Being anti pasteurization is the one that really gets me. Like it’s just heating up the milk slightly for a brief period of time. It’s really simple and not scary science that’s easily misunderstood. Like what about heating up milk is dangerous?
The only thing I’ve been able to come up with is that it’s a conspiracy theory of manufactured panic to send people down the right wing pipeline.
I think it’s partly leftover dribble from the inane Gaia “theory” that was so strong in hippie circles. Everything natural (like bacteria in milk) is good, and you know, gut bacteria, yogurt, 's all good, right?
Combine that with “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger” beliefs that they don’t realize come from right wing nuts and you got a perfect diarrhea inducing cocktail that we all get to pay for with our taxes and our nerves.
My personal theory:
First off, raw milk does taste noticably different than pasteurized and homogenized milk you find at the store.
Pasteurization: heating the milk triggers the unfolding of proteins (Denaturation). This is what kills the bacteria but can also change the flavor of the milk.
Homogenization. This process breaks up the fat into smaller segments so they stay in solution in the milk. The result is a less creamy flavor.
People instinctually associate flavor with nutritional value. They think that better flavored food = better for you. This sort-of works in tomatoes and a few other fruit/vegetables. However taste perception is a complex blend of genetics, environmental conditions, and psychology. So the results are inherently unpredictable and completely unreliable.
The unpasteurized crowd all fall for the 'it tastes better so it must be better". They then make all sorts of excuses to justify their instinct. " Big corporate milk is evil!!" Blah blah blah.
UHT has a very different taste to pasteurised milk, but is pasteurised to raw milk such a big difference?
It does taste different.l but it’s still milk.
I’ve grown up on a farm, and milk can even taste different from cow to cow, or at different times of the year if that changes their alimentation.
Raw milk also usually has a higher fat content than what most people buy.
Ours would average 4.5%.
Different breeds also taste different, holsteins, ayrshires, jerseys, etc.
I’ve never been a big fan of milk, so I can’t into much details on flavor.
I personally wouldn’t procure raw milk from a farm I didn’t know very well.
The only time I ever liked plain milk was still warm out of the cow. These days, I just don’t drink milk except for a very rare (couple of times a year) chocolate milk or milkshake where I don’t taste the milk itself, really.
Breed and diet definitely impact milk flavor and fat percentage, but some types of pasteurization seem to as well.
This is not an endorsement to drink milk that has not been pasteurized.
Aside from that, particularly with regard to colostrum, some people think treating the milk can damage things. As mentioned, I’m not a milk drinker to begin with, but I have no idea if (a) there are any studies showing benefits or even effects of drinking colostrum, particularly as an adult and from something other than a human or (b) regardless of point a if there is even any study on heat damaging it. I watch a lot of farming/homesteading content and some people are really into this.
There’s a whole subset of idiots that believe that you need to expose yourself to harmful shit to have a strong immune system. (See: all the people licking toilets and crap during lockdown)
There’s some credible science to it, in the way that, an immunization is literally putting “harmful” stuff in you to train your immune system. This is known science that I should be able to mostly hand wave around since most people already know this. Immunizations are usually focusing on a key indicator, eg, for COVID, it’s the protein on the outside of the vital cell wall (all the spiky bits in the illustrations) or whatever… I’m no scientist. For other viruses and bacteria, it’s a deactivated version of the virus… It’s essentially “dead” for all intents and purposes. It just resembles the virus so closely that it effectively trains your immune system to recognize it.
With all that being said, not all bacteria and viruses are something we can develop a natural immunity to, partly because some of them just kill us, partly because there’s something that is preventing it. Again I’m not a scientist.
Regardless, these idiots think that by exposing yourself to “natural” viruses and bacteria, you can strengthen your immune system. Bluntly, it’s possible to do that, and why the fuck would you want to do it that way? It’s literally a randomized version of a science we already have that’s tried, tested, and proven effective, called immunizations. With immunizations, you get all the benefits of surviving the horrors of some of the most nasty viruses and bacteria out there, without suffering through what those viruses and bacteria are going to do to you.
The whole thing is stupid.
If anyone argues about “good” bacteria, tell them to eat yogurt. FFS.
It’s just unscientific thinking. People think virus and bacteria are the only thing you have to worry about, but lots of the time it’s the bacteria producing toxins as part of their metabolism that’s dangerous to us. In other words, their shit is poison.
One of the reasons we don’t want some groups of bacteria growing on our foodstuff is because they turn stuff literally toxic to us, completely unrelated to immune responses. Same way some molds can be toxic while others are not. It’s not because the fungus starts growing inside your body and has an epic free for all with your immune system. Its byproducts are just toxic. Like some berries or some plants are toxic.
yeah, mycotoxins (ie: toxic byproducts from fungi/mold decomposing your food stuffs) don’t always get broken down during cooking. So, while cooking according to standard food safety specs may have killed the mold, their shit is still everywhere ready to fuck your shit up.
Not to mention that you have to survive an infection before it matters that you immune system learned to detect the infectious agent. Yes, the first inoculation techniques were literally just minor exposure to the infectious agent (eg: grinding smallpox scabs and blowing the resulting powder up the nose – wtf). While it technically worked, the mortality rate was still pretty damn high, just not quite as high as ya know getting smallpox the normal way, and thus really only used when a serious outbreak was occuring. We’ve gotten so much better at making vaccination safer and more effective, because we now know so much more about what is actually occuring biologically and know to use attenuated virus or just the benign protein coat alone to achieve results. Why would you ever want to go back to scab-snorting (or toilet licking, apparently, lol)?
There’s a whole subset of idiots that believe that you need to expose yourself to harmful shit to have a strong immune system.
And then they are anti-vaccine. ¯\(ツ)/¯
If we just go with it and give them some cyanide, arsenic, and a rod of spent uranium to boost their immunity, it would be a self solving problem.
Many, but not all, of the anti -pasteurization people believe that there is an invisible “life force” in the milk that is killed by processing. This is an old idea, but this unfalsifiable and unprovable “life force” thinking undergirds a lot of pseudoscience. People believe in getting energy aligned and unblocked and so on, and believe that drinking milk with mysterious life force is more natural.
Raw milk that is carefully and intentionally produced for direct human consumption is a low-risk food with superb nutritional benefits.
While it’s tastier raw, though that’s subjective I suppose, no significant amount of nutrients are lost during pasteurization. Most minerals aren’t destroyed by that heat. Bacteria and most viri are destroyed however.
The vitamins lost by pasteurization aren’t that significant that it compares to the chance of contracting salmonella.
Why am I being downvoted for stating something and providing a link to back up what I wrote? It’s not like I posted a bad link. In the previous link, it described how pre-pasteurized milk is categorically different from raw milk intended for direct human consumption. I think it’s interesting to note how preparation for pasteurization can affect the product.
Also this link shows that there are indeed many nutritional benefits not available from pasteurized milk.
Natural selection is also “going natural”
Look up an old newspaper from say 100-120 years ago and check out the obituaries.
SEWARD, Mark – Died at Gooseberry Cove, Trinity Bay, on the 2nd inst. [January 1891], Mark, youngest child of Thomas and Rosanna Seward, aged 4 years.
SEWARD, Peter – Died on the 10th inst., Peter, second youngest son of Robert and Mary A. Seward, aged 2 years.
SEWARD – Died on the 14th inst., infant child of James and Mary A. Seward.
SEWARD, Richard – Died on the 15th inst., Richard, youngest son of Joseph and Louisa Seward, aged 4 years.
SEWARD, James – Died on the 19th inst., James, second youngest child of James and Mary A. Seward, aged 2 years (Evening Telegram, January 29, 1891)
Or just walk through an old graveyard. There’s a pioneer cemetery near my old place with so many children’s graves. One family gravesite has the mother’s name, the father’s name, a couple of their kids, some young, some adults… and one is just titled ‘babies’.
Like, so many babies died for that mother and father they just put them all in one grave, not even names to remember them by…
Walk into any old graveyard and notice all the tiny little tombstones of children who died before the age of two. Before vaccines were in use.
Now notice how almost NONE of those tombstones are recent.
Primitive forms of innoculation, antiseptic, and pasteurizing go back centuries if not millennia. The very idea of the small pox vaccine came out of the recognition that cow pox mitigated the risk of contagion. Milk maids were (unwittingly) vaccinating themselves for some time.
And pasteurization is just cooking your food. Hell, the whole reason primitive people started baking bread, roasting meat, and brewing beer came down to the benefits of sterilization.
These aren’t even new ideas, per say. They’re advances in technique, understanding of consequence, and means of distribution.
the whole reason primitive people started baking bread, roasting meat,
It’s to start the break down of food. We evolved to outsource our digestion to cooking.
Brewing beer is entirely different though.
It’s to start the break down of food.
That too. But killing parasites in meat and fish is another big benefit.
We evolved to outsource our digestion to cooking.
To a degree. But we also just died more often to infection and disease. Cooking reduced mortality rates, which spurred a larger population, whose members transmitted the knowledge of how and what to cook before eating.
I mean our evolution really kicked off so to speak from outsourcing our digestion. That meant more calories could go to the brain. That’s the aspect I’m focused on.
