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

modernfarmer.com

181–190 of 271 posts

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

#181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The issue is how trivial it is to make it safe; and how people will avoid this trivial step for the sake of some essentially religious notion about human action upon nature violating its "sacred" condition. The underlying view is very much "the world was made Good, and we are Bad". The world is as much poisonous, grow up.

I agree with your sentiment for the most part. However, I've heard plenty of times from people that lived on dairy farms that that milk straight from the cow tastes noticeably better. As someone who has never had that experience, I don't think it's that out there for me to want to try it, especially if the chances of getting sick are low enough.

Yes, it tastes better. No, it's not worth the risk.

It's ok as a hobby thing when you go visit a farm, it's most likely not ok at industrial production scales.

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

#182
post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes, just like they're required to treat you if you break a leg skiing. Just like they're required to treat you if you're obese.

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

#183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“Calories” measures the amount of energy a human can extract from the food. Interestingly, if you cook.a steak (for examples le) it can gain calories, not lose them.

Does it really? I thought it was a simple chemical test where you burn a set amount of it and check how much it heats a given amount of water.

That's the old, less accurate way. By that measure, fiber tends to have quite a lot of calories, as it's a carbohydrate, but that is now known to be wrong - fiber passes through our digestive systems almost completely undigested, and yields almost 0 calories.

Today, calorie counts are usually obtained by checking the protein, fat, sugar and fiber contents, and using known values for calorie/g of each. Those well-known values are ideally obtained either through human calorimetric studies, or through burning protein, fat, sugar directly.

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

#184
post #92
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…

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.

If you eat "natural" (I dislike the term) food you have a chance of cutting away additive sugar that the manufacturer add way too much of in most ready made products.

I.e. you get better food for an indirect reason.

Like if you make your own müsli you might not add sugar, which the companies add to increase sales, and have more of the expensive nuts, that they cut down in share to increase margins since noone notices the difference between 2.3% expensive nuts and 2.2% until there is almost no left ...

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

#185
post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If you dont want public hospitaps to treat certain things, you're welcome to advocate against public healthcare.

Public healthcare is not a justification for slavery.

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

#186
post #69
post #59

When I was a kid, we lived in a village in northeastern Slovakia. On the hill above the village there was a farm with a big herd of cows. And every morning at around 5, a tractor would bring a few dozen litres of milk down to a small shack just by our house. People were usually waiting in line already, in a room that stank of rancid milk, to get a liter or two. When we brought the milk home, we'd pour a cup and let i…

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'm not going to advocate in favor of drinking raw milk. But on the other hand, there are a lot of smug responses here totally discounting the experiences of the rural-dwelling commenters who have apparently been drinking milk raw safely for years. "It's risky." Absolutely. On the other hand, the entire reason many adult humans are lactose tolerant to begin with is that humans have been drinking cows milk for thousands of years. Milk pasteurization has been around for less than 200 of them. Clearly raw milk consumption was safe enough for humans to evolve a mutation permitting us to chug even more of it.

So maybe let's not be so quick to jeer at the people here who report they have been doing it with no ill effects. Especially since most of them don't appear to be proselytizing, just relaying their personal experience. I agree there's no need for anyone to drink milk raw in the 21st century, and that it is always going to have some inherent risk compared with drinking pasteurized milk. The same can be said for many uncooked foodstuffs that we consume, and other enjoyable but non-risk-free activities we undertake.

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

#187
I have been drinking raw milk from one of these machines[1] and various grey market sources for years, routinely order steak tartare or make it at home, almost always with a raw egg yolk, not to mention raw fish, and never had an issue.

There is a risk to everything but I've noticed online that Americans tend to focus on food safety a lot, keep their eggs in the coolers, freeze, pasteurize, and homogenize everything while eating a diet of reheated garbage and breaking new grounds in obesity. The systemic risk from being overweight, type 2 diabetes, and eating quarter of your calories in HFCS is much higher than acute risk of eating untreated food. And it's usually hard to miss that the milk tastes off anyway.

[1] https://www.tuwroclaw.com/pliki/duze_zdjecia/wiadomosci/mlek...

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

#188
post #176
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 don't think people are saying it's a folly, but that it does taste better and have better nutrition, if you can get it at it's absolutely freshest. Pasteurization is for when you cannot, which is the case for most. Also pasteurization was invented in the mid 1800s, while mass market electric refrigeration was invented in in the early 1900s. Before that it was a bunch of awkward ice boxes, and not used much.

> Pasteurization is for when you cannot, which is the case for most.

Fresh milk from a dirty udder, or from an infected cow, or sitting in a bucket that has traces of yesterday's milk, is not safe to drink. Pasteurization (or boiling or fermentation and other preservation methods before that) are all ways to make pretty sure that the milk is safe to drink, regardless of freshness.

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

#189
post #92
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…

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.

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