I'm no expert so don't treat my comments as health advice, but viruses are large complex molecules and they don't tend to survive intact very long outside of living cells, do they?
When smallpox was eradicated, the WHO organized teams to collect and destroy samples of smallpox used in remote places for variolation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variolation#Decline IIRC the samples they found were too old and did not contain viable virus, but they were afraid they could start a new smallpox epidemic. So ... I guess they think virus can survive for a long time.
Really depends on where you buy it. Some real cheese maker, or some random crappy industrial brand?
In France we eat cheese made from raw milk all the time, it's almost never a problem, it's so rare that when it does it makes the news and products are recalled.
It is a French cheese, but bought in a German supermarket. So most likely more industrial production for the mass market. It's still tasty, but probably not the best one you can buy out there.
Lots of European cheeses are made from raw milk and cases of people getting sick from anything commercially prepared are vanishingly rare, even when the end product looks and smells like death.
Please explain. I’m afraid I’m too dense to understand that.
I didn’t mean to insult anyone’s sacred cow. I just have some experience in this.
However, unhomogenized milk can be pretty cool. When we lived in London, we used to get daily deliveries of bottled, unhomogenized milk, and I always loved taking the cream off the top.
We (the "West") are too far removed from death and disease being a real, everyday risk so our collective memories forgot why pasteurization is such a good thing
As far as I can tell, it's in the same weird "purity" deal as anti-vax, anti-mask, and various other kinds of orthorexia. As well as being aligned with anti-helmet and anti-seatbelt campaigners: seemingly they want it because it's dangerous. It makes them feel good to reject objective standards of safety and substitute their own specialness. After all, they're the protagonist, they can't die in the middle of the show.
Raw milk isn't anywhere near as dangerous as the other choices you mention except during a cow pandemic. Still, I agree, the risk/reward seems like it could throw an exception. I would like to controversially throw preservatives in bread into the same category. When we started adding preservatives to bread, the incidence of colon cancer dropped significantly. Bread mold isn't good for you, preservatives have a very long track record of being the less (but probably still) dangerous option.
The tendency for HN comments to focus on a relatively less important detail and completely ignore the larger implications never ceases to amaze.
Certainly the safety of raw milk is important for the 2% of the population that drinks it, and we should add H5N1 to the existing pile of pathogens they should worry about like E. coli, salmonella, listeria and campylobacter.
The far more significant fact that we're not discussing for some reason is that H5N1 has not only jumped from birds to mammals, but it's spreading rapidly between different species of mammals. And not just cattle from coast to coast in the US, but also bears, foxes, skunks, minks, raccoons, otters, seals, sea lions, domestic cats and even at least one dolphin. And for many of these mammals, not only does it spread fast, it also has a very high fatality rate.
If the virus has mutated to spread rapidly from mammal to mammal, and it also spreads to many different species of mammal, that's a very new thing that's never been seen before with this virus.
I don't know what the probability is for this to turn in to a high-mortality human pandemic, but that probability is certainly orders of magnitude greater now than before the virus achieved mammal-to-mammal transmission.
"As far as you can tell" is just your misinformed and shit-stirring opinion. Pasteurization is unnatural and changes the quality and nutrition of the milk. Baby cows don't drink pasteurized milk, and neither do human babies. In other words, you're projecting--hard.
Disclaimer: I drink pasteurized milk like everyone else because raw milk is expensive and hard to source. When I was a child I drank raw milk in glass bottles sourced from a local dairy since I grew up in a dairy town. I suffered no ill effects.
Does it? In what way, and with what evidence? People say things like this without ever getting specific.
> Baby cows don't drink pasteurized milk, and neither do human babies
No, but (a) there's a much shorter supply chain there in nature, which is the big problem, (b) cows consume all sorts of things that are inedible by humans, and (c) it's not actually "natural" for humans to drink cow's milk at all, that's a relatively recent genetic adaptation (lactose tolerance) that not everybody has.
>> Baby cows don't drink pasteurized milk, and neither do human babies
> No, but (a) there's a much shorter supply chain there in nature, which is the big problem, (b) cows consume all sorts of things that are inedible by humans, and (c) it's not actually "natural" for humans to drink cow's milk at all, that's a relatively recent genetic adaptation (lactose tolerance) that not everybody has.
and (d) some places, especially large dairies, do feed baby cows pasteurized milk. They do this to limit the spread of illness among their livestock and to use up waste milk. Some do this with colostrum as well.
Not sure why this is downvoted. Probably because of the agressive wording, but imo you are right.
They just want the pure milk, because it's pure. Not because it's better in any way.
I do wonder every now and then if there is a way to stop this trend. I do believe that most people know that they'd have all the information available to prove themselves wrong. But that's just uncomfortable. Being the one who "knows better" feels better. We need to embrace uncomfortable truths more.
I do not drink raw milk. However, I have once or twice on a farm, and it does taste better. More creamy and full bodied. Like the difference between pasturised orange juice and fresh orange juice. So there is a reason other than purity and ego.
The French can access raw milk and cheeses made from raw milk. As I understand it, one or two people a year in France die from this.
I’ve tasted pasteurized milk from a farm. It’s also more creamy and full bodied.
I don’t think it’s the lack of pasteurization that made the milk you tasted different but the fact that it was directly from the farm and from healthier animals.
That being said, oat milk beats the crap out of cow’s milk for me now minus the hormones, antibiotics, abuse and torture.
Different risks. I'd say you were extremely unlikely to get listeria from McDonalds - the very industrial standardisation that makes it bland also makes it processes out the pathogens. Acute risks vs the long term.
Is it? Junk food is the "thoughtless", easy, popular option while raw milk is very much something you have to seek out, unless you live on or next to a dairy farm. And not just seek out, you have to have been advertised to.
I was thinking the same thing and as the other commenter pointed out, it does align with the vax crowd pretty well. I have seen so many posts about raw milk and how its healthier than pasteurized milk. Absolutely insane to me.
You need to comprehend the complete loss of trust in authority. This has gone so far as to be inverted: if the government, academia, media, etc enthusiastically endorse something then it is assumed to be harmful until proven otherwise.
I say this as someone who shares this mindset. It is as shocking to me that you would queue up for a dangerous vaccine, support mass 3rd world immigration, consume slop full of soy and seed oils, etc as it no doubt is to you that I would be an openly racist anti-vaxer who gets his steaks and eggs straight from the farm (and would my milk too, if it wasn't illegal here).
It doesn't help at all that the champion of pasteurization was one Lord Rothschild, whose only two addresses to UK parliament were for Zionism and the prohibition of raw milk. If one is considered a program of genocidal supremacist hatred of my people, it's a very tough sell that the other is supposed to help keep me safe and healthy.
A healthy scepticism for gov and media seems good to me but inverting what they’re saying seems less than sound. At that point what’s left as a sound basis? Fringe blogs? Facebook lunatics?
Do your own research isn’t viable either given that I can’t be an expert in everything. Especially with the rise of misinformation. At some point you’ve got to trust something
Steak and eggs from the farm seems quite reasonable to me. ;)
“Do your own research” would be ok if people actually did research. Or at the very least, if they were just reading other research they’d look at primary sources and considering how innumerate most people are, made the effort to learn statistics before.
“Do your own research” is absolutely ridiculous when what it means is diving deeper into the rabbit holes presented by the YouTube or TikTok algorithms.
Where are all the mass deaths and murders since then?
Even overall death rates and mortality rates have fallen across the world after jumping up during COVID itself.
Even an extremely tiny risk of say 0.1% should have seen aroun 4 million dead. Where are all the overflowing morgues and need for new hospitals we saw when COVID, which has a low mortality rate, and had definitely not infected even close to 70% of people in Italy, or China, was spreading in the early months?
two modern insanities on display in one place. Outdoor cats, one of the most ecologically devastating invasive species we somehow let run wild, and overconsumption of animal product. Incredible disease vectors we just keep around for no necessary reason.
