Raw Milk: Secret Superfood??

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. Science Vs is a Spotify Studios Original. Listen for free on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. Follow us and tap the bell for episode notifications. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Wendy Zukerman?

  Hi, I'm Wendy Zukerman and this is Science Versus.

• 0:05Wendy 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.

• 0:36Wendy Zukerman?

  I'm on an illegal mission today.

• 0:41Wendy 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.

• 0:59Wendy Zukerman?

  Here I go. I'm going into the store. There's plants out the front.

• 1:06Wendy 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.

• 1:46Wendy Zukerman?

  Raw milk.

• 1:49Wendy Zukerman?

  I've got it. I've got it. I've got it.

• 1:52Wendy Zukerman?

  Hello. Hi. But should I drink it? Thank you. The card? Yes, please. Sure.

• 1:59Wendy 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.

• 2:11Speaker 01

  Raw milk, raw dairy in your diet is definitely going to improve your health. Raw milk protects kids from asthma, eczema, and allergies.

• 2:20Speaker 02

  It is packed full of gut-healthy bacteria.

• 2:23Speaker 03

  You heal your microbiome.

• 2:25Speaker 01

  God intended milk to be raw. If he didn't, he would have put a pasteurization chamber on the udder of a cow.

• 2:33Wendy 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?

• 3:16Speaker 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.

• 3:30Speaker 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.

• 3:37Wendy 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?

• 3:51Wendy Zukerman?

  Today on the show, we're gonna squeeze the teat of science until we've filled our bucket with facts around raw milk.

• 4:01Wendy Zukerman?

  Because, you know, there's a lot of...

• 4:03Speaker 01

  God intended milk to be raw.

• 4:06Wendy Zukerman?

  And then there's science.

• 4:10Wendy Zukerman?

  Science vs. Raw Milk is coming up just after the break.

• 4:20Speaker 06

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• 4:27Speaker 06

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• 5:12Speaker 06

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• 5:22Speaker 06

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• 5:39Wendy Zukerman?

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• 5:54Wendy Zukerman?

  Welcome back. Today, we are guzzling down the science of raw milk and I'm here with our editor, Blythe Terrell. Hello, Blythe.

• 6:02Speaker 04

  Hello, Wendy.

• 6:03Wendy Zukerman?

  So I've got it in my hot little hands.

• 6:05Speaker 04

  Ooh, I'm so nervous.

• 6:09Wendy Zukerman?

  It's, I should say, so it says pet milk only.

• 6:13Speaker 04

  Mmm.

• 6:14Wendy Zukerman?

  And what's funny about the health food store that I bought it at is,

• 6:19Wendy 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.

• 6:42Wendy Zukerman?

  And that's it.

• 6:43Speaker 04

  Wow, that is cheeky.

• 6:46Wendy Zukerman?

  Yeah, okay, so let's open, let's open this raw milk.

• 6:50Speaker 04

  Once it's open, it's open, Wendy. Then it really becomes like Chekhov's raw milk.

• 6:53Wendy Zukerman?

  Yeah, okay, here we go. There it is.

• 6:56Speaker 04

  So you're just gonna put it there next to you, right? You're not having it now?

• 6:59Wendy Zukerman?

  Nope. The question is, Blad, am I gonna drink this?

• 7:03Speaker 04

  It sounds like maybe you need some science before you can make that call.

• 7:06Wendy 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?

• 7:18Speaker 04

  Okay, so the key difference is that it has not been pasteurized.

• 7:24Wendy Zukerman?

  Mm-hmm.

• 7:25Speaker 04

  Right? And I can tell you a little bit about pasteurization.

• 7:29Wendy Zukerman?

  Thank you.

• 7:30Speaker 04

  So what we do when we pasteurize milk is basically we heat it up usually to 161 degrees Fahrenheit, 72 degrees Celsius.

• 7:40Wendy Zukerman?

  Thank you.

• 7:41Speaker 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.

• 7:52Wendy Zukerman?

  Okay.

• 7:53Speaker 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.

• 8:04Wendy Zukerman?

  Oh.

• 8:05Speaker 04

  And like it would come out in their milk and people would drink the milk and get TB.

• 8:08Wendy 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.

• 8:19Speaker 04

  Kills the TB.

• 8:20Wendy Zukerman?

  Yes.

• 8:20Speaker 04

  It becomes the thing we do in the US, right? And in a lot of other places.

• 8:24Wendy Zukerman?

  And so I guess now the movement is saying we're killing too much in the milk.

• 8:31Speaker 04

  Right. Perhaps it's overkill.

• 8:32Wendy Zukerman?

  Mm-hmm, overkill.

• 8:34Speaker 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.

• 8:41Wendy Zukerman?

  Right. We're getting rid of the bad microbes and the good.

• 8:45Speaker 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.

• 8:58Speaker 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.

• 9:08Speaker 04

  And that is not all. John is from Ireland and also.

• 9:13Speaker 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.

• 9:21Speaker 04

  So Wendy, I brought you the Dairy King.

• 9:24Wendy Zukerman?

  Yeah, this is perfect. It's perfect.

• 9:26Speaker 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.

• 9:32Wendy Zukerman?

  Yeah.

• 9:34Speaker 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.

• 9:50Speaker 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.

• 10:08Wendy Zukerman?

  That's interesting, though, because it definitely suggests that this raw milk in front of me isn't that dangerous, right?

• 10:15Speaker 04

  We're gonna get into the details of that later.

• 10:17Wendy Zukerman?

  Okay.

• 10:18Speaker 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.

• 10:39Wendy Zukerman?

  Of course, you're thinking about yogurt, kefir, things like that.

• 10:43Speaker 04

  Yeah. And, and even if there were like a tiny bit of, of good gut bugs for the microbiome.

• 10:50Wendy Zukerman?

  Yeah.

• 10:50Speaker 04

  It wouldn't be there in the amount that it would need to be in order to actually do anything inside your gut.

• 10:56Wendy Zukerman?

  Yeah.

• 10:56Speaker 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.

• 11:05Speaker 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.

• 11:24Wendy Zukerman?

  Yeah, the analogy that I always hear from researchers talking about the microbiome is that if you imagine your gut like a rainforest.

• 11:34Speaker 04

  Mm hmm.

• 11:35Wendy 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.

• 11:48Speaker 04

  Right, right.

• 11:49Wendy Zukerman?

  That space is taken, right?

• 11:52Speaker 04

  Well, exactly. So you can't just like sprinkle in a few things and expect to like fix your, your [BLEEP].

• 11:58Wendy Zukerman?

  Literally.

• 11:58Speaker 04

  Literally.

• 11:59Wendy Zukerman?

  Right.

• 12:00Speaker 04

  So John actually told me that to do the kind of thing that people are claiming that the milk could do.

• 12:06Speaker 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.

• 12:15Speaker 04

  Oh, of anything?

• 12:18Speaker 07

  Anything.

• 12:19Speaker 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.

• 12:36Wendy Zukerman?

  All right. So the next claim let's look up is this idea that it can prevent allergies and asthma.

• 12:44Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 12:44Wendy Zukerman?

  Anything to this?

• 12:45Speaker 04

  This one, Wendy, is like a lot more interesting, actually.

• 12:49Wendy Zukerman?

  Ooh.

• 12:50Speaker 04

  This is the one that made me go, hmm.

• 12:56Wendy Zukerman?

  All right.

• 12:56Speaker 04

  Can you hear the intrigue?

• 12:58Wendy Zukerman?

  Get it, five?

• 12:59Speaker 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.

• 13:28Speaker 06

  It is the number one reason for admission to the hospital for a child. Asthma, asthma and [BLEEP].

• 13:35Speaker 04

  Really, the number one reason?

• 13:37Speaker 06

  Exactly. And so if you can prevent it in the first place from developing, that's game changing.

• 13:44Wendy Zukerman?

  Yeah, and we've seen a rise in allergies and asthma in kids, right?

• 13:49Speaker 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.

• 14:06Wendy Zukerman?

  Mm-hmm.

• 14:06Speaker 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...

• 14:21Wendy 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.

• 14:35Speaker 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.

• 14:48Wendy Zukerman?

  Yeah.

• 14:49Speaker 04

  It's more than allergies and asthma, it's like, skin conditions, stuff like eczema, these histamine things, yeah.

• 14:54Wendy Zukerman?

  Yeah.

• 14:54Speaker 04

  And Christine told me this finding, it's been borne out in the US as well.

• 14:59Wendy 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?

• 15:30Speaker 04

  You have entered the ring on this debate, Wendy.

• 15:34Wendy 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?

• 15:45Speaker 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.

• 16:21Wendy Zukerman?

  Okay.

• 16:22Speaker 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.

• 16:54Wendy 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.

• 17:06Speaker 04

  Wendy, you're such a good student of the challenges of this research. How did you know?

• 17:12Wendy Zukerman?

  Wait, is this an actual question?

• 17:14Speaker 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.

• 17:58Wendy Zukerman?

  Oh, like the crap you get on a plane?

• 18:01Speaker 04

  Right, like sterilized.

• 18:03Wendy Zukerman?

  That's sitting in a hotel room in a little box, that sort of stuff.

• 18:07Speaker 04

  Exactly, that can just sit on the shelf for three months or whatever without being refrigerated.

• 18:12Wendy Zukerman?

  Oh, so you compare it to that, which is seriously processed milk?

• 18:17Speaker 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?

• 18:37Wendy Zukerman?

  Yeah, minimally-processed milk, what's that?

• 18:39Speaker 04

  So that is pasteurized milk.

• 18:42Wendy Zukerman?

  That's, that's science versus touch flight, getting into the papers, working out what all the definitions are.

• 18:48Speaker 04

  That's right, we love a definition.

• 18:50Wendy Zukerman?

  That's why we're here.

• 18:52Speaker 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.

• 19:05Wendy Zukerman?

  Hmm, so when she looks at all this complexity, she's like, I'm not crying over spilt milk.

• 19:13Speaker 04

  Correct.

• 19:14Wendy Zukerman?

  She doesn't think the science is spoiled.

• 19:18Speaker 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.

• 19:28Wendy Zukerman?

  But she doesn't think we're ready for a milk shakeup and that we should all be drinking raw milk right now.

• 19:37Speaker 04

  She does not think that.

• 19:41Wendy Zukerman?

  So we've done our puns. What are, where do we go from here then?

• 19:45Speaker 04

  Well, I'm not gonna leave you with just that.

• 19:47Wendy Zukerman?

  Okay.

• 19:47Speaker 04

  Okay. Because.

• 19:49Wendy Zukerman?

  It would behoove you to tell me more.

• 19:52Speaker 04

  Um, I can.

• 19:54Wendy Zukerman?

  Sorry, sorry, sorry.

• 19:55Speaker 04

  I can squeeze out a few more drops of science.

• 19:59Speaker 04

  Uh, just.

• 20:02Speaker 04

  Okay, okay.

• 20:03Wendy Zukerman?

  We've really milked this for all it's worth.

• 20:05Speaker 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?

• 20:47Wendy 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.

• 21:00Speaker 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.

• 21:10Wendy Zukerman?

  Yeah.

• 21:11Speaker 04

  And they tend to drink raw milk.

• 21:14Wendy Zukerman?

  Okay, great.

• 21:16Speaker 04

  And farm from the farm.

• 21:17Wendy Zukerman?

  Yes, great.

• 21:17Speaker 04

  Raw milk.

• 21:19Wendy Zukerman?

  Perfect, yes, yes.

• 21:20Speaker 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.

• 21:33Wendy Zukerman?

  Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.

• 21:34Speaker 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.

• 21:44Speaker 06

  The Amish community is like super protected. Like, they had decreased allergic diseases across the board compared to the Old Order Mennonites.

• 21:57Speaker 04

  This might suggest that what matters here is that they're doing all this stuff by hand with the animals.

• 22:04Wendy Zukerman?

  Hmm.

• 22:05Speaker 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.

• 22:21Wendy Zukerman?

  Hmm. It's not about drinking the raw milk, it's about all that time with the animals.

• 22:28Speaker 04

  That is a suggestion that the time with the animals could be more important.

• 22:34Wendy Zukerman?

  Hmm, which is back to the hygiene hypothesis. That's bing, bing, bing.

• 22:37Speaker 04

  Exactly.

• 22:38Wendy Zukerman?

  Hygiene hypothesis.

• 22:39Speaker 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.

• 22:49Wendy Zukerman?

  Hmm.

• 22:50Speaker 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.

• 23:07Wendy Zukerman?

  Got it.

• 23:08Speaker 04

  And the thinking is that that might be, we don't know for sure, but that might be the bigger difference maker here.

• 23:13Wendy Zukerman?

  Hmm.

• 23:14Speaker 04

  So like even away from the Amish and the Mennonites, just sort of bigger picture, you know, Christine's

• 23:19Wendy Zukerman?

  Yeah.

• 23:20Speaker 04

  group, they study a lot of farming families in Wisconsin, and they will ask them.

• 23:23Speaker 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.

• 23:39Speaker 04

  At what age is it most beneficial for the kid to be in the barn?

• 23:42Speaker 06

  Yeah, I mean, it's a good question. The data from the epidemiologic studies strongly suggests that

• 23:50Speaker 06

  This needs to happen early in life. And the European studies have suggested that even begins in utero.

• 24:02Wendy 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?

• 24:16Speaker 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.

• 24:35Wendy 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?

• 25:01Speaker 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?

• 25:16Wendy 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...

• 25:30Speaker 04

  Uh huh.

• 25:31Wendy Zukerman?

  Ah, ah.

• 25:35Speaker 04

  I'm gonna have to stop you right there.

• 25:37Wendy Zukerman?

  Okay.

• 25:39Speaker 04

  Let's talk about that after the break.

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• 26:52Speaker 02

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• 27:25Wendy Zukerman?

  All right, welcome back. I'm here with Blythe. We are suckling at the teat of raw milk research.

• 27:30Speaker 04

  Absolutely, yes, we are.

• 27:32Wendy 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.

• 27:41Speaker 04

  Oh, no. My time is running out.

• 27:43Wendy Zukerman?

  I'm parched. I'm parched.

• 27:45Speaker 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.

• 28:07Wendy Zukerman?

  Yes. That's right.

• 28:08Speaker 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.

• 28:28Wendy Zukerman?

  Hmm, it's also somewhat close to their butthole, right? I guess.

• 28:32Speaker 04

  Yes, near the poop chute.

• 28:34Wendy Zukerman?

  Yes.

• 28:35Speaker 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.

• 28:41Speaker 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.

• 28:58Speaker 04

  Right, you can't, the cow's not in a bubble.

• 29:00Speaker 07

  Cow's not in a bubble, the soil is not in a bubble, the feed is not the bubble.

• 29:04Wendy 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?

• 29:26Speaker 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.

• 29:45Speaker 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.

• 30:28Speaker 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.

• 31:09Speaker 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.

• 31:28Wendy 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?

• 31:43Speaker 04

  Right.

• 31:43Wendy Zukerman?

  That's the question.

• 31:44Speaker 04

  That is the question. That is a question. How often is this grotty stuff actually getting into the milk?

• 31:49Wendy Zukerman?

  Yes, yes.

• 31:50Speaker 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.

• 31:59Wendy Zukerman?

  Mm-hmm, mm-hmm, mm-hmm.

• 32:00Speaker 04

  Right?

• 32:00Wendy Zukerman?

  Yeah.

• 32:01Speaker 04

  And what happens is it gets collected in this big tank called a bulk tank.

• 32:04Wendy Zukerman?

  Okay.

• 32:05Speaker 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.

• 32:11Speaker 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.

• 32:27Speaker 04

  Yeah, so when they look at these samples, about 1 in 20 of them have one of these nasty bacteria inside them.

• 32:35Speaker 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?

• 32:44Speaker 04

  Mm-hmm.

• 32:44Speaker 07

  Sometimes it's as high as 20 to 30% have one pathogen present in the bulk tank.

• 32:50Wendy Zukerman?

  Whoa. Whoa, there's no way I'm drinking that.

• 32:58Speaker 04

  You don't like those odds?

• 32:59Wendy Zukerman?

  No way. At the upper estimate of 30% in the bulk tanks? Whoa, and why would you give that to your pets?

• 33:11Speaker 04

  Or your kid, Wendy.

• 33:12Wendy Zukerman?

  Right.

• 33:13Speaker 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.

• 33:31Wendy 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?

• 33:51Speaker 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.

• 34:30Speaker 04

  And look, when you look at the raw numbers, Wendy.

• 34:33Wendy Zukerman?

  Yes, nice.

• 34:34Speaker 04

  People are more likely to get sick from other foods. Stuff like seafood, maybe leafy vegetables like spinach. That is true.

• 34:42Wendy Zukerman?

  Uh huh.

• 34:43Speaker 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.

• 34:50Speaker 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.

• 35:23Speaker 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.

• 35:40Wendy Zukerman?

  Because of a listeria infection? She had a listeria infection?

• 35:43Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 35:44Wendy Zukerman?

  Oh, God.

• 35:45Speaker 04

  So, like, not common from what we can tell. But these outbreaks, when they happen, people can die.

• 35:54Wendy 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.

• 36:28Speaker 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.

• 36:37Wendy Zukerman?

  It's awful.

• 36:38Speaker 04

  They're awful.

• 36:39Wendy Zukerman?

  Yeah.

• 36:39Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 36:40Wendy 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?

• 36:54Speaker 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.

• 37:11Wendy Zukerman?

  Right.

• 37:12Speaker 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.

• 37:20Wendy Zukerman?

  Wow, okay, yeah, yeah, yeah. Ninety-six percent of the time.

• 37:26Speaker 04

  Which is why we pasteurize it. Pasteurization works really well to kill all the stuff that we are talking about.

• 37:33Wendy Zukerman?

  You had it fast, in twenty twenty-six.

• 37:36Speaker 04

  A hundred plus years later.

• 37:38Wendy Zukerman?

  Pasteurization works really well.

• 37:40Speaker 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.

• 37:56Speaker 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.

• 38:04Speaker 04

  So I asked him, is, is there a way to have safe raw milk? You're shaking your head.

• 38:09Speaker 07

  No, no, um, it's, it's a foolish and risky thing to do.

• 38:15Wendy Zukerman?

  I don't wanna be called foolish by John.

• 38:18Speaker 04

  So, what are you gonna do with that milk?

• 38:23Wendy Zukerman?

  I mean, there's this annoying neighborhood cat.

• 38:32Speaker 04

  Wendy, no.

• 38:33Wendy Zukerman?

  That might be thirsty and pisses on my security gate.

• 38:42Speaker 04

  If you even, don't do it.

• 38:46Wendy Zukerman?

  It says for pets, pet milk only.

• 38:49Speaker 04

  Oh, my God, Wendy.

• 38:53Speaker 04

  Throw it out, put it down the drain.

• 38:55Wendy Zukerman?

  Tell us in the comments, what should I do with the raw milk?

• 39:01Speaker 04

  Yeah, I think they'll tell you exactly where you can put it, Wendy.

• 39:11Wendy Zukerman?

  That's Science vs.

• 39:18Wendy Zukerman?

  I'm not gonna give it to the cat. Don't call Peter.

• 39:21Speaker 04

  I know, you would never.

• 39:22Wendy 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?

• 39:32Speaker 04

  There are 72 citations in this week's episode.

• 39:37Wendy Zukerman?

  And if people want to see them, where should they go?

• 39:39Speaker 04

  They can find a link to our transcript in our show notes.

• 39:44Wendy 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.

• 40:09Speaker 04

  Yeah, just a few weeks. We'll be back.

• 40:11Wendy Zukerman?

  In a few weeks, all right. Bye.

• 40:14Speaker 04

  Bye.

• 40:23Wendy 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.

• 41:04Speaker 02

  Whenever fall comes back around, it always feels like a fresh start. This year, I've been layering in some styles from the new Lululemon fall drop because the weather is shifting and I find I have to be ready for the entire day and not just one part of it. Lululemon's fall line has some really versatile transitional pieces. So I can just wake up, throw on a matching set, add a jacket or a fleece and head out, knowing that I'll feel comfortable enough to go wherever the day takes me. Check out the new fall arrivals in store and online now at lululemon.com.

• 41:34Speaker 05

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