Raw Milk: Secret Superfood??

0:00Hi, I'm Wendy Zukerman and this is Science Versus. 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 can also catch us on Instagram, TikTok. But now it's time for the episode. Let's jump in.

0:36I'm on an illegal mission today. Legal grey area would be more accurate, but for a cold open like this, we're going to say illegal. No, we're going to say grey area. There's no way that would get through fact check. The point is I'm doing something naughty. A couple of weeks ago, I went on a secret mission. Okay. Here I go. I'm going into the store. There's plants out the front. 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...

1:27It'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. Raw milk. I've got it, I've got it, I've got it. Okay. Hi. But should I drink it? Thank you. The cup? Yes, please. Sure. 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. Raw milk, raw dairy in your diet is definitely going to improve your health. Raw milk protects kids from asthma, eczema and allergies.

2:20It is packed full of gut-healthy bacteria. You heal your microbiome. God intended milk to be raw. If he didn't, he would have put a pasteurization chamber on the udder of a cow. Raw milk fandom has even hit the udder 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.

3:08I had to find it in the pet food section of the store. So why are people worried here? 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. 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. 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 going to die from having too much diarrhea? up. Today on the show, we're going to squeeze the teat of science until we've filled our bucket with facts around raw milk.

4:00Because, you know, there's a lot of... God intended milk to be raw. And then there's science. Science vs. Raw Milk is coming up just after the break.

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5:24Welcome back. Today we are guzzling down the science of raw milk, and I'm here with our editor, Blythe Terrell. Hello, Blythe. Hello, Wendy. So I've got it in my hot little hands. Ooh, I'm so nervous. Um, it's, I should say, so it says pet milk only. And what's funny about the health food store that I bought it at is, 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.

6:12And that's it. Wow, that is cheeky. Yeah. Okay, so let's open. Let's open this raw milk. Once it's open, it's open, Wendy. Then it really becomes like Chekhov's raw milk. Yeah. Okay, here we go. There it is. So you're just going to put it there next to you, right? You're not having it now. Nope. The question is, but am I going to drink this. It sounds like maybe you need some science before you can make that call. I believe so. So tell me, Blythe, let's start here. What is different about this raw milk compared to regular milk that you would buy at the store? Okay. So the key difference is that it has not been pasteurized, right?

6:56And I can tell you a little bit about pasteurization. Thank you. So what we do when we pasteurize milk is basically we heat it up usually to 161 degrees Fahrenheit, 72 degrees Celsius 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. Okay. 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. Oh. And like it would come out in their milk and people would drink the milk and get TB. Wow. Oh, I didn't realize TB. Okay.

7:42So they start pasteurizing the milk and it works. It kills the box. Kills the TB. Yes. It becomes the thing we do in the U.S., right? And in a lot of other places. And so I guess now the movement is saying we're killing too much in the mill. Right. Perhaps it's overkill. Mm-hmm. Overkill. Like, a big argument is that we're getting rid of microbes that actually, like, would make our guts stronger if they hung around. Right. We're getting rid of the bad microbes and the good. 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.

8:28My 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. And that is not all. John is from Ireland, and also... I grew up on a farm too, so a dairy farm as well. And I also worked for a couple of years in New Zealand, another dairy country. So Wendy, I brought you the Dairy King. Yeah, he's perfect. He's perfect. And so I asked John about this argument that raw milk is good for your gut, that it's kind of a probiotic, basically. And so John told me out of the gate that there is a really good reason to be skeptical of this.

9:09And 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. There's very little bugs of any description, good, bad, or indifferent, in milk. That's where the science is right now. It's not that there's a really important good bacteria flora in the raw milk. That's just not where we're at right now. Just the science isn't supportive about that. That's interesting, though, because it definitely suggests that this raw milk in front of me isn't that dangerous, right? We're going to get into the details of that later. Okay.

9:48But basically, the scientists tend to agree that when it comes out initially, 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. Of course. You're thinking about yogurt, kefir, things like that. Yeah. And even if there were like a tiny bit of good gut bugs for the microbiome, it wouldn't be there in the amount that it would need to be in order to actually do anything inside your gut.

10:26Yeah. 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. 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, off the chart. Yeah, the analogy that I always hear from researchers talking about the microbiome is that if you imagine your gut like a rainforest, and then you drink some milk and say, it's like a pigeon comes in to the rainforest.

11:12forest. It's not going to change things. It's not going to flourish. Right, right. That space is taken, right? Well, exactly. So you can't just like sprinkle in a few things and expect to like fix your shit. Literally. Literally. Right. So John actually told me that to do the kind of thing that people are claiming that the milk could do. 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. Oh. Of anything? Anything. So, to me, this is what makes the microbiome claim fall pretty flat. Like, it does not make me want to go running to the local farm for a warm, frothy glass fresh from the udder.

12:06All right. So the next claim let's look up is this idea that it can prevent allergies and asthma. Yes. Anything to this? This one, Wendy, is like a lot more interesting, actually. Ooh. This is the one that made me go, hmm. Hmm. Hmm. All right. Can you hear the intrigue? Hit it, Flav. 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 Surugi.

12:51She's a pediatric allergist and immunologist who's also at the University of Wisconsin. And she says asthma can be really serious. It is the number one reason for admission to the hospital for a child. Asthma and vision. Really? The number one reason? Exactly. And so if you can prevent it in the first place from developing, that's game-changing. Yeah, and we've seen a rise in allergies and asthma in kids, right? 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.

13:36So 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... There's really striking epidemiologic evidence that the children growing up on farms are really protected from developing allergic diseases. Some people say the farm effect. 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.

14:19Yeah. It's more than allergies and asthma. It's like skin conditions, stuff like eczema, these histamine things. Yeah. And Christine told me this finding. It's been borne out in the U.S. as well. 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?

15:00You have entered the ring on this debate, Wendy. So, Jonna, 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? The up-to-date thinking is that yes, like these exposures to things on the farm, to like dust, to dander, all 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.

15:39But 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. 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.

16:17Like we don't, we think that the hygiene hypothesis is part of this, but we also think that the milk is at play. This will just show my ignorance. Living on a farm, growing up on a farm, these kids are drinking raw milk. I feel like we're making some assumptions here. I'm guessing the researchers actually asked these families. Wendy, you're such a good student of the challenges of this research. How did you know? Wait, is this an actual question? 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.

17:01and 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. Oh, like the crap you get on a plane. Right, like sterilized. That's sitting in a hotel room in a little box, that sort of stuff. Exactly. That can just sit on the shelf for three months or whatever without being refrigerated.

17:42Oh, so you compare it to that, which is seriously processed milk. 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? Minimally processed milk. What's that? So that is pasteurized milk. That's that science versus touch flight getting into the papers, working out what all the definitions are.

18:19That's right. We love a definition. That's why we're here. 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. So when she looks at all this complexity, she's like, I'm not crying over spilt milk. Correct. She doesn't think the science is spoiled. 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. But she doesn't think we're ready for a milkshake up and that we should all be drinking raw milk right now.

19:08She does not think that. So we've done our puns. Where do we go from here then? Well, I'm not going to leave you with just that. Okay. Okay, because— It would behoove you to tell me more. I can— Sorry, sorry, sorry. I can squeeze out a few more drops of science.

19:30Just— Okay, okay. We've really milked this for all it's worth. Oh, my God. I'm going to 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 studies a lot of different families who live on farms. And what she did is some research into these two particular groups in the U.S., the Amish and the Old Order Mennonites.

20:16Are you familiar? 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. Tell me more. 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. Yeah. And they tend to drink raw milk. Okay, great. And from the farm. Yes, great. Raw milk. Perfect. Yes. Yes. But these two groups are different in one important way. So the Amish often don't use any electricity at all.

20:57And the Mennonites, some of them do have electricity. So they tend to sometimes use mechanized processes for things. 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... The Amish community is like super protected. They had decreased allergic diseases across the board compared to the Old Order Mennonites. This might suggest that what matters here is that they're doing all this stuff by hand with the animals. 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?

21:46They're like one-on-one. They're milking the cows by hand. They're in the cow shed. It's not about drinking the raw milk. It's about all that time with the animals. That is a suggestion that the time with the animals could be more important. Which is back to the hygiene hypothesis. That's bing, bing, bing. Exactly. Hygiene hypothesis. 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, you know, and that the kids are involved.

22:22And 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. Got it. And the thinking is that that might be, we don't know for sure, but that might be the bigger difference maker here. So, like, even away from the Amish and the Mennonites, just sort of bigger picture, you know, Christine's group, they study a lot of farming families in Wisconsin. And they will ask them, you know, is the child going into the barn?

22:57And if so, at what age? I mean, that makes a difference. And getting exposed to that barn environment and the stable, like, that is another protective signal. At what age is it most beneficial for the kid to be in the barn? Yeah, I mean, it's a good question. The data from the epidemiologic studies strongly suggests that this needs to happen early in life. in the European studies have suggested that even begins in utero. Aha. 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. Yeah, which is sort of a little bit of an annoying answer, right?

23:49Like, 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. 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? I think that's right. You know, it's possible there's some kind of link with allergies and asthma.

24:38Not really a slam dunk. Okay, how are you feeling about the idea of taking a big old gulp of that? 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... Ah. Ah. Ah. Ah. Ah. I'm going to have to stop you right there. Oh, okay. Let's talk about that after the break.

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