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Lawmakers Drink Raw Milk to Celebrate Legality, Become Immediately Sick (2016)

modernfarmer.com

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Re: Lawmakers Drink Raw Milk to Celebrate Legality, Become Immediately Sick (2016)

#121
post #82
post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s amazing that in a supposedly science-driven forum, an entire set of comments can imply that pasteurization, one of humanity’s great accomplishments, is a folly. People die from drinking raw milk. It is genuinely a risky thing to do. Not everyone will die but enough that society should work hard to limit it as much as possible.

I think instead of straight prohibit, raw milk should be purchasable if the buyer understands the dangers, and knows how to treat their own usage so that it's safe - for example, they boil it themselves. There's plenty of things that are dangerous and can kill you, but we don't and shouldn't prohibit it all. Instead, society should aim to educate, and also put in warning labels etc.

If you understand the danger then is a hospital still required to treat you?

That’s private benefit and socialized risk.

If you’re going to be taking communal resources then you should need to uphold some community standards.

Re: Lawmakers Drink Raw Milk to Celebrate Legality, Become Immediately Sick (2016)

#122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why were you eating raw meat, may I ask?

Steak tartare and carpaccio are two raw beef dishes that I love that are common in France and Italy, respectively. There are many others. But American food practices are so awful that it is impossible to eat raw meat here, mostly: some places are careful. That's why cows are pumped full of antibacterials: because they are given growth hormones until their udders rip, and are constantly infected. This doesn't happen i…

I was just reading the wiki on steak tartare b/c of this thread and was surprised to find its original name was steak à l'Americaine

Re: Lawmakers Drink Raw Milk to Celebrate Legality, Become Immediately Sick (2016)

#123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m just catching up on this, can someone explain to me what happens if you drink raw milk? Edit: thanks for the answers everyone. My mum’s a dairy farmer and so was I during my high school weekends. My family’s been drinking raw milk for the past 20 or so years. So it’s interesting to know what scary stuff is out there lurking and that a debate has formed around something I had grown to normalize. Tb is obviously a…

“tuberculosis, diphtheria, typhoid, Campylobacter, Listeria, Brucella, E. coli, Salmonella, and streptococcal infections” apparently.

Sounds like a bad run through the Oregon Trail

Re: Lawmakers Drink Raw Milk to Celebrate Legality, Become Immediately Sick (2016)

#124
post #83

Growing up in a village in India, we only ever bought raw milk because there was no packaged milk available. Everyone had a deal with a local farmer. Every morning or evening, we would walk over to the farmer's house, pick up our milk and bring it home. My family in India (and the whole village) still does that. And this is where the similarity ends. The first thing my mom (and everyone else) did is to boil the milk…

Note that boiling is not the same as pasteurization. Pasteurization involves heating but doesn't require boiling. You can pasteurize by heating to 73 degrees C for 25 seconds. Boiling, in the case of milk, is heating it to its boiling point which is around 100.17 degrees C. Boiling has a higher impact in the nutritional value of milk than pasteurization.

> Boiling has a higher impact in the nutritional value of milk than pasteurization.

What does that mean?

Re: Lawmakers Drink Raw Milk to Celebrate Legality, Become Immediately Sick (2016)

#125
When I was a kid, we had got our milk direct from the farmer (early 80s, Switzerland). It was our kids job, to go to there and get 2 or 3 liter milk several times a week. I'm not sure, if my mom cooked allways all the milk, I guess I have to ask her. But sometimes I drank, still warm, fresh milk on the way home. I don't think I ever had trouble because of it.

Re: Lawmakers Drink Raw Milk to Celebrate Legality, Become Immediately Sick (2016)

#126
FWIW we have been drinking raw milk for years and have never had any problems. We buy it from the neighboring farm once a week, it holds just fine in the fridge. We make yogurt out of it, eat it with cereals, make milk shakes, and cook with it. Anything left after a week will go to the house animals. It tastes great, has double the fat content (Jersey cows), we also use non pasteurized butter coming from the same farm.

Re: Lawmakers Drink Raw Milk to Celebrate Legality, Become Immediately Sick (2016)

#127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Note that boiling is not the same as pasteurization. Pasteurization involves heating but doesn't require boiling. You can pasteurize by heating to 73 degrees C for 25 seconds. Boiling, in the case of milk, is heating it to its boiling point which is around 100.17 degrees C. Boiling has a higher impact in the nutritional value of milk than pasteurization.

> Boiling has a higher impact in the nutritional value of milk than pasteurization. What does that mean?

Some proteins break down and loose nutritional value.

Re: Lawmakers Drink Raw Milk to Celebrate Legality, Become Immediately Sick (2016)

#128
post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“I did this and was fine. Therefore I think it is fine” is half of these stories. It is of course possible to say “I was fine but probably was lucky”, which is at least acknowledging that food science is a thing and probably closer to the truth than your singular personal experience. GP is pointing out that people take personal stories and turn them into some science-sounding conclusion. If the internet existed in th…

I'm seeing "it was fine for me", nobody recommending that raw milk is a good and healthy choice...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30809457 Heavy implication that the rules don’t make sense

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30809207 Making some argument that our bodies could handle it if we had more bacteria

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30809218 Literal “I was fine so it’s fine”

Lots of “is this just factory farming being an issue” comments which are at least in good faith and usually questions, though! So people are trying to get more details

It’s not every comment but lots of it.

Re: Lawmakers Drink Raw Milk to Celebrate Legality, Become Immediately Sick (2016)

#129
post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's a modern western cultural thing that everything that's more 'natural', 'untreated', 'non-GMO'... is automatically considered more healthy, see also antivaxxers etc. Without any evidence of course.

It's like it stems from some sort of self-hatred, as if we have this belief deep down that we are wrong or corrupted and whatever we are not MUST be good. These naturalistic fallacies are certainly a strange, ilogical thing, but one at the core belief of _many_ people. I wonder if it's a western thing though and if we don't find it in other cultures as well.

It's not really a western thing, it's just that "natural" stuff is much more expensive to produce in a modern industrial world, so --- naturally --- it's perceived as higher quality.

Centuries ago sugar was extremely expensive in Korea. Kings would use it as a medicine when they were sick.

Re: Lawmakers Drink Raw Milk to Celebrate Legality, Become Immediately Sick (2016)

#130
post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's a modern western cultural thing that everything that's more 'natural', 'untreated', 'non-GMO'... is automatically considered more healthy, see also antivaxxers etc. Without any evidence of course.

It's like it stems from some sort of self-hatred, as if we have this belief deep down that we are wrong or corrupted and whatever we are not MUST be good. These naturalistic fallacies are certainly a strange, ilogical thing, but one at the core belief of _many_ people. I wonder if it's a western thing though and if we don't find it in other cultures as well.

I can understand the logical leap that people took to get there:

Most processed food in western diets are unhealthy for you. Usually because the processing basically means very high in sugar, and relatively low nutritionally. It doesn't take much to go from that data point to a rule of thumb "natural = good".

Especially if you combine it with a mistrust of large corporations that you believe prioritize profits over ethics (not exactly a huge leap) - where you think that the stuff they make is bad, but "natural" things they didn't have a hand in cant be corrupted by them.

Real life is much more complex than that, but i can see the chain of logic people use.

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