Politicians push raw milk despite its dangers
www.texasstandard.org

... 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. ...