Last month we talked about how alternative points of view are being silenced.
All. The. Time.
Today I want to talk about how so-called “journalists” regurgitate status quo “science” cloaked as “investigative health reporting.”
News flash: There’s no investigation if you have a pre-determined point of view, you interview sources only to get them to give you the rope you need to hang them with, and you refuse to listen to nuance.
To wit, a new “investigation” from ProPublica about the dangers of raw milk (oh my god, we’re all going to die! Raw milk is so dangerous! The farmers selling it are making everyone sick! They’re just crazy MAGA people! They hug me when I don’t want to be hugged!) is a good case in point.
Instead of fair and balanced reporting, the article simply reiterates today’s cultural norms.
It’s a panic piece, designed to make the reader as upset as possible about raw milk, like the journalist seemingly was before she even started “investigating.”
Right at the beginning of the article we learn:
“Today, most scientists and health experts agree that raw milk has no significant, proven nutritional benefits over its sanitized counterpart, cannot treat or cure disease and subjects its consumers to over 100 times the risk of food borne illness, which can be especially dangerous for young children.”
That settles it then.
Because what most people do or agree about—especially most scientists—is always right.
Take Ptolemy’s model of the cosmos. A mathematician and astronomer, Ptolemy showed scientifically that Earth was at the center of the universe. That was the scientific consensus that was considered an immutable fact for over a thousand years.
Except that it was wrong.
Consensus isn’t Science. It’s groupthink.
According to the article, “At least 233 people have been sickened in eight outbreaks that federal and state regulators have connected to McAfee’s [raw milk] farm since 2006, and at least 40 of them have been hospitalized.”
Ah. Some actual numbers.
Let’s take a moment to examine them. Shall we?
In twenty years, according to the article, 233 people in America have become sick, purportedly due to drinking raw milk from McAfee’s farm.
That’s approximately 12 people a year. Of those 233 people, 40 were hospitalized. That’s 2 hospitalizations a year. There were apparently no deaths, though one young man highlighted in the article reports having ongoing chronic kidney problems.
We have no N.
What I mean is that we don’t know the number of people drinking raw milk from this farm per year. Or the number of people drinking raw milk in the United States. However, since the farm is grossing $30 million a year in revenue, we can assume that the number of people drinking their raw milk and eating their other raw milk products is relatively high.
What we do know, however, is that about 340 million people live in the United States.
We also know that—extrapolating from CDC data—in any given year, some 53,298 people are hospitalized for food borne pathogens from ALL food sources, and approximately 931 die per year.
So, your overall chance of acquiring a food borne illness in America is 1 in 6,379 per year, no matter what you eat.
Two (2) people per year end up so sick they require hospitalization from McAfee’s raw cow milk.
Fifty three thousand two hundred and ninety eight (53,298) per year from other food sources.
If you’re eating pasteurized food, restaurant food, conventionally grown produce, meats of all kinds, and everything else in your fridge, you are taking a chance of being one of the 53,000 people who will get sick.
If you’re drinking raw milk from McAfee’s farm, you’re taking a chance of being one of the two people who get sick per year.
When you look at the numbers from a rational, science-forward perspective, you realize just how biased this article is.
“The article categorically dismisses the benefits of raw milk, which are huge,” says Stephanie Seneff, Ph.D., a senior research scientist at MIT.
Seneff herself was duped by the mainstream mindset for years. The first time she tried raw milk was at a conference on nutrition where speakers, dairy farmers, and exhibitors were all talking about its benefits. Though she thought it was delicious, she felt nervous about drinking it.
“I felt this uneasiness about it,” she explains. “I’d been taught all my life that of course you have to pasteurize raw milk. I had really sunk into that concept.”
After trying it, seeing firsthand how delicious it was, and learning about the health benefits, Seneff started buying it for her family from a small-time dairy farmer who lived outside of Boston.
“I think it’s far better than pasteurized milk,” she tells me.
Pasteurization is a multi-billion dollar industry.
Raw milk production, usually done by homesteaders and cottage farmers, is not.
Given there is no financial incentive to study the benefits of raw milk (another fact that was left out of the article completely), it’s remarkable that we have some peer-reviewed literature showing its benefits.
We can certainly argue about the quality of this research. But ProPublica chose to simply pretend this research doesn’t exist, essentially pitting the word of one dairy farmer—and several of the seemingly deluded families that drink and enjoy the benefits of raw milk—against the so-called experts.
Among these studies:
A 2011 study published in the Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology by an international team of German, Swiss, and Polish scientists found that thousands of children living in farming communities across Europe who regularly drank raw farm milk were less likely to have asthma, hay fever, and allergies than children who did not. These researchers argued that natural components in raw milk—including heat-sensitive proteins and beneficial microbes (that are destroyed when the milk is subjected to high heat)—may have a “protective effect” on the immune system.
A 2019 study published in the Journal of Complementary Therapies in Medicine found that after regular consumption of raw milk, immune-compromised adults experienced a strong improvement of their health, immunity, bowel problems, and mood. Women surveyed reported more improvements to their health after drinking raw milk than men.
A 2020 meta-analysis by German and Dutch scientists reviewed the current scientific literature and also found that drinking raw milk benefited the immune system. These scientists reported that children who consumed raw farm milk early in life enjoyed a:
42 percent lower rate of asthma
34 percent lower rate of wheezing
32 percent lower rate of having hay fever
The benefits were seen both for children raised on farms and for children living in rural areas who weren’t farmers, suggesting that the raw milk itself is beneficial, independent of other benefits to living on a farm.
When our kids were little, we lived in western Massachusetts. We drove once a week to buy raw milk from a local dairy farmer. The milk came in glass jars. I was glad my kids were drinking a living food teeming with immune-enhancing properties that had not been sitting in plastic for weeks. If the milk went a little sour, we baked with it. I also made it into raw-milk yogurt.
My husband and I both suffered from intractable and life-compromising allergies our entire childhoods. Our children did not.
This is N=5 (our youngest wasn’t born yet) but none of us ever got sick from drinking raw milk.
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