Pod Insights Science Vs Raw Milk: Secret Superfood?? About this episode Raw milk is having a major moment, with fans claiming it’s a gut-healing superfood that can prevent everything from asthma to allergies. But others are like HOLD ON — we pasteurize milk to make it safe! Drinking raw milk can kill you. So, who’s right? Could there be some benefits to guzzling milk straight from the teat? Or is it a terrible idea? We talk to food science Prof. John Lucey and pediatric allergist and immunologist Prof. Christine Seroogy to find out.
Find us on YouTube at ScienceVsPodcast! You can also find the show on Instagram at science_vs and Wendy on TikTok at @wendyzuk.
Find our transcript here: https://tinyurl.com/ScienceVsRawMilk
In this episode, we cover:
(00:00) Some people online claim raw milk is GREAT for you
(05:36) What is pasteurization??
(07:15) Is raw milk good for your microbiome?
(11:06) Can raw milk help prevent allergies and asthma?
(24:31) What are the risks of drinking raw milk?
This episode was produced by Blythe Terrell, with help from Ekedi Fausther-Keeys, Meryl Horn, Rose Rimler, Michelle Dang and Wendy Zukerman. We’re edited by Blythe Terrell. Wendy Zukerman is our executive producer. Fact checking by Diane Kelly. Research help from Erica Akiko Howard. Mix and sound design by Bobby Lord. Music written by Bumi Hidaka, Peter Leonard, Emma Munger and Bobby Lord. Thanks to the researchers we spoke to for this episode, including Professor Markus Ege, thanks so much for your time. Thanks to Elsevier for sharing your raw milk book.
Thanks to Elsevier for sharing your raw milk book with us. Thanks to the Zukerman family, Joseph Lavelle Wilson, and Jack Weinstein.
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Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Wendy Zukerman? Hi, I'm Wendy Zukerman and this is Science Versus.
0:05 Wendy Zukerman? After this episode, we're taking a quick break just to work on some future episodes. So if you have ideas, let us know in the comments, things you'd like us to versus. And we wanted to let you know that we now have a YouTube channel. Yay! It's Science VS Podcast. There's a link in the show notes. You could also catch us on Instagram, TikTok. But now, it's time for the episode. Let's jump in.
0:36 Wendy Zukerman? I'm on an illegal mission today.
0:41 Wendy Zukerman? Legal grey area would be more accurate, but for a cold open like this, we're gonna say illegal. No, we're gonna say grey area. There's no way that would get through fact check. The point is doing something naughty. A couple of weeks ago, I went on a secret mission. Okay.
0:59 Wendy Zukerman? Here I go. I'm going into the store. There's plants out the front.
1:06 Wendy Zukerman? Plants inside. Organic bananas to my left. I'm here to buy something that some say is dangerous and could even kill me. The chocolate milk drops. I bet there's carob somewhere around here. God only knows. Oh my gosh, there's an empty... It's a completely empty fridge. There's one left. One left. I found it. It's a white substance in a plastic bottle. There's one left. There's one left. One raw milk.
1:46 Wendy Zukerman? Raw milk.
1:49 Wendy Zukerman? I've got it. I've got it. I've got it.
1:52 Wendy Zukerman? Hello. Hi. But should I drink it? Thank you. The card? Yes, please. Sure.
1:59 Wendy Zukerman? A lot of people online are saying yes, that this milk that I've got, that hasn't been pasteurized and is straight from the teat, has heaps of benefits. They say, just look at the science.
2:11 Speaker 01 Raw milk, raw dairy in your diet is definitely going to improve your health. Raw milk protects kids from asthma, eczema, and allergies.
2:20 Speaker 02 It is packed full of gut-healthy bacteria.
2:23 Speaker 03 You heal your microbiome.
2:25 Speaker 01 God intended milk to be raw. If he didn't, he would have put a pasteurization chamber on the udder of a cow.
2:33 Wendy Zukerman? Raw milk fandom has even hit the utter echelons of society. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is a huge raw milk fan. And it's not just the RFK Juniors of the world. It's pretty common to drink raw milk in some countries. You can even find it in some vending machines around Europe. But of course, there is a flip side to this story. The raw milk naysayers, who reckon that raw milk is dangerous. It's actually illegal to sell raw milk for humans to drink in Australia and in some states in the US as well. I had to find it in the pet food section of the store. So why are people worried here?
3:16 Speaker 04 Some people keep trying to act like drinking raw milk is unlocking some secret level of health. Well, I want to say congratulations. It unlocked diarrhea, fever, stomach cramps, nausea, and vomiting.
3:30 Speaker 05 The only reason to drink raw milk is if you ever wondered, hey, I wonder what it's like to die from having too much diarrhea.
3:37 Wendy Zukerman? So who's right here? Could drinking raw milk be the thing you need to help your microbiome, your allergies, your asthma? Or are you gonna die from having too much diarrhea?
3:51 Wendy Zukerman? Today on the show, we're gonna squeeze the teat of science until we've filled our bucket with facts around raw milk.
4:01 Wendy Zukerman? Because, you know, there's a lot of...
4:03 Speaker 01 God intended milk to be raw.
4:06 Wendy Zukerman? And then there's science.
4:10 Wendy Zukerman? Science vs. Raw Milk is coming up just after the break.
4:20 Speaker 06 For adults with Crohn's disease or ulcerative colitis symptoms, every choice matters.
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5:54 Wendy Zukerman? Welcome back. Today, we are guzzling down the science of raw milk and I'm here with our editor, Blythe Terrell. Hello, Blythe.
6:02 Speaker 04 Hello, Wendy.
6:03 Wendy Zukerman? So I've got it in my hot little hands.
6:05 Speaker 04 Ooh, I'm so nervous.
6:09 Wendy Zukerman? It's, I should say, so it says pet milk only.
6:13 Speaker 04 Mmm.
6:14 Wendy Zukerman? And what's funny about the health food store that I bought it at is,
6:19 Wendy Zukerman? so you go to the milk section with the regular pasteurized milk and then they have a sign that says, "If you want raw milk, go to the pet food section." But there is no other pet food sold in the quote-unquote "pet food" section. Across the store, there's just a fridge with raw milk.
6:42 Wendy Zukerman? And that's it.
6:43 Speaker 04 Wow, that is cheeky.
6:46 Wendy Zukerman? Yeah, okay, so let's open, let's open this raw milk.
6:50 Speaker 04 Once it's open, it's open, Wendy. Then it really becomes like Chekhov's raw milk.
6:53 Wendy Zukerman? Yeah, okay, here we go. There it is.
6:56 Speaker 04 So you're just gonna put it there next to you, right? You're not having it now?
6:59 Wendy Zukerman? Nope. The question is, Blad, am I gonna drink this?
7:03 Speaker 04 It sounds like maybe you need some science before you can make that call.
7:06 Wendy Zukerman? I believe so. So tell me, Blad, let's start here. What is different about this raw milk compared to regular milk that you would buy at the store?
7:18 Speaker 04 Okay, so the key difference is that it has not been pasteurized.
7:24 Wendy Zukerman? Mm-hmm.
7:25 Speaker 04 Right? And I can tell you a little bit about pasteurization.
7:29 Wendy Zukerman? Thank you.
7:30 Speaker 04 So what we do when we pasteurize milk is basically we heat it up usually to 161 degrees Fahrenheit, 72 degrees Celsius.
7:40 Wendy Zukerman? Thank you.
7:41 Speaker 04 For you and those like you, for like 15 seconds or less. And when we started doing this at scale, it was about 100 years ago.
7:52 Wendy Zukerman? Okay.
7:53 Speaker 04 And that, Wendy, was partly because milk was making people sick. Actually, a lot of the time with things like tuberculosis, like the cows would get tuberculosis.
8:04 Wendy Zukerman? Oh.
8:05 Speaker 04 And like it would come out in their milk and people would drink the milk and get TB.
8:08 Wendy Zukerman? Wow. Oh, I didn't realize TB. Okay. So they, so they start pasteurizing the milk and it, it works. It kills the bugs.
8:19 Speaker 04 Kills the TB.
8:20 Wendy Zukerman? Yes.
8:20 Speaker 04 It becomes the thing we do in the US, right? And in a lot of other places.
8:24 Wendy Zukerman? And so I guess now the movement is saying we're killing too much in the milk.
8:31 Speaker 04 Right. Perhaps it's overkill.
8:32 Wendy Zukerman? Mm-hmm, overkill.
8:34 Speaker 04 Like, a big argument is that we're getting rid of microbes that actually like would make our guts stronger if they hung around.
8:41 Wendy Zukerman? Right. We're getting rid of the bad microbes and the good.
8:45 Speaker 04 And that's where I want to start, with this argument about the microbiome. And so to find out if that is true. I called up this guy in the dairy capital of the United States.
8:58 Speaker 07 My name is John Lucy. I'm a professor in the Food Science Department here at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. And I'm also the director of our Center for Dairy Research.
9:08 Speaker 04 And that is not all. John is from Ireland and also.
9:13 Speaker 07 I grew up on a farm too, so dairy farm as well. So, and I also worked for a couple of years in New Zealand. Another dairy country.
9:21 Speaker 04 So Wendy, I brought you the Dairy King.
9:24 Wendy Zukerman? Yeah, this is perfect. It's perfect.
9:26 Speaker 04 And so I asked John about this argument that raw milk is good for your gut. That it's kind of a probiotic, basically.
9:32 Wendy Zukerman? Yeah.
9:34 Speaker 04 And so John told me out of the gate that there is a really good reason to be skeptical of this. And it comes down to the fact that generally, if you've got a healthy cow, the milk doesn't pop out of the teat chock full of bacteria.
9:50 Speaker 07 There's very little bugs, of any description, good, bad, or indifferent, in milk. That's, that's where the science is right now is not that there's a really important, good bacteria flora in the raw milk. That's just, that's just not where we're at right now. That just the science isn't supportive of that.
10:08 Wendy Zukerman? That's interesting, though, because it definitely suggests that this raw milk in front of me isn't that dangerous, right?
10:15 Speaker 04 We're gonna get into the details of that later.
10:17 Wendy Zukerman? Okay.
10:18 Speaker 04 But like, basically, the scientists tend to agree that when it, when it comes out initially, like, it doesn't really have a bunch of bacteria in it. And this actually makes intuitive sense, because if you think about like the dairy that we eat, that we know has good probiotic stuff in it, like yogurt, that stuff is fermented, which means that you've added that bacteria to it.
10:39 Wendy Zukerman? Of course, you're thinking about yogurt, kefir, things like that.
10:43 Speaker 04 Yeah. And, and even if there were like a tiny bit of, of good gut bugs for the microbiome.
10:50 Wendy Zukerman? Yeah.
10:50 Speaker 04 It wouldn't be there in the amount that it would need to be in order to actually do anything inside your gut.
10:56 Wendy Zukerman? Yeah.
10:56 Speaker 04 Because for a probiotic to work, scientists generally think that like, it has to have a lot of these bugs. Here is John on that.
11:05 Speaker 07 So if you like buy a probiotic supplement and you look at the fine print, they'll say it contains per gram, millions and billions and whatever of bugs. And because numbers are important for these benefits. It's not like, because your own gut microbiome is in the bazillions, you know? It's off the chart.
11:24 Wendy Zukerman? Yeah, the analogy that I always hear from researchers talking about the microbiome is that if you imagine your gut like a rainforest.
11:34 Speaker 04 Mm hmm.
11:35 Wendy Zukerman? And then you drink some milk and say, it's like a pigeon comes in to the rainforest. It's not gonna, it's not gonna change things. It's not gonna flourish.
11:48 Speaker 04 Right, right.
11:49 Wendy Zukerman? That space is taken, right?
11:52 Speaker 04 Well, exactly. So you can't just like sprinkle in a few things and expect to like fix your, your [BLEEP].
11:58 Wendy Zukerman? Literally.
11:58 Speaker 04 Literally.
11:59 Wendy Zukerman? Right.
12:00 Speaker 04 So John actually told me that to do the kind of thing that people are claiming that the milk could do.
12:06 Speaker 07 The milk would need a million per gram of bugs. And if the milk had a million per gram of any bugs, it would already start to be sour.
12:15 Speaker 04 Oh, of anything?
12:18 Speaker 07 Anything.
12:19 Speaker 04 So to me, this, this is what makes the microbiome claim fall pretty flat. Like, it does not make me wanna go running to the local farm for a warm frothy glass fresh from the udder.
12:36 Wendy Zukerman? All right. So the next claim let's look up is this idea that it can prevent allergies and asthma.
12:44 Speaker 04 Yes.
12:44 Wendy Zukerman? Anything to this?
12:45 Speaker 04 This one, Wendy, is like a lot more interesting, actually.
12:49 Wendy Zukerman? Ooh.
12:50 Speaker 04 This is the one that made me go, hmm.
12:56 Wendy Zukerman? All right.
12:56 Speaker 04 Can you hear the intrigue?
12:58 Wendy Zukerman? Get it, five?
12:59 Speaker 04 Yeah, yes. This is a big one that people say, right? They say that if you give kids raw milk, it can help prevent allergy, it can help prevent asthma. And actually, if raw milk could do this, it would actually be a pretty big deal. Because these conditions, asthma and allergies, they're super common in kids. I talked about this with Professor Christine Saruji. She's a pediatric allergist and immunologist who's also at the University of Wisconsin. And she says asthma can be really serious.
13:28 Speaker 06 It is the number one reason for admission to the hospital for a child. Asthma, asthma and [BLEEP].
13:35 Speaker 04 Really, the number one reason?
13:37 Speaker 06 Exactly. And so if you can prevent it in the first place from developing, that's game changing.
13:44 Wendy Zukerman? Yeah, and we've seen a rise in allergies and asthma in kids, right?
13:49 Speaker 04 Yes, and that's what she pointed out, too, is that like, in a lot of countries, these numbers are going up. So this all is connected to raw milk because a couple of decades ago, we started getting studies relating to asthma and allergies in this particular group, kids who live on farms.
14:06 Wendy Zukerman? Mm-hmm.
14:06 Speaker 04 So what these studies would do is that a lot of times there were these big surveys coming out of Europe, and they would look at thousands of kids comparing the health of the farm kids, medical conditions they had, to kids who didn't live on the farm. And what they found was...
14:21 Wendy Zukerman? Really striking epidemiologic evidence that the children, the growing up on farms, are really protected from developing allergic diseases. Some people say the farm effect.
14:35 Speaker 04 One study out of Austria found that about 1% of the farm kids had asthma compared to about 4% of kids who didn't live on the farm. You know, a study out of Germany found that just over 3% of farm kids had asthma compared to more than 6% of non-farm kids.
14:48 Wendy Zukerman? Yeah.
14:49 Speaker 04 It's more than allergies and asthma, it's like, skin conditions, stuff like eczema, these histamine things, yeah.
14:54 Wendy Zukerman? Yeah.
14:54 Speaker 04 And Christine told me this finding, it's been borne out in the US as well.
14:59 Wendy Zukerman? I feel like this story of kids on farms having low allergies, it's sort of, I feel like the science has known this for a while, but it's had in the past been attributed to the hygiene hypothesis, and that maybe these kids on farms are exposed to more dirt, and that's really good for them, and lowering their risk of getting these illnesses, is now the thought moving, maybe it's because they're drinking raw milk?
15:30 Speaker 04 You have entered the ring on this debate, Wendy.
15:34 Wendy Zukerman? So, do you want to walk me through, so with the hygiene hypothesis, let's bing, bing, bing, bing, bing, so... Okay, so what is the up-to-date thinking on that?
15:45 Speaker 04 The up-to-date thinking is that, yes, like, these exposures to things on the farm, to like, dust, to dander, all of these things that challenge your immune system at a really young age and sort of teach your immune system, like, what's out in the world, and basically strengthens it so that, like, when it encounters that stuff later, you don't have a big allergic reaction to it. The idea is still that that's important. But, at the same time, some scientists have also looked closer and started to think that maybe also the milk that these farm kids are drinking is at play.
16:21 Wendy Zukerman? Okay.
16:22 Speaker 04 And some of these, particularly some of these researchers out of Europe started thinking this because they looked at these, they did these big observational studies of a lot of kids, and they tried to look at kids who were, in some cases, not living on the farm, but who were drinking raw milk. And they tried to control for some of those other exposures on the farm. And they have started to say, "We think that there is something going on with the milk." Like, we don't, we think that the hygiene hypothesis is part of this, but we also think that the milk is at play.
16:54 Wendy Zukerman? This will just show my ignorance. Living on a farm, growing up on a farm, these kids aren't drinking raw milk? I feel like we're making some assumptions here. I'm guessing the researchers actually asked these families.
17:06 Speaker 04 Wendy, you're such a good student of the challenges of this research. How did you know?
17:12 Wendy Zukerman? Wait, is this an actual question?
17:14 Speaker 04 Yeah, yeah, it is. So, it is not always clear that the stuff that the kids are drinking on the farm is strictly raw milk. Because some of the time, even if kids are drinking milk from the farm, it's getting boiled, it's getting treated some kind of way. And the studies don't always check for that. And then, on top of that, some of these studies coming out of Europe are comparing this farm milk to milk that has gone way beyond. Sort of standard pasteurization. So this is stuff that like has been heated up way higher to a way higher temperature. And that kind of milk is more common in Europe. It's actually like the milk that you get that you don't have to put in the fridge, like the shelf-stable stuff.
17:58 Wendy Zukerman? Oh, like the crap you get on a plane?
18:01 Speaker 04 Right, like sterilized.
18:03 Wendy Zukerman? That's sitting in a hotel room in a little box, that sort of stuff.
18:07 Speaker 04 Exactly, that can just sit on the shelf for three months or whatever without being refrigerated.
18:12 Wendy Zukerman? Oh, so you compare it to that, which is seriously processed milk?
18:17 Speaker 04 Right. And so online, this is what a lot of people seem to get wrong about these studies. You know, they're assuming that like farm milk is raw milk. But if you actually read the nitty-gritty papers, you see sometimes that's not true. And sometimes what they're looking at is something else, Wendy, called quote minimally-processed milk. You want to know what that is?
18:37 Wendy Zukerman? Yeah, minimally-processed milk, what's that?
18:39 Speaker 04 So that is pasteurized milk.
18:42 Wendy Zukerman? That's, that's science versus touch flight, getting into the papers, working out what all the definitions are.
18:48 Speaker 04 That's right, we love a definition.
18:50 Wendy Zukerman? That's why we're here.
18:52 Speaker 04 And so I will say, despite all that, scientists like Christine, they are not like driving a nail through the coffin of this claim that raw milk might do something to help reduce allergies.
19:05 Wendy Zukerman? Hmm, so when she looks at all this complexity, she's like, I'm not crying over spilt milk.
19:13 Speaker 04 Correct.
19:14 Wendy Zukerman? She doesn't think the science is spoiled.
19:18 Speaker 04 She thinks we shouldn't be lapping up the science out of Europe and using it to bolster claims that raw milk is good for you.
19:28 Wendy Zukerman? But she doesn't think we're ready for a milk shakeup and that we should all be drinking raw milk right now.
19:37 Speaker 04 She does not think that.
19:41 Wendy Zukerman? So we've done our puns. What are, where do we go from here then?
19:45 Speaker 04 Well, I'm not gonna leave you with just that.
19:47 Wendy Zukerman? Okay.
19:47 Speaker 04 Okay. Because.
19:49 Wendy Zukerman? It would behoove you to tell me more.
19:52 Speaker 04 Um, I can.
19:54 Wendy Zukerman? Sorry, sorry, sorry.
19:55 Speaker 04 I can squeeze out a few more drops of science.
19:59 Speaker 04 Uh, just.
20:02 Speaker 04 Okay, okay.
20:03 Wendy Zukerman? We've really milked this for all it's worth.
20:05 Speaker 04 Oh, my God. I'm gonna put my dipper back into the pail, Wendy, and pull out more science for you. Okay. So Christine actually was part of a study that I did think does some work here to help us parse out how big of a deal raw milk might be. Like, if there's a signal, how much might that matter? Compared to like the other stuff people are exposed to on the farm, right? And so Christine is based in Wisconsin, and she works with a lot of people. She, she studies a lot of different families who live on farms. And what she did is some research into these two particular groups in the US. The Amish and the Old Order Mennonites. Are you familiar?
20:47 Wendy Zukerman? Um, yeah, I've been to Pennsylvania, intercourse. Big Amish community there. My parents laughed a lot at the name. I didn't understand what was funny. I do now. Um, tell me more.
21:00 Speaker 04 So, yes, so the Amish and the Old Order Mennonites are similar in a lot of ways. They often have big families. They live these like sort of more traditional farming lifestyles, not big on technology a lot of the time.
21:10 Wendy Zukerman? Yeah.
21:11 Speaker 04 And they tend to drink raw milk.
21:14 Wendy Zukerman? Okay, great.
21:16 Speaker 04 And farm from the farm.
21:17 Wendy Zukerman? Yes, great.
21:17 Speaker 04 Raw milk.
21:19 Wendy Zukerman? Perfect, yes, yes.
21:20 Speaker 04 But these two groups are different in one important way. So the Amish often don't use any electricity at all. And the Mennonites, some of them do have electricity. So they tend to sometimes use mechanized processes for things.
21:33 Wendy Zukerman? Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.
21:34 Speaker 04 So Christine's team, what they did is that they surveyed a bunch of families in these two groups. They looked at the rates of asthma, the rates of allergy, and they found.
21:44 Speaker 06 The Amish community is like super protected. Like, they had decreased allergic diseases across the board compared to the Old Order Mennonites.
21:57 Speaker 04 This might suggest that what matters here is that they're doing all this stuff by hand with the animals.
22:04 Wendy Zukerman? Hmm.
22:05 Speaker 04 So that animal contact is what's important. So what you see in like an Amish family, and I'm speaking generally here, right? Is that people are in the barn, you know? They're like one-on-one, they're milking the cows by hand, they're in the cow shed.
22:21 Wendy Zukerman? Hmm. It's not about drinking the raw milk, it's about all that time with the animals.
22:28 Speaker 04 That is a suggestion that the time with the animals could be more important.
22:34 Wendy Zukerman? Hmm, which is back to the hygiene hypothesis. That's bing, bing, bing.
22:37 Speaker 04 Exactly.
22:38 Wendy Zukerman? Hygiene hypothesis.
22:39 Speaker 04 Bing, bing, bing. Yes. Yes. Another scientist told me that in Amish households, a lot of times it's the women who are doing the milking, so they're in the barns a lot, including when they're pregnant, maybe including when they have really small babies.
22:49 Wendy Zukerman? Hmm.
22:50 Speaker 04 You know, and that the kids are involved. And so there's like just a lot of exposure one-on-one with animals that if you have like a mechanical milking setup, or like a more mechanized farm, you're on the tractors, all this stuff, you're just like not up in it with the animals nearly as much.
23:07 Wendy Zukerman? Got it.
23:08 Speaker 04 And the thinking is that that might be, we don't know for sure, but that might be the bigger difference maker here.
23:13 Wendy Zukerman? Hmm.
23:14 Speaker 04 So like even away from the Amish and the Mennonites, just sort of bigger picture, you know, Christine's
23:19 Wendy Zukerman? Yeah.
23:20 Speaker 04 group, they study a lot of farming families in Wisconsin, and they will ask them.
23:23 Speaker 06 You know, is the child going into the barn? And if so, at what age? I mean, that makes a difference in getting exposed to that barn environment and the stable, like that is another protective signal.
23:39 Speaker 04 At what age is it most beneficial for the kid to be in the barn?
23:42 Speaker 06 Yeah, I mean, it's a good question. The data from the epidemiologic studies strongly suggests that
23:50 Speaker 06 This needs to happen early in life. And the European studies have suggested that even begins in utero.
24:02 Wendy Zukerman? Uh huh. So actually, what we need to be doing is taking our kids to the farm. Or going to farms when pregnant to reduce the risk of allergies and asthma. That's where we're at?
24:16 Speaker 04 Yeah, which is sort of a little bit of an annoying answer, right? Like, because not everybody has access to that kind of thing. But the other thing Christine told me is that, like, get a pet, get a dog. Like, that also is a good way for your kid to be exposed to this type of stuff early in life.
24:35 Wendy Zukerman? So where we're at with the research at the moment, this raw milk in front of me, not packed with good bacteria and probably not going to be the thing to help me with my allergies or reduce your kid's chance of having eczema, allergies and asthma in the future. Is that where we're at?
25:01 Speaker 04 I think that's right. You know, it's possible there's some kind of link with allergies and asthma. Not really a slam dunk. Okay. How are you feeling about the idea of taking a big old gulp of that?
25:16 Wendy Zukerman? I mean, less interested than when we started, I've got to say. But I'm also less worried about it because John said there's probably not that many bad bugs in here. But is that...
25:30 Speaker 04 Uh huh.
25:31 Wendy Zukerman? Ah, ah.
25:35 Speaker 04 I'm gonna have to stop you right there.
25:37 Wendy Zukerman? Okay.
25:39 Speaker 04 Let's talk about that after the break.
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27:25 Wendy Zukerman? All right, welcome back. I'm here with Blythe. We are suckling at the teat of raw milk research.
27:30 Speaker 04 Absolutely, yes, we are.
27:32 Wendy Zukerman? Okay, so now we are on to the risks. How dangerous is this glass of milk in front of me? Because I am getting thirsty, Blythe.
27:41 Speaker 04 Oh, no. My time is running out.
27:43 Wendy Zukerman? I'm parched. I'm parched.
27:45 Speaker 04 Right, okay, let me tell you. Even though, like John said, the milk doesn't start out with a bunch of bugs in it, if the cow is healthy, of course, sometimes the cow is not healthy and gnarly stuff can get into the milk that way. So actually, astute listeners of the show will remember from our bird flu episode that cows can get bird flu and that can get into their milk.
28:07 Wendy Zukerman? Yes. That's right.
28:08 Speaker 04 But even if the cow is healthy, you have something else to worry about. Because the other big concern is that even if the milk comes out okay, it can get contaminated afterward. Bugs can get in. Because cows are on farms, and the milk comes out of their udders, which are just kind of like flopping around under their bodies.
28:28 Wendy Zukerman? Hmm, it's also somewhat close to their butthole, right? I guess.
28:32 Speaker 04 Yes, near the poop chute.
28:34 Wendy Zukerman? Yes.
28:35 Speaker 04 So they can come into contact with all sorts of stuff. And I dug into this with John Lucy, who's the first scientist that we heard from.
28:41 Speaker 07 You know, I grew up in a farm. We do the best we can. But you try and keep it as clean as you can. But to think that the ground or the soil or the bedding that the animal is laying down in is sterile is just fantasy. And, and the problem is the dairy farms are just not a sterile environment.
28:58 Speaker 04 Right, you can't, the cow's not in a bubble.
29:00 Speaker 07 Cow's not in a bubble, the soil is not in a bubble, the feed is not the bubble.
29:04 Wendy Zukerman? That's fascinating. So the, so it comes out, let's say, close to sterile. But as soon as it's out, then it's exposed to all of these other things. And that stuff that can then infect the milk, that tends to be the bad bacteria. Is that right?
29:26 Speaker 04 Yes, exactly. Like, that's what, that's what we see. It's a dirt, it's a dirty environment because there's dirt, you know? And actually, one thing that John told me that was also kind of interesting is that if this bacteria gets on the teat of the cow somehow, sometimes it just like hangs out there.
29:45 Speaker 07 We all see these hospital shows, and we see the doctor about to go into the surgery, and he's washing his hands. And it's not a five-second job. It's like scrubbing of the hands, scrubbing, scrubbing, scrubbing. Why? Because on the hands, there can be bacteria, and it can form also actually biofilms on the hands and in the environment. And that means it's harder to remove than just a simple little wash-off. The same can be true on the outside of these, uh, other of the teats that the cow has. They can actually be permanent bacteria living on the outside of it that are very hard to remove. And remember, this is a sensitive area for the cow too. So you can't spend five minutes like the doctor scrubbing.
30:28 Speaker 04 And the things we're worried about here are stuff like Salmonella, E. coli, this thing called Campylobacter. And in particular, I want to zoom in on one bacteria, Listeria. So there's a bunch of different types of Listeria, but one of them in particular can make us pretty sick. And it can cause gross stuff like diarrhea and nausea. But it's actually especially dangerous to people with compromised immune systems. And if you're pregnant, it can kill the baby. And Listeria is kind of all over the farm. You can find it in the soil, you can find it in the cows a lot of the time, at least in their crap. Here's John again.
31:09 Speaker 07 I'll give you just an example. One of my colleagues here at the University of Wisconsin did a study of a farm here in Wisconsin. And she literally went out and sampled poop from these animals and cows. 90% of the animals were carrying Listeria monasatagix.
31:28 Wendy Zukerman? So that's in their poo, though. So then the question is, how often is that Listeria, any of these scary bugs going from the farm to the milk, right?
31:43 Speaker 04 Right.
31:43 Wendy Zukerman? That's the question.
31:44 Speaker 04 That is the question. That is a question. How often is this grotty stuff actually getting into the milk?
31:49 Wendy Zukerman? Yes, yes.
31:50 Speaker 04 And so one way that scientists try to figure this out is that they look at the milk at the dairy, because it comes out of the cows, it all gets collected up before it gets pasteurized.
31:59 Wendy Zukerman? Mm-hmm, mm-hmm, mm-hmm.
32:00 Speaker 04 Right?
32:00 Wendy Zukerman? Yeah.
32:01 Speaker 04 And what happens is it gets collected in this big tank called a bulk tank.
32:04 Wendy Zukerman? Okay.
32:05 Speaker 04 And scientists, what they'll do is they'll take samples from a bunch of tanks and they'll actually analyze them to see what's in there.
32:11 Speaker 07 I would say, you know, if you look at the percentage of the different pathogens, sometimes you see 5% of them are contaminated with Listeria. 5% are contaminated, roughly. I'm giving broad ranges with Campylobacter, E. coli, et cetera.
32:27 Speaker 04 Yeah, so when they look at these samples, about 1 in 20 of them have one of these nasty bacteria inside them.
32:35 Speaker 07 But if you amalgamate all of them and you ask a slightly different question, John, how many bulk tanks in many of these surveys have at least one pathogen?
32:44 Speaker 04 Mm-hmm.
32:44 Speaker 07 Sometimes it's as high as 20 to 30% have one pathogen present in the bulk tank.
32:50 Wendy Zukerman? Whoa. Whoa, there's no way I'm drinking that.
32:58 Speaker 04 You don't like those odds?
32:59 Wendy Zukerman? No way. At the upper estimate of 30% in the bulk tanks? Whoa, and why would you give that to your pets?
33:11 Speaker 04 Or your kid, Wendy.
33:12 Wendy Zukerman? Right.
33:13 Speaker 04 So, I mean, the bottom line is like, it's pretty common to find creepy stuff in the milk. Like, John talked about those numbers. I did, I found a study out of the UK that looked at raw milk that was actually for sale, and it found that 40% of the samples they looked at had some kind of problem with a risky pathogen.
33:31 Wendy Zukerman? But then 40, right, but then not everyone who will then drink these microbes in their raw milk will then get sick, right? Some of them, their immune system will deal with it. So how often are people getting sick from drinking raw milk?
33:51 Speaker 04 Yeah, I mean, it's a great question, you know, because like, look, some people drink raw milk and they are totally fine, you know? It's not like they're drinking arsenic, right? But there have definitely been some disease outbreaks. So this one CDC study looked at about a 20-year period and found more than 200 outbreaks tied to raw milk in the US, getting about 2,600 people sick. Just this year, there have been a couple of outbreaks in the headlines. There was an E. coli outbreak that was linked to this raw cheese. In Idaho, almost 60 people got sick from raw milk, a bunch of them from Campylobacter.
34:30 Speaker 04 And look, when you look at the raw numbers, Wendy.
34:33 Wendy Zukerman? Yes, nice.
34:34 Speaker 04 People are more likely to get sick from other foods. Stuff like seafood, maybe leafy vegetables like spinach. That is true.
34:42 Wendy Zukerman? Uh huh.
34:43 Speaker 04 But with raw milk, what freaks out scientists like John is that a lot of the time with these outbreaks, the people who get sick are kids.
34:50 Speaker 07 Children end up being the most largest percentage of hospitalizations for raw milk outbreaks. They don't have a choice. They don't know anything. They're even, mom and dad are feeding it to their kids. Those, those are the ones that I get most concerned about. And depending on which study you take, sometimes it's like a quarter or more. Or sometimes under the age of three and five years old. Like, people are thinking, oh, I gotta expose my kids to pathogens? Are you serious? They're gonna end up in hospital? That's the problem.
35:23 Speaker 04 And earlier this year, this is actually how raw milk kind of got on my radar. Because there was a listeria case. So this woman in New Mexico apparently drank raw milk during her pregnancy. And she lost her baby.
35:40 Wendy Zukerman? Because of a listeria infection? She had a listeria infection?
35:43 Speaker 04 Yeah.
35:44 Wendy Zukerman? Oh, God.
35:45 Speaker 04 So, like, not common from what we can tell. But these outbreaks, when they happen, people can die.
35:54 Wendy Zukerman? I mean, this is exactly why it's so devastating, right? I mean, I don't know what was happening for this woman during her pregnancy. But more broadly, you see these trends and these influencers and people saying, damn, the establishment, what do they know? Raw milk is the answer. Pasteurization is a farce. And then this is the ultimate conclusion. Of course it is. Then people thinking, oh, I've got to be drinking raw milk to help my unborn child and reduce the chance of them getting allergies. And then they're missing the bigger picture that is listeria.
36:28 Speaker 04 Right. And the stakes are just really high if. Because it's not common for those horrible, horrible things to happen. But when they do.
36:37 Wendy Zukerman? It's awful.
36:38 Speaker 04 They're awful.
36:39 Wendy Zukerman? Yeah.
36:39 Speaker 04 Yeah.
36:40 Wendy Zukerman? I just wanna, just, just wanna spill that milk right in front of me. But this carpet, I don't, I don't wanna have to clean that. So, I mean, it's really feeling like this raw milk. This, this raw milk's not coming back from that, right?
36:54 Speaker 04 No, I don't think so. Um, and I mean, you know, just to say, like, some raw milk producers, of course, they'll say, like, listen, we try to avoid this, we keep things clean, we try to test for bacteria. And also, like, there are instances where stuff sneaks into pasteurized milk and makes you sick.
37:11 Wendy Zukerman? Right.
37:12 Speaker 04 But one study found that when people were getting sick from contaminated dairy, ninety-six percent of the time, it was the raw stuff.
37:20 Wendy Zukerman? Wow, okay, yeah, yeah, yeah. Ninety-six percent of the time.
37:26 Speaker 04 Which is why we pasteurize it. Pasteurization works really well to kill all the stuff that we are talking about.
37:33 Wendy Zukerman? You had it fast, in twenty twenty-six.
37:36 Speaker 04 A hundred plus years later.
37:38 Wendy Zukerman? Pasteurization works really well.
37:40 Speaker 04 Yeah, yeah, I mean, listen, John was like, it's good that we've been doing it so long, you know? Like, it's allowed us to, like, test it and refine it and figure out systems for it, figure out how to do it at scale.
37:56 Speaker 07 And all of that has been put in place over a hundred years to show that pasteurized milk is one of the safest food products on the planet.
38:04 Speaker 04 So I asked him, is, is there a way to have safe raw milk? You're shaking your head.
38:09 Speaker 07 No, no, um, it's, it's a foolish and risky thing to do.
38:15 Wendy Zukerman? I don't wanna be called foolish by John.
38:18 Speaker 04 So, what are you gonna do with that milk?
38:23 Wendy Zukerman? I mean, there's this annoying neighborhood cat.
38:32 Speaker 04 Wendy, no.
38:33 Wendy Zukerman? That might be thirsty and pisses on my security gate.
38:42 Speaker 04 If you even, don't do it.
38:46 Wendy Zukerman? It says for pets, pet milk only.
38:49 Speaker 04 Oh, my God, Wendy.
38:53 Speaker 04 Throw it out, put it down the drain.
38:55 Wendy Zukerman? Tell us in the comments, what should I do with the raw milk?
39:01 Speaker 04 Yeah, I think they'll tell you exactly where you can put it, Wendy.
39:11 Wendy Zukerman? That's Science vs.
39:18 Wendy Zukerman? I'm not gonna give it to the cat. Don't call Peter.
39:21 Speaker 04 I know, you would never.
39:22 Wendy Zukerman? Don't go, put down the phone, don't call Peter, it's fine. Um, how many citations are in this week's episode, Blythe?
39:32 Speaker 04 There are 72 citations in this week's episode.
39:37 Wendy Zukerman? And if people want to see them, where should they go?
39:39 Speaker 04 They can find a link to our transcript in our show notes.
39:44 Wendy Zukerman? Thank you, Blythe. Like I mentioned, we just started a YouTube channel, so you can come and find us at Science VS Podcast. That's where we are. There's gonna be a link in the show notes. And while you are looking at the transcript, you can click on it and find us there, see some of our video episodes. And Blythe, like I said at the start of the show, we are taking a short break.
40:09 Speaker 04 Yeah, just a few weeks. We'll be back.
40:11 Wendy Zukerman? In a few weeks, all right. Bye.
40:14 Speaker 04 Bye.
40:23 Wendy Zukerman? This episode was produced by Blythe Terrell with help from Akety Foster-Keeys, Meryl Horn, Rose Rimler, Michelle Dang, and me, Wendy Zukerman. We're edited by Blythe Terrell. I'm the executive producer. Fact checking by Diane Kelly. Research help from Erica Akiko Howard. Mix and sound design by Bobby Lord. Music written by Boomi Hidaka, Peter Leonard, Emma Munga, and Bobby Lord. Thanks to the researchers we spoke to for this episode, including Professor Marcus Egger. Thank you so much for your time. Thanks to Elsievia for sharing your raw milk book with us. Thanks to the Zukerman family, Joseph Lavelle Wilson and Jack Weinstein. I'm Wendy Zukerman. Back to you next time.
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