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Lactose Lovers Lock Horns With Legislature
With the recent announcement by Durham-area farmer Michael Schmidt that he’s going on hunger strike until he’s allowed to sell raw milk, what previously seemed like a one-day news oddity is turning into a full-blown debate here at Torontoist (and no doubt elsewhere). Even Toronto celebrity chef Jamie Kennedy is going to hold a press conference wherein he’s expected to announce his support for Schmidt.
Most stories about Canadian raw milk contain sentiments from raw milk lovers claiming that if the general public only knew all the benefits of raw milk, they’d jump right on board and be drinking unpasteurized moo juice till the cows literally come home. Schmidt himself claims that “There is enough evidence that raw milk, if it’s properly produced, is never a health hazard.” We here at Torontoist, however, are Skeptical Journalist Types, and felt research was merited in this instance.
(DISCLAIMER: The author’s preference is for pasteurized skim milk.)
The major health benefits of raw milk put forward by proponents of it are as follows:
– Probiotic health. This is one of the big ones – even raw milk opponents concede that pasteurization kills off the probiotic microorganism cultures that can potentially lower risk of colon cancer as well as lower cholesterol count and blood pressure – and definitely can help manage lactose intolerance. Of course, raw milk opponents also point out you can get probiotic intake from yoghurt.
– Lactase. It aids in the digestion of lactose, and gets destroyed by the pasteurization process. That having been said, the usefulness of lactase beyond the ability to drink milk seems quite debatable – and most raw milk support sites don’t actually list any benefits beyond the ability to drink milk as a general good. (There is a lot of this latter boosting on most raw milk support sites, to be frank. Raw Milk Facts, for example, points out that milk has cholesterol in it, and we all need some cholesterol, so why not get it from raw milk, et cetera.)
– Factory farming. A lot of raw milk sites also point out that grass-fed cows produce healthier milk, and that pasteurization allows factory farming of milk (due to pasteurization killing any bacteria that might get into the milk from, say, a spare globule of feces), whereas raw milk cows almost exclusively are grass-fed. Grass fed cows produce milk with five times as much omega-3 fatty acids, and much more omega-6 fatty acids and CLA (conjugated linoleic acid, which is a trans fat but apparently one with benefits according to raw milk boosters).
This appaears to be an excellent argument for grass-feeding cows, but not necessarily for raw milk. Hey, if you want to end factory farming, that is great and awesome, but that doesn’t de facto follow through to “and don’t pasteurize the milk.”
Opponents of raw milk (here’s a fairly comprehensive argument from Stephen Barrett) make their case more plainly: without pasteurization, dairy producers cannot guarantee that their milk will not contain (among other diseases) salmonella, brucella, streptococcus or TB. e. Coli infections have likewise been traced back to raw milk consumption, and harmful pathogens in any cow that could not otherwise be detected can frequently be transferred to milk. The counterargument from raw milk supporters here is that the risk level of infection is so low that preventing the public from drinking raw milk is a waste of time. This appears to be debatable.
Traditonally this sort of article is supposed to reach some sort of conclusion and come out conclusively for one side or the other, but sadly nobody working for Torontoist is a professional nutritionist, and even nutritionists know that the combined human knowledge of dietary science is like a vast desert with the occasional oasis of Stuff We Know For Sure, like “don’t eat rocks.”
What can be said with certainty is that raw milk websites tend to be sloppily produced (rawmilk.org, for example, repeatedly boasts of scientific reports that contain “hundreds of scientific evidence”) and frequently engage in arguments that are largely irrelevant to the health issues regarding pasteurization, which forces one to raise at least a single skeptical eyebrow.
Photo courtesy Marc Lostracco and the Torontoist Flickr group.