Analysis by Sally Fallon Morell from Mercola.com
STORY AT-A-GLANCE
- In a December 2023 article, Claire Panosian Dunavan, a UCLA professor emeritus, questioned the appeal of raw milk, citing historical efforts to reduce infant mortality through pasteurization and expressing concerns over the risks of illness from pathogens in raw milk
- Sally Fallon Morell refutes claims about the heightened risk of illness from raw milk, pointing to data and analyses suggesting that the dangers are grossly overstated
- Historical declines in infant mortality were more due to sanitation and public health measures than the pasteurization of dairy
- Pasteurized milk has been shown to contribute to a range of health issues, including allergies and asthma
- Studies from Europe and anecdotal evidence have linked raw milk consumption to lower rates of asthma, allergies, and stronger bones, among other health advantages
During the last few years, bureaucrats and public health officials have been quiet about raw milk, but then Iowa legalized its sale in May. The accompanying publicity — in The New York Times and USA Today,1,2 plus many other publications — has resulted in a flurry of pro-pasteurization, anti-raw milk Internet posts.
One of these appeared on December 8, 2023,3 written by Claire Panosian Dunavan, professor emeritus of medicine and infectious diseases at the David Geffen School of Medicine at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) and past president of the American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene. Dunavan can’t understand the “risky allure” of raw milk. “Is it buyers’ faith in ‘nature’s perfect food’ or sellers’ pure, naked greed?” she asks. The main claims in her article:
| In the 1890s, Nathan Straus (co-owner of Macy’s) started a private foundation to dispense pasteurized milk after his son died of typhus during a vacation in Italy — the death blamed on raw milk. (Dunavan then credits Straus with a drop in U.S. infant mortality from 125 per 1,000 to fewer than 16 per 1,000 between 1891 and 1925.) |
| Raw milk consumers are 840 times more likely to suffer illness than those who drink pasteurized dairy. |
| Recent outbreaks of illness blamed on raw milk have occurred in California, Utah and Idaho. |
| Raw milk contains dangerous pathogens like campylobacter and salmonella. |
| Raw milk may cause Guillain-Barré syndrome. |
| People are avoiding pasteurized milk because of milk allergy “as opposed to a serious, even life-threatening infection.” |
| The real villains are the people who sell raw milk “because they believe there’s an audience out there that will buy it,” even though they “know” that raw milk will harm some people. |
Are Raw Milk Farmers Driven by Greed?
Let’s look at these points one by one, starting with the accusation that raw milk farmers are motivated by pure, naked greed. (In the spirit of full disclosure, I am a dairy farmer who sells raw milk.)
Conventional dairy farmers today receive about the same price as they did during World War II, even while their costs have skyrocketed. Typically, they get $1.45 per gallon, which costs them $2 to produce.4
This explains why the number of licensed dairy operations in the U.S. has steadily declined by more than 55%,5 from 70,375 in 2003 to 31,657 in 2020. More than 3,000 dairy farms stopped production during 2020 alone — that’s eight per day.
Some of these farmers have avoided going bankrupt by switching to raw milk sales. Typically, consumers are happy to pay from $5 to $10 per half gallon — enough to save the family farm, especially if the farmer reduces his costs by nourishing his cows on grass (the natural food for cows) rather than feeding grain.
Dunavan refers to farmers’ desire to make a decent living as “pure, naked greed,” but let me give you an example of real greed. Dairy company CEOs typically make salaries upwards of $3 million per year. They do this by keeping milk prices as low as possible — hence the heartbreak of losing the farm inflicted on thousands of dairy farmers. That is what most of us would call pure, naked greed.
True Causes of Infant Mortality
About Nathan Straus losing his son to typhus and blaming it on raw milk, according to that font of conventional knowledge, Wikipedia, typhus is caused by bacteria spread by lice, chiggers or fleas.6 Since Dunavan is a public health expert, she should know this. (I have not been able to find any reference to raw milk causing typhus, except for the case of Straus’ son.)
Typhus reigns in filthy conditions and it was a real problem, especially in cities, before the advent of modern housing, sewage systems and washing machines. Even today we see outbreaks of typhus, but public health experts typically blame them on rats, never on raw milk!7
As for the decline in infant mortality in the U.S. at the turn of the 20th century, it was during this period that public officials worked to clean up our cities with the installation of sewage systems, rubbish collection and clean water.
This was also the period when the car gradually replaced the horse and mule — before the car, our cities were stinking cesspools of manure and grime. Immigrants huddled in crowded housing without running water and refrigeration, and with only rudimentary sanitation. The death rate by the age of five was 50% — and this was blamed on raw milk rather than unsanitary conditions — officials called it the “milk problem.”
Manure piled up on a New York City street creating deadly unsanitary conditions — health officials called this the “milk problem.”
Raw milk may indeed have contributed to the high death rate because it came from distillery dairies — inner city confinement dairies of unimaginable filth where cows were fed distillery waste. The milk was so deficient and watery that chalk was often added to make it look white — this was the milk that Straus wanted to pasteurize.
However, pasteurization cannot take the credit for the decline in infant mortality as it was around this time that distillery dairies were banned. The real hero was not Nathan Straus, who did nothing for public clean-up efforts, but Dr. Henry Coit, who worked to bring clean raw milk from the countryside to the cities.
Public health officials at the time lauded Coit’s certified raw milk with saving children’s lives and noted that children in orphanages brought up on raw milk were healthier than those given pasteurized milk.