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Raw Milk Literally Kills People
Why you should avoid raw milk and never give it to children
Raw milk is one of those perennial topics that comes around every year or two. Sooner or later, people will forget the last time that raw milk caused an infectious disease outbreak, and everyone will listen to some sort of wellness influencer who claims that drinking the stuff will make people drastically more healthy or give them superhuman powers.
This time is no different. People on Tiktok are going crazy for raw milk, and promoting the stuff as a delicious way to improve your health. The problem is that raw milk not only has no health benefits, it’s actively dangerous for people and regularly kills children who drink it.
The Science
If you’ve ever done a high school science class, or gone shopping at a supermarket, you’ve probably heard of pasteurization. It’s a simple process named after a French scientist called Louis Pasteur who, about 200 years ago, was one of the first to develop the idea that microbes could cause issues with human health.
Pasteurization is a really simple thing to do. Basically, you’ve got a bunch of bacteria and other nasty stuff that naturally occurs in milk and other liquids. These germs can’t survive high temperatures, so we heat the milk up to kill them. This used to be by boiling, but we’ve discovered that you can actually heat liquids for longer times at lower temperatures instead, which means we now pasteurize stuff by heating it to about 60 degrees Centigrade (145 Fahrenheit) for 30 minutes which has the same effect. In practice, this has minimal impact on the flavour or content of the milk, but kills all the nasties.
This is a basic and commonly accepted way to both extend the shelf-life of milk — because fewer bacteria means it goes off less quickly — and also reduce the risk to human health. There are innumerable pathogens present in unpasteurized milk which can cause issues, including fun things like bovine tuberculosis that most people don’t even realize exist.
