People, Please Don't Drink Raw Milk

Some things are dangerous to eat or drink raw. Beef needs to be cooked to some degree, with even a rare steak getting some sear. Flour and eggs can carry foodborne illness without proper care taken to turn your raw cookie dough into actual cookies. Then there is milk, which, through a process invented by Louis Pasteur, is a lot safer to drink via pasteurization than untreated. There is no health benefit to drinking raw milk, just as there would be zero benefit to eating a raw chicken breast. Somehow, however, ingesting milk that hasn't been made safe for humans has become a political issue. Now, folks are getting sick as Hell just to make an ideological point.

I'm not joking about the getting sick part, by the way. Just this month, at least 21 people got ill in Florida due to E. Coli that was in raw milk they drank--a chunk of the sickened are children. There are tons of myths about raw milk, from it curing lactose intolerance to helping with asthma or boosting your gut health. These are all the claims of metaphorical snake-oil salesmen/women, but in this case literal snake oil would probably be less dangerous than raw milk! The thing about pasteurizing your milk is that it literally just kills bacteria. It doesn't add anything to the milk--no preservatives, processed stuff, or anything else. When milk is made safe to drink, literally just the germs (ones that can make you very sick) are killed.

Even New Jersey knows raw milk isn't safe--and you know how New York mocks New Jersey!

Regardless of how much medical proof there is about how raw milk has zero benefits for your health, certain people always want to drink it because, "Those in power," must be lying about its dangers/how it can help. This isn't a purely political thing where conservatives are drinking raw milk to, "Own the Liberals," either. There is a weird cross-section of people who swear by raw milk, from folks on the far left to those on the far right who distrust authority and/or vaccines and/or general modern medicine for one reason or another. I can tell you, however, big agriculture or big pharma aren't getting rich off pasteurizing your milk--they are merely following laws in place that they have to make milk safe for human consumption so an item you buy from your grocery store won't make you possibly die of illness. Raw milk isn't safe. There is no benefit to drinking it. Please, everyone, don't drink raw milk.