Like in most states, if you want to buy raw milk in Texas, don’t go to a grocery store. The only place to find unpasteurized milk is to buy it directly from a dairy registered with the state.
Pasteurization kills bacteria in milk and extends its shelf life. “Raw” milk has not been pasteurized and could contain dangerous pathogens.
Nonetheless, there is demand for the raw stuff – and more public officials are saying that folks should be able to have it if they want it. Last week, Texas Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller wrote that the government should get out of the way if people want to buy and consume raw milk. Robert F. Kennedy, President-elect Trump’s choice for Health and Human Services secretary, is also a big proponent.
John Lucey, director of the Center for Dairy Research and a professor of food science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, spoke to the Texas Standard about the lack of evidence to support the purported health benefits of raw milk.
This transcript has been edited lightly for clarity:
Texas Standard: Let’s just get this out of the way. Where do you personally stand on this issue of raw milk versus pasteurized?
John Lucey: Well, I come from a farming background, and I grew up consuming milk. But my mother did change, when I was young, to pasteurize and boiling that milk on the farm. Obviously, she found out about some risks.
And as a scientist, I’ve studied this aspect and I have significant concerns about the risk of consuming raw milk.
Let’s talk about this editorial that Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller recently wrote about raw milk. He said that for some people, the benefits outweigh the risks.
Let’s talk about the benefits first. Those who support this, what do they say?
Well, there is studies that have been done on populations in Europe and have correlated consumption of raw milk with lower incidence of asthma and allergy. However, those were surveys of all kinds of people. There were not clinical trials. And the people who are the children who had lower risks of allergy and asthma tend to be from a very traditional farming background.
In the U.S., we’ve done kind of similar studies, and we found that Amish children have lower incidence of asthma and allergy, but actually Mennonites and other kind of populations that also drank raw milk at much higher levels. And it seems to be related to the farm environment. And the amount of contact with farm animals seems to be a very critical thing.
So it isn’t at all clear that it’s consumption of raw milk from those studies – it’s more of a biomarker or a factor that tells us these are very traditional farming groups.
So what you’re saying is that the studies that are often referred to deal with correlation and not so much causation. But have there been studies on the causation factor – peer-reviewed studies on whether or not raw milk does provide greater benefit?
The issue here is that even in those studies that we were talking about that have found some correlation, the only benefit is for kids that are less than 2 years of age.
And it’s not very ethical to be giving kids, anybody, the potential that has life-threatening pathogens like listeria. So those studies have not been done. That’s that’s the short and sweet answer.
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What about the principal risks here?
The principal risks are the farm environment itself is what we would call a reservoir of pathogens. That means that there are pathogens like listeria or E.coli present in the soil, so like in the dirt. The cows themselves have it in their poop or manure. And that means that it could also be in the environment like water and so on.
So the farm itself, irrespective of whether the farmer is an excellent farmer and loves his animals and treats them well, it’s got nothing to do with that. It’s the farm itself is kind of surrounded by a reservoir of pathogens, which means that if anything goes wrong in the cleaning or milking process, you can have contamination because it’s literally a non-sterile environment.
The animals themselves can also get infections, mastitis and also greater infections. That could mean that it’s in the milk and you don’t even know about it.
So it means that it’s very difficult and sporadic. I don’t have much faith in once- or twice-a-month testing and that tells me all is good, because it depends on what happened on a particular day.
Now, we’ve talked a lot on this show about the strain of avian flu that the dairy industry has been dealing with for the past several months. And I notice that in California over the past day, there have been reports that bird flu is detected in raw milk sold at a California store.
Does pasteurization take care of bird flu? And if you consume bird flu in milk, would that mean that you get the disease, or what?
We’re very fortunate that pasteurization also inactivates this bird flu in milk. So that’s a very fortunate thing. Otherwise we would be stopped and we’d be figuring out what to do. But it’s very fortunate it does.
If I consumed raw milk with this avian flu, would I get sick? We don’t know yet. What I can tell you is that in Texas, where most of that seemed to have originated back in February, March, is that one of the first signs that there was something really wrong with the cows and the milk was that farm cats started to die on the farms that had this infection.
And that was even before it had identified what it was. And they actually tested the farm cats that had drank raw milk, and they had the avian flu that we’re talking about. It’s only then that that was helping to confirm that there was this avian flu, because it had never moved to cattle before.
