Raw Milk: Is It Safe to Drink?
Really? Is this where we’re at? It's almost 2026!
A few years ago, I came down with a sudden illness.
It hit me out of nowhere. I was on my way to a medical appointment in the morning and started feeling slightly off. I chalked it up to not sleeping well the night before and did my best to ignore it.
As I sat in the waiting room, I began to feel worse and worse. The lady sitting near me kept shooting me anxious looks, asking if I was alright and informing me that I looked very pale and weak.
Within minutes, I was doubled over the wastebasket as I fought to hold down my breakfast.
I managed to make it through my appointment, but on my way out of the hospital, my stomach turned violently, and I had to run to the bathroom. I’ll spare you the details, but it wasn’t pretty.
By the time I made it home, I was experiencing whole-body shakes; my teeth were audibly chattering, and I could barely walk. I crawled into bed in my coat and wrapped up in blankets to try and ward off the chill.
I was running an awful fever. I started vomiting suddenly, without any warning or indication that I was about to lose my lunch.
By the following day, the waste coming out from either end of me was red with blood, and I was rushed back to the emergency room at the same hospital I’d been at the day before.
After some blood tests and an extensive interview with the doctor, we discovered the culprit: a bacterial infection caused by undercooked chicken.
Foodborne pathogens are common and well-known. Every child is taught that eating raw eggs can lead to salmonella, and undercooked chicken can be dangerous.
Introductory food safety courses extensively cover these facts, giving lots of information on the safe handling of risky ingredients, food storage tips, and avoiding cross-contamination.
In my case, it took about a week before I was able to digest food properly again, and I was seriously sick for days. My experience was awful, but it was also comparatively mild. I survived without needing to be hospitalized.
However, foodborne illnesses can be much more dangerous for people with weakened immune systems. For young children, elderly people, or people with chronic diseases, foodborne pathogens can be lethal.
Your chances of survival are also significantly impacted by the kind of pathogen you contract. E.coli is very survivable, as is salmonella. Botulism, on the other hand, can be much more severe.
Thankfully, there is something simple that anyone can do to help reduce their chances of getting sick with any form of food poisoning, which is the umbrella term we use for all these infections.
You can raise the temperature of the food to a degree that kills off the bacteria before you eat it.
Raw milk has been all over social media lately, with a disturbing number of people insisting that the stuff is perfectly safe and that the basic tenets of food safety should be ignored.
It’s a key part of RFK Jr.’s ‘Make America Healthy Again’ movement, alongside raw meat smoothies and cutting food dyes out of candy. John Oliver put out an excellent video about the movement earlier this year; it’s free to watch on YouTube.
Many people have been spoiled by living in the modern world. They don’t know the potential consequences of disregarding caution regarding their health.
To explain what I mean, let’s go back to before the 1860s when Louis Pasteur first figured out how to prevent food spoilage by killing microbes with heat.
Back then, people didn’t know that temperature was a critical factor in the growth of harmful microbes. They didn’t know that you could kill potential diseases so easily, so people were just eating and drinking whatever was on hand.
Not only were they drinking raw milk, but they were also not paying much attention to the internal temperature of the meat they cooked, nor boiling water before drinking it.
They were exposing themselves to toxic microorganisms repeatedly throughout their lives.
Contrary to what some people have said to me, these people were not ‘fine.’ Outbreaks of lethal fevers were common, and people were quite literally dying from diarrhea — in regions of the world with poor water sanitation, it’s still a leading cause of death.
The child mortality rate was around 46% in 1800, meaning that nearly half of all babies born would die before they made it to their fifth birthday. Remember, small children can’t fight off food poisoning as well as adults, and they can die quickly due to dehydration.
Were foodborne illnesses the sole cause of high child mortality? No, of course not. Were they a huge part of the problem? Absolutely, yes.
Pasteurization was known to have an enormous impact on reducing infant mortality when it became the norm — that’s why it became standard practice in the first place!
Any time you eat or drink anything that isn’t adequately treated and preserved, you play Russian roulette with disease.
Specifically with regards to raw, unpasteurized milk, here’s a short list of the possible microbes it could be carrying:
Most of these are considered a nuisance more than a threat, but several can be lethal. And if you’re repeatedly exposed and get sick multiple times, it can damage your body for life.
That risk can be erased by taking one ridiculously easy step: pasteurizing the milk.
Most harmful bacteria that cause human sickness cannot survive high temperatures. Pasteurize the milk, cook your food to a safe internal temperature, and boil untreated water before you drink it or use it to bathe.
It’s easy, doesn’t require any special gear or equipment, and keeps you and your children from having to deal with days of stomach upset and hospital visits.
Raw milk can carry severe pathogens, and you can’t guess whether you’ll get sick from it unless you want to do a laboratory test every time you buy a carton. That sounds like a massive inconvenience to me — not to mention expensive.
Rolling the dice with your safety — with your family’s safety — isn’t necessary.
Contrary to what some social media influencers might say, it doesn’t even provide special health benefits. Those people aren’t doctors; they’re just using clickbait to get attention and make money.
If you want to ignore these warnings and go on taking risks, that’s your choice. You have every right to decide what to put in your body, and I can’t stop you.
But when you have to take a trip to the hospital, shaking with fever, and are unable to keep food or water down, understand that you’re only experiencing the consequences of poor decision-making.
Undercooked chicken nearly took me out. I don’t plan on giving raw milk a chance to finish the job.
Solidarity wins.
I can't count anymore, how many times in my life and travels around the world, when I've contracted a food borne illness. Mostly from undercooked or spoiled food. In third world countries, this is especially prevalent. To this day, I suffer from an extremely sensitive digestion system that revolts at the slightest imbalance. All from my travels to third world countries years ago now.
Now, I do all I can to cook everything to a degree short of extra crispy, and I'm on a very restrictive diet and I still suffer consequences that a lot of time, defy logic.
When I query the medical profession, they issue more Imodium and tell me I have IBS. For anyone who doesn't know what this means, it means that they know you have something wrong with you but they don't know what the cause is and they're too lazy to work to figure it out, So, they write you up as chronic IBS, which is a catchall term for everything G.I. related when they don't know what's wrong with you.
At my age, I am thinking more and more about whether these disabilities are going to shorten my lifespan because all I am is another casualty from America's wars and a liability on the VA balance sheet. The sooner I die, the less money they have to pay in medical care and disability pensions.
Take care of yourselves as no one else will. You're just a paying customer to the health insurance companies and a nuisance to the medical profession in the U.S. The less time you spend fighting with your insurance providers and doctors, the happier you will be.
As part of my ag degree I did extensive research into small farm dairy practices (meat, too), and the rigorous requirements for keeping things clean was more than enough to convince me of the benefits of food safety like pasteurization. It also made me incredibly suspicious of hamburger meat. 😬