7 ms·
Who benefits from the MAHA anti-science push?
- briandw 1y ago[flagged]
- exrhizo 1y agoRaw milk doesn't seem to me the most anti science thing to me But I believe the premise that financial interests aren't being challenged
- Refreeze5224 1y agoIt is if you don't understand the germ theory of disease, and how many bacteria can be present in raw milk. There is a reason that pasteurization was revolutionary, and it's because it caused fewer people to die. If you don't understand the science behind pasteurization, you should absolutely "trust the experts", aka scientists, or if you prefer, trust the old wisdom of previous generations who knew the value of pasteurization and watched people die of preventable illnesses before it came along.
- ImJamal 1y agoMany people just boil raw milk themselves and don't have issues?
- ceejayoz 1y agoIs this... a joke?
- ImJamal 1y agoBuying raw milk doesn't mean people will consume it?
- ceejayoz 1y agoSure. But boiling it makes it… not raw.
- _blk 1y agoBest thread all day :)
- ImJamal 1y agoI know, but the topic at hand is about buying raw milk? From the article > Powerful anti-vaccine advocates and people selling potentially harmful goods such as raw milk are profiting from the push to write anti-science policies into law across the U.S.
- ceejayoz 1y ago> I know, but the topic at hand is about buying raw milk? But we don't regulate milk for the people who boil it. We regulate it because of the ones who don't.
- ImJamal 1y agoWe do though. It is illegal to buy raw milk in some jurisdictions regardless if you boil it after purchasing.
- ceejayoz 1y agoBecause some people won't boil it, and that has serious public health impacts. Right? Same reason we have airport security even if I personally don't want to hijack a plane.
- ImJamal 1y agoPlenty of things have serious health impacts and we don't mandate it. To go after something as niche as raw milk is weird in my view. Heart disease leads to quite a few deaths and we don't ban McDonalds. If the fear is actually the drinking of raw milk then they should ban that, not the buying/selling of it.
- loourr 1y agoBelieving that one should be able to consume raw milk is not anti-science. Yes pasteurization kills bacteria that can be present in milk which can cause serious harm and also it kills bacteria that can be positive and people should have the right to choose to consume it and sell it with proper disclosures.
- mtrovo 1y agoReally depends on the country and the access to clean processes between milking a cow and your glass tho. Kind of related I was really shocked when I saw people eating raw pork mince in Germany when I lived there. My first reaction is that I would never do that based on my upbringing but if natural selection is a thing it's working fine for them I guess.
- throwaway091025 1y agoIt's funny, a tradition in European countries is to eat raw minced beef, but offer them a medium rare steak and they wince at the 'blood'.
- Refreeze5224 1y agoBut it's not dependent on the country in this case, it's the US we're talking about. And I absolutely would not trust the US dairy industry to be able to properly produce and sell pathogen-free milk without pasteurization. And I would assume they don't want the liability of selling it anyway, most people and companies avoid selling things that can kill you if possible.
- TeeMassive 1y agoI never understood the fear of raw milk. The best cheese are made with raw milk. I don't understand how it can't be safe when both the cow and the milk are tested for disease and bad germs.
- hydrogen7800 1y agoIsn't cheese making just an old process of preserving milk for later consumption, which removes moisture and thus the environment for harmful bacteria?
- WorldMaker 1y agoAnd also encouraging controlled, beneficial bacteria that out-compete harmful bacteria.
- TeeMassive 1y agoThen why is it illegal to make raw milk cheese?
- hydrogen7800 1y agoI have no idea what the rules are, but I'm sure you can make whatever you want. If something is illegal, it's is probably illegal to _sell_ it, which i think is reasonable. I wouldn't trust just anyone to sell me raw milk cheese, and would want them to follow food safely regulations when doing so, which maybe are not compatible with the process of making raw milk cheese.
- rkomorn 1y agoAren't cheeses made from raw milk cultured, and usually cure for a long enough time that bacteria does not survive?
- lukeinator42 1y agoI really wish I could buy raw milk for hobby cheesemaking. I'm in Canada where the laws are really restrictive.
- dpc_01234 1y agoThe biggest benefit of pasteurization is extending the shelf life, which is important in an industrialized economy. Dying due to consuming raw milk was not a problem, at least until milk had to be shipped long distances.
- Palomides 1y agothis is a shockingly false thing to see someone say, I have family members who have died due to drinking milk from their own farm pasteurization and vaccination are the crown jewels of modern civilization
- WorldMaker 1y agoNot just distance, but time. If you try to keep milk around for any amount of time after milking the cow, you run risks like Bird Flus and TB and other disease contaminants. Which is also why in the other direction cheese was invented for time stability of milk.
- mondainx 1y agoNot the most anti-science, but clearly foolish. The safety of humans consuming raw-milk was solved long ago by Pasteur. Its all part of the dumbing-down section of the control the people handbook.
- hshdhdhj4444 1y agoWhat’s the scientific reason to choose raw milk over pasteurized milk?
- throwaway091025 1y ago[flagged]
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- ceejayoz 1y agoPasteurization was discovered in 1860s, so she probably didn't have to. It was made mandatory starting in the late 1940s in the US. Prior to that, a whole bunch of folks got TB from it. Here's a PSA about making milk safe for babies from 1912; https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Give_The_Bottle-Fed_Baby_a_Chance_For_It%27s_Life_poster.jpg https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Give_The_Bottle-Fed_... If you're referring to breast milk, your mother probably wasn't raised in a dairy farm.
- deepanwadhwa 1y agoAre you directly sucking the cow? If yes, I'd support you drinking raw milk.
- spacechild1 1y ago> her milk Are you seriously equating breast milk with cow milk? Or did I misinterpret your post?
- sceptic123 1y agoI read it more as a suggestion that the parent poster's mother was a cow
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- 1y ago
- shrubble 1y agoIt’s scientifically valid to want to drink raw milk in some cases. However pasteurized milk allows for factory production and raw milk does not. That’s the real reason why it’s banned. The same government that banned raw milk allows Doritos to be sold in the billions and even bought with Snap/EBT, btw.
- oceanplexian 1y agoImagine believing articles like this and thinking somehow allowing a product that's legal in most advanced European countries is "Anti science"
- ceejayoz 1y agoNow ask yourself why. Their farms can’t get away with the same conditions we put American cows in. Because of regulation. Same reason chicken sashimi can be safe in Japan.
- WorldMaker 1y agoPasteurization has been settled science since the 1860s. It's benefits are extremely well known and well studied. We understand the contamination issues it solved in trying to sell things across large distances and/or from grocery shelves that may take some amount of time to sell. We see those contamination issues in "Raw Milk" sales, exactly as predicted. It seems pretty anti-science to me, going against such foundational food and health science. It also seems directly related to anti-vax anti-science efforts because Louis Pasteur was also a critical early scientist involved in vaccines (through efforts against Cholera and beyond).
- antonvs 1y agoYou can read what the FDA says about it here: https://www.fda.gov/food/buy-store-serve-safe-food/dangers-raw-milk-unpasteurized-milk-can-pose-serious-health-risk https://www.fda.gov/food/buy-store-serve-safe-food/dangers-r... The problem with this kind of thing is that the story looks different at the level of a government than at the individual level. The FDA article mentioned 2,645 illnesses and 228 hospitalizations in a 20-year period, and that was a period during which raw milk was heavily regulated, so would be likely to be significantly higher otherwise. Still, the odds of you as an individual getting sick from raw milk would be relatively low. Does that mean it shouldn't be regulated? It's not a purely scientific decision. Perhaps another way to go would be warning labels on raw milk. Still, I bet that would produce much higher illness numbers than the ones quoted above. In the end the question is whether the government should be trying to help people stay healthy or not. If the goal is actually "Make America Healthy Again," then requiring milk to be pasteurized is an obvious choice.
- busssard 1y agothe eternal struggle of big corporations lobbying. Before it was big pharma now its big supplement.. in the end the consumer gets the stick
- dpc_01234 1y ago[flagged]
- cool_man_bob 1y ago[flagged]
- ceejayoz 1y agoThere's a reason a bunch of old recipes say "scald the milk" as an early step.
- nathan_compton 1y agoJust because you've done something with clearly demonstrable problems without encountering the rare but serious issue with it does not mean the rest of society has to be ok with it. The attitude "if something is rare enough that I don't personally see a problem means there IS no problem" is dumb in a country with 300 million people or a world with 9 billion people. Like smoking: most people who smoke don't get lung cancer. But the risk increases enough that it ends up costing the public coffers quite a lot of money. Thus it is within the remit and interest of the public to curtail smoking, even if your grandmother smoked every day of her life till she died at 100 in a bungie jumping accident. It is one thing to believe that it would be better to have libertarian system that let you personally take the risk of drinking raw milk. But its dumb to call the regulation totalitarian.
- tverbeure 1y agoYour data point is what they call “anecdotal”. How does your underdeveloped country compare to developed countries in a bunch of health related indicators?
- dpc_01234 1y ago> Your data point is what they call “anecdotal”. Oh, whole nations and hundreds of years are now "an anecdote". > How does your underdeveloped country compare to developed countries in a bunch of health related indicators? Comparable, probably soon to overtake all US stats given how much of a shitshow the healthcare here is.
- hyperhello 1y agoIt's a series of large-scale distractions while they steal from the Treasury to support their power games.
- msla 1y agoNo, it's what they actually want. Destroying vaccines, for example, is something they've wanted for a long time. They're not masterminds. They really are this crazy.
- woooooo 1y agoIs it a long time for the vaccine thing? I thought anti-vax was a California vaguely hippie-ish thing in the 90s. It's actually weird that conservatives picked it up. I guess the throughline is being anti-flouride in the 60s?
- mindslight 1y agoTrumpists aren't actually deserving the label "conservative". They're the complete opposite - a mashed together hodgepodge of anti-everything grievance politics. Trump's main feature is a stream of drivel that sounds honest, opinionated, and assertive if you only listen to part of it. If you try to listen to everything he says and logically reconcile the statements, it's all contradictory. The only consistency is that grievance emotion. So it has created a big tent of follower-type people who value emotion over intelligence (think the stereotypical mind-blown hippie, man), from all sorts of (what are effectively) counter cultures. It doesn't matter that they aren't implementing good solutions, and that a lot of time there aren't any good solutions. The followers are just happy "someone is talking about it [, man]".
- msla 1y agoThe only difference I see between Trump and Reagan or Thatcher, for example, is how blatant Trump is about killing the people he sees as undesirable. Just get ICE to grab them instead of slowly turning off welfare and deregulating everything that pollutes, for example.
- mlinhares 1y agoThese folks are all selling supplements or some other quackery, they profit from it.
- Apreche 1y agoPrior to the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act of 1994 (DSHEA) it was mostly illegal to sell dietary supplements that weren’t legitimate. You couldn’t have homeopathy on the shelves at a drug store since it wouldn’t get through FDA approval. You couldn’t put so-called structure/function claims on the box such as ”for flu symptoms“ either. You couldn’t even do things like sell smoothies and claim that they boost the immune system. Once the DSHEA passed, snake oil was back on the menu. It has now become a multi-billion dollar industry. If science and facts win out, a lot of people stand to lose a lot of money.
- vvpan 1y agoHacker News is a little hard in these times. That it has kept politics unrelated to tech out is a great achievement, but as scientific method is being equated to flat-earth thinking by elected leaders talking about what's new in Rust seems off.
- ChrisRR 1y agoI really hope it doesn't become the norm. Check r/technology on reddit and it's 90% US politics posts
- bix6 1y agoI understand the frustration but the people on this board have real ability to make change so I think it’s worthwhile.
- Rebuff5007 1y ago> That it has kept politics unrelated to tech out is a great achievement I see your point, but is it an achievement? Is there not some amount of civil rights abuse or a breakdown of society that would warrant discussion on all possible spaces? I say this as someone that feels conflicted to see a daily twitter feed of tech leaders celebrating the performance of their favorite LLM breaking some new record when citizens and residents are being detained or discriminated against in violent and appalling ways... sometimes just meters from a fancy tech office!
- tinfoilhatter 1y agoMany of those tech "leaders", who are celebrating the performance of their favorite LLM are also large donors to politicians who are enabling the violent abuses of power you mentioned. I don't feel conflicted, because we're seeing exactly what they want to play out, play out.
- Esophagus4 1y agoCan I make a distinction of separating politics (especially US politics) from current affairs? Shining a light on current affairs, sure. It’s nice to engage with those on this site. I get just as tired of seeing the same posts about LLMs and the Ai BuBbLe as you do. And there are some political stories that are probably worth the real estate here. But where I’ll draw a distinction is that there will always be a political story grabbing attention on social media. And someone will always be outraged enough about it to deem it important enough for your outrage as well. For example, I’m sure there are people who would say this is important news: “politician responds to other people who respond to Trump’s ballroom construction”[1]. If we don’t have some line on politics specifically (because that has proven to be engagement-bait high-sugar content for the internet), we will end up with a lot of low quality content here and less interesting / focused discussion with the people that make this site interesting. Someone will always think every political story is important enough for discussion, but I think it’s healthy to keep HN free of most of it. Most of the low hanging, high-sugar fruit, at least. [1] https://thehill.com/homenews/senate/5566872-donald-trump-white-house-renovation-east-wing/ https://thehill.com/homenews/senate/5566872-donald-trump-whi...
- xhkkffbf 1y agoI think it's wrong to think of MAHA as "anti-science" because science is all about questioning. Something as important as medicine should be questioned and questioned again and again. Simply dismissing them out-of-hand with such a term is more anti-science than what they're doing. Now having said that, it's perfectly fair to criticize some of their assumptions and methods. The article, for instance, talks about raw milk. Pasteurization seems like a smart idea to me, but to assert that anyone who drinks raw milk is "anti science" is wrong. They're just approaching science differently.
- woooooo 1y agoI hear you and I once cringed at a "believe in science" sign at a liberal protest. But science is about questions demanding proof and rigor, verification, reproducible results. It's not about blindly saying "Yeah my questioning makes a bunch of unsupported claims equally valid".
- ThrowMeAway1618 1y ago>But science is about questions demanding proof and rigor, verification, reproducible results. It's not about blindly saying "Yeah my questioning makes a bunch of unsupported claims equally valid". Asimov's take[0] on stuff like this is just as relevant as ever: “Anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.'” ― Isaac Asimov Although it seems to concisely describe more and more (and far too much, IMHO) of our public discourse these days. And more's the pity. [0] https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/84250-anti-intellectualism-has-been-a-constant-thread-winding-its-way-through https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/84250-anti-intellectualism-...
- ceejayoz 1y ago> I think it's wrong to think of MAHA as "anti-science" because science is all about questioning. There's a lot more to science than just questioning, and the MAHA folks have little interest in questioning their own unfounded beliefs.
- pokstad 1y ago[flagged]
- graybeardhacker 1y agoDrinking untreated water also only has the _potential_ to cause disease. Playing Russian roulette with a loaded revolver only has the _potential_ to cause death. Luckily, science can quantify those potentials and determine when the reward outweighs the risks. If we, as a country, decided to let people who drank unpasteurized milk or untreated water to die without burdening the medical system, it would truly be their own choice. Once a society decides it will care for those people at a cost to the general public, it becomes necessary to protect the public from the burden of their ignorance.
- pokstad 1y agoI guess you never drank from a fresh water spring?
- _blk 1y agoHonestly the overburden to the health system sounds like lame excuse. We don't have an overburden there because of the massive consumption of raw milk. Try to buy some legally and you'll get the picture of how hard it is to find and how expensive it is. I'll happily wave any rights to be emergency treated for any reason (traffic accidents included) if you grant me the right to live in peace and buy the milk and meat from sources I like because that's what this freedom is worth to me. Anyone that I know that drinks raw milk, raw uncured meats, untreated water hasn't seen a doctor in over a decade.. not terribly scientific but a good indicator that I won't buy pharma-money backed "scientific" studies that show that low-fat, low-sodium and oats-in-cereal-bars are the solution to health issues. I'm all for science and capitalism but they're both not substitutes for common sense.
- ceejayoz 1y ago> Anyone that I know that drinks raw milk, raw uncured meats, untreated water hasn't seen a doctor in over a decade. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Survivorship-bias.svg https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Survivorship-bias.sv...
- nxor 1y ago[flagged]
- EvanAnderson 1y agoSince I feel powerless to stop it I wonder if I should shift my portfolio to the funeral industry and try to profit from it. I'm only kind of joking.
- dataviz1000 1y agoFrom the front page of Bloomberg today > "Disaster Spending Has Become an $8 Trillion Engine for US Growth"
- ge96 1y agoHello Tech Crunch, we'd like to present our coffin made out of recyclable cardboard, buy it in bulk for your whole family for a discount
- redserk 1y agoFor TechCrunch you need to latch onto at least a few trends. For example: Medium Memories is introducing an AI-enabled coffin personalized to the relationship between you and your late-loved one. Medium provides you an always-on cloud-connected camera to ensure you won’t have to lose sight of those who matter to you. Medium Plans start at $2.99/mo for 60 minutes of AI-enabled talk time a month. Here’s our interview with founder Bamuel Saltman.
- tavavex 1y agoAnd for just $25.99/month, you may access our premium offering - Medium Resurrect. Compatible with only our top offering, the fully sealed, biologically preserving LifeCoffin Ultimate (only from $9,999), instead of using a generic model, we will let you upload the data, messages and videos of the deceased. Then, we will finetune your own personalized LLM, and using cutting-edge voice transfer and video generation technology, we'll superimpose your loved one's talking, smiling face onto the live feed from your LifeCoffin Ultimate. Giving you closure and a moment of reflective peace, Medium will empower you to speak to your love one more time.
- graybeardhacker 1y agoSaying "Everyone but me is lying to you." to ignorant people who are already suspicious of corporations and science is a simple way to consolidate power. Once power is consolidated, you can then get paid by any snake oil salesman to say their snake oil is the best.
- pessimizer 1y agoWorking for big raw milk against "the science." RFK, Jr.'s assessment of medical evidence is bad, and he doesn't seem to have spent a second on ending public advertising of prescription drugs. I personally don't like him and have never liked him. But also, medical evidence is bad and wrong, the modern anti-vax movement was started by the low standards of The Lancet, and big pharma really does run our media (through that advertising) and consistently suborns all medical research. Watching that fake Alzheimer's drug get repeatedly reintroduced as a miracle for a change of 1.5 questions on a subjective checklist, even after a bunch of experts at the FDA who had a moral center quit over it, was depressing. Putting this quack rich kid at the head of the agency will at least have some effect on it other than the effect of big pharma cash. I think the proof for the effectiveness of the MMR and HPV vaccines is indisputable. I also think that big pharma lobbying for vaccine indemnification against lawsuits, and the consequent explosion in the number of vaccines, was an opportunity to push a lot of stuff in that the "science" defenders never seem to bring up. They always defend the entire class of "vaccines," and avoid the harder to defend specifics. This is something you have to be paid to do, because it is a deliberate rhetorical distraction. Also, the classes of drugs that make the most money (not vaccines) have the least evidence of effect. Not just the real evidence, but even the claimed effects are tiny and take a bunch of suspicious math to find. This is a sign of a system that runs on corruption. Not that you need signs, because the companies are making direct payments. Just like we legalized bribery in our politics, we normalized bribery in medical literature, practice, and journalism. [*] like Ioannidis taught us before he got canceled for being more right (or at the worst equally wrong in the other direction) about covid than everyone else. Remember when HN worshiped the science, rather than "the science," and posted every Ioannidis paper?
- auntienomen 1y agoThe quack rich kid is breaking the parts of NIH/CDC/etc that were working correctly. Writing that off as "some effect" ignores what we can already plainly see.
- UncleMeat 1y agoIoannidis more right about covid than everybody else? Do you remember his concrete predictions about the number of deaths?
- jeffbee 1y agoThere don't have to be beneficiaries driving it. RFKj is an actual eugenicist. He's not doing it for hidden reasons. He's doing it because he thinks your child who does not survive measles should have died because that's the better outcome.
- cool_man_bob 1y agoWhy did he not treat his brain parasites the same?
- hypeatei 1y agoThe same reason that RFK uses TRT for "anti-aging": they're hypocrites and don't care.
- treetalker 1y agoTo answer the question posed in the title: Russia and China, for two.
- Herring 1y agoAnd Republicans! Damaged/hurt/frightened humans tend to vote for right wing and fascists. This is because going left wing is expensive, it requires time to know, like and trust your neighbors.