatsoever to drink raw milk. And states that allow the sale of raw milk are endangering the health of their own people.

Better diagnosis of infections

This week I'm not posting an article here because I wrote a piece for BloombergView, the online magazine published by Bloomberg, the company founded by Michael Bloomberg. The article is titled "Make Way for Better Germ Tests." Check it out here.

Government regulation to the rescue: FDA halts the overuse of antibacterial soaps

Over the past two decades, anti-bacterial soaps have proliferated. It got to the point, a couple of years ago, where it was difficult to find any hand-washing products in some stores that were not labeled "antibacterial." All the way back in 2001, a study by Eli Perencevich and colleagues found that 76% of liquid soaps on the market contained some kind of antibacterial agent. It only got worse after that.

The primary active ingredients in most of these soaps are triclosan and triclocarban, chemical agents that do indeed kill bacteria. However, as Perencevich pointed out,

"No scientific data have been published to suggest that the use of antibacterial agents in household products prevents infection."

It didn't take long for triclosan to start showing up in freshwater streams and elsewhere in the environment. Triclosan has been detected in the water supply in the U.S., multiple countries in Europe, Canada, Australia, Japan, and Hong Kong. As use of antibacterial soaps proliferated, bacteria resistant to triclosan started to appear–an outcome that any biologist could have predicted, and that many did.

After many years, the FDA finally announced, in December 2013, that manufacturers needed to produce actual data showing that their products worked. They didn't, for the simple reason that antibacterial soaps don't work any better than plain old soap and water.

Finally, this past Friday, the FDA stepped in. They are banning 19 different chemicals, including triclosan. Their announcement states:

"Companies will no longer be able to market antibacterial washes with these ingredients because manufacturers did not demonstrate that the ingredients are both safe for long-term daily use and more effective than plain soap and water in preventing illness and the spread of certain infections."

This has been a very long time coming.

Antibacterial soaps are no more effective than simple hand-washing with regular soap, as Forbes contributor David DiSalvo explained last year. But people have been buying these products anyway, often not realizing that they might be hurting themselves and the environment. As Janet Woodcock, M.D., director of the FDA’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research, explained in the FDA announcement:

“Consumers may think antibacterial washes are more effective at preventing the spread of germs, but we have no scientific evidence that they are any better than plain soap and water. In fact, some data suggests that antibacterial ingredients may do more harm than good over the long-term.”

Sometimes government regulation is the only effective way to fix a public health problem. Kudos to the FDA for stepping in to protect all of us from potentially deadly outbreaks of antibiotic resistant bacteria. Let's hope that other countries follow the U.S. example.

Raw food is rich in bacteria, not nutrients

The raw food crazies are making themselves sick.

There's a thing called the Raw Food Movement that has been growing in popularity in recent years. Proponents argue that it's far healthier than our usual (human) diet of cooked foods, claiming that cooking removes many of the natural enzymes that make food nutritious. They also believe that cooking creates harmful toxins.

What's really happening, though, is that raw foodies are putting themselves at risk of serious bacterial infections. Just last week, we learned that a salmonella outbreak tied to raw food has sickened people in 15 states so far. The CDC reports that the outbreak is linked to Garden of Life's RAW Meal Organic Shakes, which come in chocolate, vanilla, and vanilla chai flavors. The FDA issued a recall and warned that "persons infected with Salmonella often experience fever, diarrhea (which may be bloody), nausea, vomiting and abdominal pain."

According to the CDC, no one has died from any of these Salmonella infections, although 4 people have been hospitalized.

It's not clear why raw food is so trendy, other than the obsession of some people with everything "natural."

Natural or not, cooking is one of mankind's greatest inventions. It allows us to spend far less time eating, because cooked food is much easier to chew and digest. We extract more nutrients from cooked food–not fewer, despite what the raw foodies claim. Chimpanzees, our closest relative, spend up to 50% of their waking hours eating, because they subsist entirely on raw food. A 2011 study by Chris Organ and colleagues at Harvard University pointed out that

"The ancestors of modern humans who invented food processing (including cooking) gained critical advantages in survival and fitness through increased caloric intake."

Cooking our food has another huge advantage as well: it kills harmful bacteria and viruses. The current Salmonella outbreak could easily have been avoided if people had simply cooked their food instead of consuming raw shakes.

Raw foodies, though, seem to live in Opposite Land, where food science gets turned on its head. The website RawFoodLife.com claims that

"Science now proves that cooking not only destroys nutrition and enzymes but chemically changes foods from the substances needed for health into acid-forming toxins, free-radicals and poisons that destroy our health!"

Er, no. Science proves nothing of the sort (nor does that website provide any citations to scientific articles to back up its claim). As Christopher Wanjek explained ten years ago at LiveScience,

"plant enzymes, which raw dieters wish to preserve, are largely mashed up with other proteins and rendered useless by acids in the stomach. Not cooking them doesn't save them from this fate. Anyway, the plant enzymes were for the plants ... they are not needed for human digestion. Human digestive enzymes are used for human digestion."

Raw foodies also love raw milk, another dangerous trend, which has sickened thousands of people in the U.S. over the past decade. That topic deserves another column all to itself, but for now, suffice it to say that one of the greatest scientists of the 19th century, Louis Pasteur, discovered that heating milk briefly can kill a host of dangerous pathogens. Pasteurization, which is named for him, has been rightly credited with saving millions of lives. A few years ago, the Royal Society named pasteurized milk the 2nd greatest invention in the history of food (after refrigeration).

Obviously some foods, fruits in particular, are generally eaten raw, and fruits are indeed very healthy. But don't be fooled into thinking that cooking somehow makes food bad for you: it doesn't. Cooked food is easier to digest, more nutritious, and to most of us, pretty darned tasty.

Raw milk enthusiasts want you to drink a bacterial stew. Yum.

Sometimes it is astonishing how ignorant people can be. Now it's the turn of fans of "raw milk," a new fad that is sweeping the U.S.

I still remember reading milk cartons as a kid, and asking my parents what "pasteurized" meant. While I don't remember exactly what they said, I'm sure they told me that it made the milk safe by killing bacteria. Even as a kid, I understood that bacteria in my milk were probably a bad thing.

Louis Pasteur is one of the most famous scientists in history, and rightly so. In 1862, he invented the process of heating milk to kill the bacteria in it. Pasteurization, as we now call it, has saved millions of lives in the 150 years since. Pasteur also created the first vaccine for rabies. He was a true giant.

Fans of raw milk appear to be stunningly unaware of Pasteur's achievements, and equally ignorant of the dangers of bacterial infections. Many of the health and safety claims for raw milk can be found on sites such as RealMilk.com, a site that is chock full of

• Conspiracy theories: the Government is hiding the truth from you.
• Denialism: raw milk never hurt anyone, and even protects you against bacteria.
• Shifting the blame: infections are caused by other contaminated foods, not raw milk.

One of the more chilling facts about RealMilk.com is their emphasis on feeding raw milk to infants, who are at the greatest risk of dying from infections.  Their "Campaign for Real Milk" advocates

"universal access to clean raw whole milk from pasture-fed cows, especially access for pregnant and nursing mothers and for babies and growing children."

We have plenty of good science about raw milk. CDC review of infectious disease outbreaks across the U.S. from 1993-2006 found that

Langer et al., Emerging Infectious Diseases 18:3 (2012).

Among other findings, a

"The rate of outbreaks caused by unpasteurized milk (often called raw milk) and products made from it was 150 times greater than outbreaks linked to pasteurized milk."

Dr. Robert Tauxe, an infectious disease specialist at the CDC, debunks some of the myths about raw milk in an article freely available on Medscape. John Snyder and Mark Crislip have both written compellingly about the dangers of raw milk at sciencebasedmedicine.org.

If I were being cynical, I might say that the wild-eyed proponents of raw milk deserve whatever infections they get. But their children don't. 3-year-old Kylee Young, who the Washington Post wrote about this past Sunday, didn't deserve to suffer kidney failure and a stroke after her mother fed her raw milk that was infected with E. coli O157:H7. Kylee can no longer walk or talk and needs constant care. Her mother now says

"If I had known what I know now, I would never have fed [raw milk] to my daughter." 

Louis Pasteur and his wife had five children, three of whom died of childhood infections. These tragedies were Pasteur's motivation for studying infectious disease. Thanks to his work 150 years ago, no one today needs to die from drinking unpasteurized milk. The raw milk movement insists, despite the evidence, that they know better.

So go ahead, drink your raw milk and eat a paleo diet too, while you're at it. But don't ask our modern medical system to pay for your treatment when you get sick. And most of all, don't subject innocent children to the unnecessary risks of raw milk.

The perfect hamburger, spoiled

20 years ago, we cooked hamburgers the way we liked them.  If you wanted your burger medium rare, well, good for you.  A thick, juicy burger, seared on the outside and just a bit pink on the inside, was the centerpiece of any good summer cookout. That was a more innocent time.

In 1993, a deadly outbreak of E. coli infections hit the northwestern U.S., sickening hundreds of people and killing four children.  The outbreak was traced to undercooked ground beef from a hamburger chain called Jack in the Box.

Fortunately, we live in a highly educated, advanced society, where the citizenry understands that its health depends on having bacteria-free food.  The unsanitary conditions that allowed E. coli to enter the food supply, including assembly-line slaughterhouse practices, were quickly halted.  New government regulations assured that any factory that shipped contaminated beef would be shut down.  Inexpensive, accurate DNA testing now detects almost all bacteria at a neglible cost.  Food-borne outbreaks of bacterial infections have been rare ever since.

Ha ha ha ha ha!  Just kidding!  Of course we can't have government regulators getting in the way of efficient food manufacturing!  Consumers ought to know that it's their fault if they get sick.  We must cook our burgers until they're as sterile as a Martian landscape.  That's simply the trade-off we must make to have such cheap food these days.

It's not that we don't check for any bacteria at all.  In fact, the U.S. Department of Agriculture recently announced that it would begin testing beef for six different deadly strains of E. coli.  Until now, it has only tested for the O157:H7 strain, which was behind the 1993 outbreak.  I guess this is progress.  However, the USDA will not be testing for salmonella bacteria or for any other nasty microbes.

The beef industry is opposed to any efforts by the government to test its products for bacteria.  For many years now, it has been remarkably successful, through lobbying efforts in Congress and through lawsuits, at rendering the USDA powerless.  As one example: twelve years ago the USDA tried to shut down a beef plant in Texas that failed its salmonella tests.  The beef industry challenged the USDA in court and won, and the USDA still doesn't have the power to shut down a plant for salmonella contamination.

We have the technology to detect all the bacteria that keep turning up in beef and chicken.  DNA testing technology has gotten much faster, cheaper, and more accurate in the 20 years since the Jack-in-the-Box outbreak, but we still don't use it on our food.  The meat industry won't say why it opposes DNA tests for contamination, but no one knows how consumers might react if they knew how much bacteria was really in their meat.

The USDA does test for E. coli O157:H7.  In the first half of this year, it tested 6,427 beef samples.  Out of those, 470 (7%) tested positive, which is pretty startling, considering that this is just one strain out of six known to be deadly to humans, and considering that we've known about this one since 1993.

(Chicken, by the way, has similar problems, with most raw chicken (organic or not) being contaminated by salmonella or campylobacter bacteria.  It helps that no one likes chicken cooked rare.)

Where does all this bacteria comes from, anyway? You may already know the answer: poo.  Beef and chicken production facilities aren't very good at keeping the (ahem) waste material separated from the meat.  Changing the way our beef is produced would cost more, undoubtedly. But is it unreasonable to ask a food producer to deliver safe food?

Luckily, if you cook meat long enough, it can't hurt you.  It might not taste as good, but hey, we all make compromises.  So broil those burgers through and through, and if they're a bit dry, well, that's what ketchup is for.