I have been drinking raw milk and raw milk products (from both goats and cows) for over a dozen years. This is especially interesting since one of my first childhood memories is my pouring a glass of milk down the laundry room drain…and getting caught. My mom’s response was to give me Bosco ( a chocolate syrup) so I’d drink my milk…
The following is taken from an article by The Alliance for Natural Health:
To hear the media tell it, our lives are in jeopardy if we drink unpasteurized milk. But the facts tell the opposite story.
A new study from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) declares that raw milk “cannot be considered safe under any circumstances,” and essentially advocates for stricter laws and enforcement against raw milk on the state level. The study claims that the rate of outbreaks caused by unpasteurized milk and products made from it was 150 times greater than outbreaks linked to pasteurized milk.
However, according to the Weston A. Price Foundation, the CDC has manipulated and cherry-picked this data to make raw milk look dangerous—and it has dismissed the same dangers associated with pasteurized milk. If we really examine the raw data, we find that pasteurized milk products cause nearly twice as many illnesses as raw milk products, but illnesses from dairy products still constitute only 1.3% of the total, with raw dairy products coming in at less than half of a single percentage point. All of this is minor compared to the health risks of taking prescription drugs or even entering a hospital.
Even more importantly: there has been not a single death from consuming raw milk in the 38 years the data has been collected—compared to over 80 deaths from pasteurized milk products during that same time period.
The time frame examined by the researchers dramatically skewed the results as well. The authors analyzed data from 1993 to 2006. Perhaps they chose that range because one year later, in 2007, 135 people became ill from pasteurized cheese contaminated with e. coli and three people died.
Another factor that is completely neglected is the source of the milk.Most food contamination products originate in large factory farms or CAFOs. Many people would consider unpasteurized milk from a family farm safer than pasteurized milk from a CAFO, but of course the government does not want to alienate Big Farma by getting into such qualitative distinctions.
To read the entire article, you can access it HERE.
Meanwhile, here is a great visual from Natural News:
3 Wheeled Cheese 