• Welcome to Phoenix Rising!

    Created in 2008, Phoenix Rising is the largest and oldest forum dedicated to furthering the understanding of and finding treatments for complex chronic illnesses such as chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS), fibromyalgia (FM), long COVID, postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome (POTS), mast cell activation syndrome (MCAS), and allied diseases.

    To become a member, simply click the Register button at the top right.

The Societal Consequences of Pasteurized Milk Laws 3/13/17

*GG*

senior member
Messages
6,389
Location
Concord, NH
While most people would agree that pasteurized milk laws have made society safer and healthier, the article The Long Term Health Consequences of Pasteurized Milk Laws outlines why this is just simply not true and has merely transferred the short term health problems that dairies with poor health practices created (and would have been quickly solved if consumers had simply been allowed to choose milk from honest healthy dairies instead of having pasteurized milk forced onto them) to long term chronic health consequences spread out to society as a whole.

This companion article goes on to show the economic and societal consequences unrelated to health that have also been caused by these laws. I’ll show you why laws designed to protect people in the short term often have serious unintended consequences that cause us to be less protected in the long term, just as occured in government’s stance on the Cholesterol and Saturate Fat debate.

cont'd

I found this to be an interesting read, have not looked at the links yet. I know that Raw (unpasteurized) milk helped my guy heal some :)

https://kerriknox.liberty.me/the-so...ail&utm_source=Liberty.me&utm_campaign=4-5-17
 

Diwi9

Administrator
Messages
1,780
Location
USA
It's a gamble in the era of industrialized farming, which is a travesty. Pasteurized milk is just not the same product.
 
Messages
1,478
Typical "food manufacturers are out to get us" conspiracy theory clap trap. The bigger the better as far as l'm concerned ......they have more to lose by getting it wrong. There is so much wrong with this article I don't know where to start....Have you seen how mucky farms are...full of bacillus, enteros and many more. Milk is one of the most microbe attractive media there is on the planet, so the risk of food poisoning by poor handling is extremely high. That would only get worse if the farm was small and the milk wasn't heat treated. The higher number of small farms you have as oppose to fewer larger ones then the risk gets higher.

This woman is living in a dream world If she thinks unregulated small holdings are going to be better. She talks about herself as a proponent of common sense.....presumable that precludes her from gathering real facts on the matter and living in an alternate universe. I notice there are no facts to back up any of her spurious claims other than links to other dodgy articles.

If you want to drink unpasteurised milk with a dodgy immune system crack on. But you are taking unnecessary risks in my opinion.
 

RogerBlack

Senior Member
Messages
902
Small number statistics mean you're almost essentially never going to be able to say anything useful about other than habitual contamination from smallholdings.
One untested cow gets a disease, and if you've got 5 cows, 20% of milk going into that batch is contaminated, not 1% if you've got 100.
Milk is not tested, and ...
 

ladycatlover

Senior Member
Messages
203
Location
Liverpool, UK

HowToEscape?

Senior Member
Messages
626
Small number statistics mean you're almost essentially never going to be able to say anything useful about other than habitual contamination from smallholdings.
One untested cow gets a disease, and if you've got 5 cows, 20% of milk going into that batch is contaminated, not 1% if you've got 100.
Milk is not tested, and ...

If the contamination is microbe that can reproduce in milk, which is not unlikely, then the entire batch is soon contaminated. If there is sufficient amount of pathogen from just one sick cow, the whole batch is also contaminated.

Yes straight milk an hour out of the cow is yummy, but there are many ways to fail if that is made a regular product. Uncertain benefit, certain risk, no thanks.
 

Manganus

Senior Member
Messages
166
Location
Canary islands
This issue is not simple. It's obvious that pasteurization has economic advantages. The libertarian angle of this article, however, borders to conspiracy theories.

Pasteurization has its disadvantages, with respect to the training of our immune systems.

But the advantages are important too. Quoting en.wikipedia, these diseases and patogens are decimated:
  • tuberculosis,
  • brucellosis,
  • diphtheria,
  • scarlet fever,
  • Q-fever,
  • Salmonella,
  • Listeria,
  • Yersinia,
  • Campylobacter,
  • Staphylococcus aureus, and
  • Escherichia coli
Where I come from, tuberculosis was the chief reason to enforce mandatory pasteurization of milk.

Tuberculosis has been possible to treat and cure, since World War II, but that's no longer true. More and more patients are infected with strains of Mycobacterium tuberculosis that have developed resistance to available drugs.
 

RogerBlack

Senior Member
Messages
902
Tuberculosis has been possible to treat and cure, since World War II, but that's no longer true. More and more patients are infected with strains of Mycobacterium tuberculosis that have developed resistance to available drugs.

I do not disagree with this, however I would suspect that tuberculosis contracted from cows would be of strains not circulating in people, and hence with limited exposure to antibiotics.

(Animals are of course exposed to antibiotics, but not the whole spectrum of them, typically (if nothing else, some are too expensive)
 

Manganus

Senior Member
Messages
166
Location
Canary islands
I do not disagree with this, however I would suspect that tuberculosis contracted from cows would be of strains not circulating in people, and hence with limited exposure to antibiotics.

(Animals are of course exposed to antibiotics, but not the whole spectrum of them, typically (if nothing else, some are too expensive)
If you are right, and that may well be so, then it's only a matter of time.
Unfortunately.
 

RogerBlack

Senior Member
Messages
902
If you are right, and that may well be so, then it's only a matter of time.
Unfortunately.

There is fortunately little contact between TB circulating in natural reservoirs, and extensively drug resistant TB.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22829789 - however may disagree with my naive thought.

(which raises the issue of which came first)
I wasn't able to find studies of drug resistance in TB circulating in cattle in 'the west'.
 

Snow Leopard

Hibernating
Messages
5,902
Location
South Australia
Milk is regarded as essential for children. The gov't has an interest in a healthy population, and safe, inexpensive milk is a major part of that.

I think it is a mistake of our western societies to to regard milk as essential, nor necessary - it is not true worldwide and especially historically. But in general, I agree pasteurisation laws (along with health and safety food laws in general) are overwhelmingly positive.
 
Messages
1,478
The best milk for humans is breast milk....however in the absence of viable farms for this, we farm cows milk. This has been the case for a very very long time in a wide range of cultures (not just western cultures).

I don't see anything wrong with it...we are humans and humans survive because we are adaptable to what's available to us. It's our nature to be omnivores and eat and digest a wide range of different foods. It's part of our success story as a species.

I despair a bit that some of our staple and nutritious foods get such a bashing, particularly when a lot of its feeding in to people's paranoia about food generally.

It also seems sad that rather than eat local produce, people would rather fly coconut milk half way across the globe because it's trendy or following some dubious non scientific rationale about why cavemen never drank milk (speaking for the uk....perfectly fine if you have a coconut plantation on your doorstep, providing it's sustainable).
 

Diwi9

Administrator
Messages
1,780
Location
USA
Public health concerns are the obvious reason why milk is pasteurized, but I think @*GG* 's point is getting muddled in the debate. The point is that there are health benefits of unpasteurized milk. Good regulation and inspection of certified facilities that are specially maintained to produced unpasteurized milk is not an unequivocal bad idea.
 

IreneF

Senior Member
Messages
1,552
Location
San Francisco

IreneF

Senior Member
Messages
1,552
Location
San Francisco
The best milk for humans is breast milk....however in the absence of viable farms for this, we farm cows milk. This has been the case for a very very long time in a wide range of cultures (not just western cultures).

I don't see anything wrong with it...we are humans and humans survive because we are adaptable to what's available to us. It's our nature to be omnivores and eat and digest a wide range of different foods. It's part of our success story as a species.

I despair a bit that some of our staple and nutritious foods get such a bashing, particularly when a lot of its feeding in to people's paranoia about food generally.

It also seems sad that rather than eat local produce, people would rather fly coconut milk half way across the globe because it's trendy or following some dubious non scientific rationale about why cavemen never drank milk (speaking for the uk....perfectly fine if you have a coconut plantation on your doorstep, providing it's sustainable).
Coconut milk tastes very good, and it's used in Asian cuisine.
 
Messages
1,478
Public health concerns are the obvious reason why milk is pasteurized, but I think @*GG* 's point is getting muddled in the debate. The point is that there are health benefits of unpasteurized milk. Good regulation and inspection of certified facilities that are specially maintained to produced unpasteurized milk is not an unequivocal bad idea.
I disagree, I think the comments go to the heart of the debate. There is very little in the article about the health benefits of pasteurised vs unpasteurised milk and that is because the argument here is a very weak. Nutritionally it's hardly different at all. There is an argument about enzymes and possible the benefit of some "good bacteria". (Can't believe I ve had to use that phrase), however this marginal and very debatable perceived benefit is blown out of the water by the enormous downside which is serious illness and death due to microbiological contamination.

The article did nothing to put a context to this (I.e how to feed a lot of people safely with unpasteurised milk) so the principle of this was discussed. Public health is a social consequence which is why Louis Pasteur is a hero not a pariah in this. I doubt the author of the article has given any consideration to these points and so has written her opinion piece which I find particularly naive and also misleading. It's pieces like these that could make people very ill on a false belief that they will get a non existent non proven benefit, whereas we know for certain that drinking unpasteurised milk has very definite provable risks.

The only way to make large scale distribution of un pasteurised milk work would be:

Maintain chill chain from milking shed to packing to store around 4 deg C
Reduce the shelf life from 12+ days to 3 days
Have microbiological testing with positive release at the farm and the factory where it's packed to keep track of contamination
Have more regular inspections of farms to monitor hygiene
Obviously all of this would put the price up to the consumer considerably

Can you see why this in itself has public health risks?