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.

European Union gets it wrong on GMOS. Again.

Teosinte on the left, modern
corn on the right, a hybrid in

the center.

A European Union court just issued a new decision about GMOs. Disappointingly, this decision is likely to confuse rather than clarify this complex and contentious issue. The court announced that plants whose genomes have been modified with CRISPR technology, a very precise form of genome editing, are subject to the EU's very strict restrictions on genetically modified crops.

More specifically, the Court of Justice of the European Union (ECJ) decided that:

"Organisms obtained by mutagenesis are GMOs."

If we take this literally, then here’s a list of all the foods that have never been subjected to mutagenesis, and are therefore NOT GMO:

1. Salt
2. Wild boar
3. Wild blueberries

That’s it. (OK, maybe there are a few others.)

We have been modifying the genes of the foods we eat for millenia. Every loaf of organic, non-GMO bread is made from wheat that humans have modified since ancient times. Every glass of milk from your grass-fed, bovine-growth-hormone-free cow comes from a cow that humans have bred for centuries. All cows are genetically modified. Those delicious croissants you bought at the organic bakery? Sorry, those are GMOs, no matter how organic you think they are.

And corn? Have you seen what ancient corn, called teosinte, looks like? I encourage you to Google it (or see the image on this blog, above). Modern corn is the result of many generations of human-driven genetic modifications.

To be fair, the EU court recognized that many of our foods have been genetically modified for a long time, and that it might be impractical to remove all of them from our food supply. So they carved out an exception:

"varieties [of plants] obtained by means of mutagenesis techniques which have conventionally been used in a number of applications and have a long safety record are exempt...."

What's ironic here–though I'm confident that the EU court didn't mean this–is that by this definition, virtually all of the GMO crops in the U.S. are exempt. You see, we've been eating them for decades, and they have a phenomenal safety record.

Two years ago, the US National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine issued a massive report that reviewed over 1,000 studies of GMOs. The bottom line: there are no health risks whatsoever from eating genetically modified foods.

Earlier gene editing technology sometimes added foreign genes to an organism, such as adding a bacterial gene to a plant. The EU court's new decision is intended to clarify that even if a foreign gene is not involved, plants bred using the newest form of gene editing (CRISPR technology) are nonetheless GMOs.

Banning GMOs doesn't make sense, and it never did. Genetic technology is just a tool, one that can be used for countless purposes, some of them highly beneficial–such as golden rice, which has the potential to prevent blindness in countries where many people depend on rice as their main staple food. If someone objects to a particular use of GM technology, such as Monsanto's use of it to create herbicide-resistant plants, that's something we can reasonably debate. But banning all GMOs is throwing out the baby with the bathwater.

Now if you'll excuse me, I've got to go out to my grill and see how my wild boar is doing. It might need a bit more salt.

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.

The 3 Dumbest Products Sold By Whole Foods Market

Whole Foods "Whole Body" products.

I have a love-hate relationship with Whole Foods Market. On the one hand, I love their fresh produce, their baked goods, and many other food choices there. On the other hand, they seem to have embraced anti-science positions in the interest of keeping everything “natural.”

Before describing what they do wrong, let’s start with some things they get right. Their seafood sustainability policy supports fishing practices that allow wild fish populations to survive. This is a shining example that other stores would do well to follow, if we want to preserve remaining stocks of wild salmon, tuna, swordfish, and other fish. Whole Foods stores now mark each fish with a sustainability rating shown as a bright-colored label next to each fish. Bravo!

Whole Foods also offers chicken and beef that was raised humanely, following animal welfare standards that they clearly describe on their website and in their stores. For those who care about the way farm animals are treated, this is a valuable option.

But in some areas of the store, especially their “health” section, Whole Foods wades deep into pseudoscience,  So here are the three of the most egregious examples.

1. Whole Foods sells homeopathic medicines that are little more than snake oil. They make claims for health benefits, both on their shelves and on their website, that are based on little more than magical thinking. For example, they sell “homeopathic flu remedies” claiming that “when taken at the first sign of sickness, these can provide temporary relief of symptoms including fever, chills, and body aches.” This is simply false: no homeopathic treatment has ever been shown to be effective at treating flu symptoms. (I’ve written about homeopathy in more detail here and here.)

It’s ironic that on the one hand, Whole Foods proclaims “We've long believed that consumers have a right to know what's in your food”. But when it comes to homeopathic remedies, they neglect to inform consumers that these remedies do not contain the ingredients on the bottle at all. That's because homeopathic preparations are so diluted that not a single molecule of the original substance remains. Even more absurd, though, is that even if they weren't diluted to nothing, most homeopathic ingredients have never been shown to have any health benefits to begin with.

2. Whole Foods has an anti-GMO policy, adopted across all their stores, that ignores the science of GMOs. They announced last year that they would label all products in their stores to indicate whether they contained Genetical Modified Organisms. They also have announced that they are trying to eliminate GMOs from their shelves. 

Why is Whole Foods opposed to all GMOs? Their answer is simply: 

“Crops are currently modified to survive herbicide treatment, produce their own pesticides and resist certain diseases.“

This answer is a true statement, though it does not describe all GMOs, nor does it explain why we should avoid them. For example, golden rice is a form of rice that’s been modified to contain more vitamin A than regular rice - a modification that is designed to prevent blindness in children, particularly in poor, rural regions where rice constitutes a major part of the diet. Golden rice has even been blessed by the Pope. Is Whole Foods opposed to this form of GMO?

And what’s wrong with engineering a crop to resist disease? Some foods would basically disappear from our shelves if we didn’t have disease-resistant versions. For example, the Hawaiian papaya was nearly wiped out by a virus until, in one of the first uses ever of genetic modification, plant scientists created a resistant variety. This saved the industry, and the papaya itself has exactly the same nutritional value it had before.

I suspect that Whole Foods (and many anti-GMO types) are mostly opposed to Monsanto’s Roundup Ready GMO crops, which are modified to allow farmers to use more of Monsanto’s herbicides. I can sympathize with that position - but not with opposing all uses of GMO technology. That’s throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

3. Whole Foods won’t sell the pain relievers aspirin and ibuprofen, because they’re not “natural." Instead, their Whole Body department sells a wide range of nutritional supplements, for which they make claims such as this: 

“Not sure which supplement to choose? Grab a full-spectrum wellness or immune support formula. These combinations of herbs, vitamins, minerals and antioxidants are specifically designed to effectively improve overall wellbeing and enhance immune support.“ 

That’s just gobbledygook, but it's carefully worded to avoid FDA regulations. The phrase "enhance immune support" is a common go-to phrase for supplement makers, because it sounds science-y. Not only are supplements mostly useless, but taking megadoses can actually harm you. And there’s no scientific reason to think that “natural” products are better for you. After all, snake venom is 100% natural.

In contrast, ibuprofen and aspirin really work - but you can't buy them at Whole Foods. I continue to shop at Whole Foods for their many excellent food selections. But for anything medical, I shop elsewhere.

GMOs versus antibiotic overuse: which is the greater evil?

People who worry about eating healthy food (and who doesn't?) have recently been very worried about genetically modified organisms, or GMOs.  Meanwhile, industrial livestock producers feed enormous quantities of antibiotics to cows, chickens, and bigs, as a way to make them grow faster.  Which of these practices poses the greater risk?

This one isn't even close. The threat of GMOs pales in comparison to the overuse of antibiotics, which are creating dangerous superbugs that already kill tens of thousands of people each year.

The anti-GMO forces have been making a big push recently to add "GMO" labels to foods. This particularly campaign is based on the hard-to-disagree-with notion that more information is always good. People have a right to know what they're eating, right?

Well, sure. But how many people out there understand what genetic engineering means? How many understand that virtually all the food we eat is genetically modified - including the most wholesome organic foods? Unless you live out in the wilderness eating wild nuts and berries, you're eating plants and animals that have been genetically modified over the centuries by humans, by selecting which ones to plant and breed.  The term GMO is meant to refer to something else:  precise genetic engineering, designed to alter just one or two genes. This creates genetic changes that are far less dramatic than the ones that turned ancient maize into today's modern corn, for example.  Thus the problem with "GMO" label is that it won't inform people unless they have a solid grounding in molecular genetics.

Teosinte is un-modified corn. Not so yummy, is it?

GMO opponents claim that GMOs are bad for you.  So far at least, there's no scientific evidence for this claim.  If GMOs were so bad, people would be dropping like flies every night after dinner.

But in the world of infectious disease, a different, far more deadly scenario is unfolding. Drug-resistant bacteria are spreading fast. Scientists have been warning for years that we are blindly marching towards an era when people start to die of previously treatable bacterial infections. Antibiotics, one of the greatest technological advances in the history of civilization, are losing their effectiveness.

Last week, the Washington Post reported that "nightmare bacteria" are real and on the rise.  In the U.S. alone, over 23,000 people died last year as a result of drug-resistant bacterial infections, according to the CDC. The CDC report implicated the use of antibiotics in animals as one of the primary causes.

Also last week, the Center for a Livable Future at the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health issued a report looking at how we've responded to report 5 years ago that recommended ways "to curb the threats to human health posed by modern industrial agriculture practices." How have we done? According to Dr. Robert Lawrence, director of the Center:

"There has been an appalling lack of progress.  The failure to act by the USDA and FDA, the lack of action or concern by Congress, and continued intransigence of the animal agriculture industry have made all of our problems worse."

Can the FDA regulate antibiotics in livestock? Not really, thanks to intensive lobbying by industry. One of the authors of the Hopkins report commented that the FDA is “almost pleading with industry to make voluntary changes.”

But industry isn't going to do this on their own, and so far the government has been utterly ineffective.  The study points out that:

"Congress has killed every effort to restrict the feeding of farm animals the same antibiotics used in human medicine ...  even as antibiotics have grown less effective in treating infection."

So listen up, GMO alarmists: you're protesting the wrong thing. If you really want people to eat healthier food, start raising Cain over the use of antibiotics in livestock.  If you want labels on our food, insist on labels showing whether our food animals were raised antibiotic-free.  Stop worrying about a hypothetical fear of a few genetic changes in soybeans, and worry instead about the very real rise of superbugs.  You're right to worry about how we raise our food - you're just looking in the wrong place.