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Growing up in a village in India, we only ever bought raw milk because there was no packaged milk available. Everyone had a deal with a local farmer. Every morn
by rupi 5y ago
Growing up in a village in India, we only ever bought raw milk because there was no packaged milk available. Everyone had a deal with a local farmer. Every morning or evening, we would walk over to the farmer's house, pick up our milk and bring it home. My family in India (and the whole village) still does that.
And this is where the similarity ends.
The first thing my mom (and everyone else) did is to boil the milk to pasteurize it. Once boiled, it is allowed to cool down till a layer of fat forms on top. That is removed to make butter and ghee out of. Milk is then used and refrigerated.
No one ever drank (or drinks) raw milk - not the farmers, not their workers, not the buyers. It boggles my mind that people are willing to take the risk by drinking raw milk.
- folli 5y agoI think it's a modern western cultural thing that everything that's more 'natural', 'untreated', 'non-GMO'... is automatically considered more healthy, see also antivaxxers etc. Without any evidence of course.
- mc32 5y agoFurther: see ‘raw water’. As far as I can tell it’s mostly high income earners who fall for these fads, outside of those stuck in the wilderness without treated water. It defies logic.
- viraptor 5y agoAnd if your want to see full crazy, check https://old.reddit.com/r/RawMeat/ https://old.reddit.com/r/RawMeat/ > Vomit, diarrhea, coughing, sneezing, sweating, are all ways that the body expels toxins.
- RealityVoid 5y agoTechnically, at least vomit, really is a self protection mechanism of the body.
- Thiez 5y agoBut the only 'toxins' it can get rid of are those you recently consumed, not the vague and unspecified toxins that the diet people claim build up in your body and must be purged.
- mc32 5y agoIt's taken us hundreds of thousands of years to achieve the benefits of civilization and to have people illogically throw all that out. It's mazing.
- andi999 5y agoWhat is wrong with raw meat? Here you can buy raw minced pork for direct consumption (on bread rolls) almost everywhere. Why should ppl get sick from that?
- jamiek88 5y agoThat’s all they eat. Just raw meat.
- andi999 5y agoI agree. I had a look at the reddit, yes there is something wrong with them.
- b112 5y agoRaw pork meat is not fine, as pork can have many worms, and other things, humans can catch. Cooking kills these things. People eat raw eggs in North America, but that's safe because of antibiotics in chicken feed. Salmonella can kill. Beef is safer, which is why you only need char the outside to be safe.
- SapporoChris 5y agoSalmonella outbreaks in USA are fairly commonly reported by the CDC. I was able to quickly find three listings for salmonella in eggs. July 26, 2018 https://www.cdc.gov/salmonella/braenderup-04-18/index.html https://www.cdc.gov/salmonella/braenderup-04-18/index.html November 9, 2016 https://www.cdc.gov/salmonella/oranienburg-10-16/index.html https://www.cdc.gov/salmonella/oranienburg-10-16/index.html December 2, 2010 https://www.cdc.gov/salmonella/2010/shell-eggs-12-2-10.html https://www.cdc.gov/salmonella/2010/shell-eggs-12-2-10.html Regarding ground beef https://www.cdc.gov/nceh/ehs/ehsnet/plain_language/restaurants-ground-beef-handling-cooking.htm https://www.cdc.gov/nceh/ehs/ehsnet/plain_language/restauran... Grilling various meats https://www.cdc.gov/foodsafety/communication/bbq-iq.html https://www.cdc.gov/foodsafety/communication/bbq-iq.html Both of these go far beyond just char the outside to be safe.
- 5y ago
- tsimionescu 5y agoThat's not even close to full crazy. In Romania there was a somewhat famous lifestly guru who advocates for this type of all natural lifestyle, in an all-vegan variant (Olivia Steer). She was asked by a follower who wanted to get pregnant but was no longer menstruating after following her advice whether she should change her diet or try some medication. The response was along the lines of "No, no, no! The fact that you're no longer menstruating is proof that you are now rid of toxins! Menses are simply the body eliminating toxins. Just keep trying to conceive, and try some <herbal tea> if you're still having trouble". To be clear, this is coming from a 30 year old woman with two children of her own...
- RealityVoid 5y agoIt's like it stems from some sort of self-hatred, as if we have this belief deep down that we are wrong or corrupted and whatever we are not MUST be good. These naturalistic fallacies are certainly a strange, ilogical thing, but one at the core belief of _many_ people. I wonder if it's a western thing though and if we don't find it in other cultures as well.
- yongjik 5y agoIt's not really a western thing, it's just that "natural" stuff is much more expensive to produce in a modern industrial world, so --- naturally --- it's perceived as higher quality. Centuries ago sugar was extremely expensive in Korea. Kings would use it as a medicine when they were sick.
- bawolff 5y agoI can understand the logical leap that people took to get there: Most processed food in western diets are unhealthy for you. Usually because the processing basically means very high in sugar, and relatively low nutritionally. It doesn't take much to go from that data point to a rule of thumb "natural = good". Especially if you combine it with a mistrust of large corporations that you believe prioritize profits over ethics (not exactly a huge leap) - where you think that the stuff they make is bad, but "natural" things they didn't have a hand in cant be corrupted by them. Real life is much more complex than that, but i can see the chain of logic people use.
- qwertox 5y agoI'm not really sure if it's that. If you look at the ingredient list of most of the products you buy, there's a ton of things in there which can cause allergies or other problems, if you consume too much of them. It's ok to want something in its most natural form, but you have to make sure that the body is designed to deal with it. Like, don't eat raw potatoes or drink raw milk.
- 7952 5y agoYou can't base every decision you make on well researched science though. Everyone develops their own heuristics to make decisions. I think naturalness is just one of those. And within a limited set of choices it is probably a pretty good heuristic.
- vt85 5y ago
- DantesKite 5y agoI would put GMO's in a completely different risk category to all the others, because of the tail risk involved and something to consider thoughtfully before introducing into an environment. https://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/pp2.pdf https://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/pp2.pdf
- rightbyte 5y agoIf you eat "natural" (I dislike the term) food you have a chance of cutting away additive sugar that the manufacturer add way too much of in most ready made products. I.e. you get better food for an indirect reason. Like if you make your own müsli you might not add sugar, which the companies add to increase sales, and have more of the expensive nuts, that they cut down in share to increase margins since noone notices the difference between 2.3% expensive nuts and 2.2% until there is almost no left ...
- ithkuil 5y agoYes, it often also boils down to giving it just a bit more of "care" (time, money) when producing and consuming. This extends to other related topics as well. For example I had a colleague who went vegan and this meant she actually started to cook and care about the meals. This opened up a whole new dimension to life. I guess much depends also on where you happen the live and/or be brought up, and how strong the food culture is.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- 29athrowaway 5y agoNote that boiling is not the same as pasteurization. Pasteurization involves heating but doesn't require boiling. You can pasteurize by heating to 73 degrees C for 25 seconds. Boiling, in the case of milk, is heating it to its boiling point which is around 100.17 degrees C. Boiling has a higher impact in the nutritional value of milk than pasteurization.
- smilespray 5y agoThey were using heat to neutralize germs. No need to be pedantic.
- 29athrowaway 5y agoPer cup (whole/pasteurized -> whole/boiled) - Calories: 152 -> 146 - Protein: 8.14 g -> 8 g - Carbs: 12 g -> 11.4 g - Calcium: 28% DV -> 23% DV - Vitamin D: 24% DV -> 13% DV - Vitamin B12: 18% DV -> 13% DV - Phosphorus: 22% DV -> 20% DV
- teclordphrack2 5y ago
- credit_guy 5y agoSo boiling reduces the amount of calories? And carbs, and proteins? How can that be? In principle boiling could induce a lot of evaporation, so the milk would be more concentrated, and so it would have more calories per cup. But people don’t boil the milk so much as to materially reduce the amount of water in it.
- monitron 5y agoI would guess that the heat chemically alters or breaks down (denatures might be the right term?) some of those macronutrients into molecules that can no longer provide caloric energy.
- 5y ago
- paganel 5y ago> The first thing my mom (and everyone else) did is to boil the milk to pasteurize it. Same here, in rural Romania (at least that's what my grandma was doing when me and my brother were kids). To be honest though, we (meaning me and my brother) did use to eat the foam-y thing that was present on top of the milk immediately after our grandma or grandpa had finished milking the cows. It was still worm, as it had just came out of the cows, so to speak. We never had any health-related issue about it.
- verve_rat 5y agoWhich seems logical on the face of it. Calves drink fresh milk all the time, and they are mostly fine.
- thematrixturtle 5y agoYes, but that's udder to mouth. When humans milk cows, they use at the very least possibly dirty hands & pails, and if it's a modern dairy there's much more equipment along the way.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- verve_rat 5y agoI'm aware. I have milked cows before. I would imagine no one is milking by hand in western countries. It, quite literally, gets sucked out of the cows and into a vat. Farmers generally take good care of the milk and clean all the equipment, it is their income after all. Not that I'm suggesting that raw milk is a good idea. I've drunk milk from the vat, and it is the cream content that gives it the different taste. But we invented civilisation for a reason. And if someone is milking into a bucket, stay the fuck away from that stone age shit.
- cute_boi 5y agoFarmers generally take good care of the milk and clean all the equipment, it is their income after all. This is a big assumption w/o any sort of evidence. However, this only applies if farmer are drinking milk themselves. Kinda reminds me of agricultural practice where farmer don't put pesticides on the food they eat, but they add a lot of pesticides that goes into sales for high income.
- lrem 5y agoI drank quite a bit of raw milk in my childhood. But it had to be fresh. I could walk up, glass in hand, to an uncle carrying today's yield to the storage room. I would get the most delicious milk ever. But if I was a couple minutes late, he'd tell me to go get some in the kitchen instead.
- SpaceInvader 5y agoI did the same thing several times, no issues as well. At first I was surprised that milk was warm, because I was used to refrigerated one.
- Arnt 5y agoAOL, except more than "several". Much more than "several". The milk has to be stored in clean containers. If you're going to pasteurise the milk anyway, then milking into a tank will do, and you can clean the tank every few days. But if the milk is to be used raw, then you have to milk into a clean container each time.
- dzhiurgis 5y ago> willing to take the risk Lot of them tout it's heals, rather than causes heaps of issues (including type 1 diabetes) But at least in NZ they are tested daily or weekly, so the risk at least somewhat being minimised. I'm still perplexed that seemingly neutral national media prints articles glorifying it without listing risks. p.s. googling "homogenised milk" in NZ first result lands you to seemingly authoritative but completely fake website filled with claims of it being hazardous and causing cancer https://homogenisation.org/advantages-and-disadvantages-of-homogenising-milk/ https://homogenisation.org/advantages-and-disadvantages-of-h...
- beebmam 5y agoIsn't it normal for babies to drink raw milk in many cultures globally?
- _ZeD_ 5y agoyou mean the mother's milk - when they are still breastfeed? otherwise... no. cow raw milk is the exceptional exception.
- tpxl 5y agoI drank raw milk for ages. Our neighbours were farmers and we'd get milk still warm from the cow. We'd drink what we wanted immediately, boil the rest for preservation and then put it in the fridge. It tasted amazing fresh compared to being boiled.
- watwut 5y agoPeople in our villages drunk raw milk regularly. I did too. You have to drink it fresh and keep high hygiene, but it is not something extraordinary at all.
- mywacaday 5y agoI'm in Ireland and have cousins who are dairy farmers. Whenever we went on holidays there were two types of milk in the fridge, bought pasteurised and homogenised milk and milk straight from the parlour. The milk from the parlour had a thick layer of cream on top and was amazing on cereal. I have also seen my cousin squirt milk straight from the cow like a water pistol into his mouth. We never got sick but the standards for cow welfare and milking parlour hygiene are very high. Milk is chilled immediately after milking in a stainless steel tank and that tank is sterilised every time the milk is collected.
- wil421 5y agoMy Indian coworker swears she drank raw milk in India. To the point she was trying to source it here and only found some place that would sell it for “pets”. Not sure if she actually drank it raw or forgot about the boiling part. She claimed pasteurization was not good but after reading your post I’m almost 99% positive she was pasteurizing it herself.
- lnxg33k1 5y agoIt’s a good thing anyway and I think we should encourage more libertarians to do it
- mbar84 5y agoConsidering the climate in India, I imagine the situation is a bit different there than in western countries. I think raw milk can be safe to drink if it is cooled down immediately during the milking process and kept refrigerated all throughout until it is drunk only a few hours later. Personally though, I think it's natural only for calves and babies to drink milk (in particular of their own mother) and I wouldn't mind a bit if the practice went away.
- vkhromov 5y agoI drank raw cow and goat milk a lot during my childhood in rural Russia. The most tasteful milk was the freshly milked one which was still warm. We also never boiled the milk, it was fine to just store it in the refrigerator for a couple of days. TBH the boiled milk tasted unpleasant comparing to the raw one.