Being anti pasteurization is the one that really gets me. Like it's just heating up the milk slightly for a brief period of time. It's really simple and not scary science that's easily misunderstood. Like what about heating up milk is dangerous?
The only thing I've been able to come up with is that it's a conspiracy theory of manufactured panic to send people down the right wing pipeline.
I think it's partly leftover dribble from the inane Gaia "theory" that was so strong in hippie circles. Everything natural (like bacteria in milk) is good, and you know, gut bacteria, yogurt, 's all good, right?
Combine that with "what doesn't kill you makes you stronger" beliefs that they don't realize come from right wing nuts and you got a perfect diarrhea inducing cocktail that we all get to pay for with our taxes and our nerves.
It's interesting to see how a lot of the hippie "natural is good" memes got a new, completely different segment of the population to live on.
*drivel
My personal theory:
First off, raw milk does taste noticably different than pasteurized and homogenized milk you find at the store.
Pasteurization: heating the milk triggers the unfolding of proteins (Denaturation). This is what kills the bacteria but can also change the flavor of the milk.
Homogenization. This process breaks up the fat into smaller segments so they stay in solution in the milk. The result is a less creamy flavor.
People instinctually associate flavor with nutritional value. They think that better flavored food = better for you. This sort-of works in tomatoes and a few other fruit/vegetables. However taste perception is a complex blend of genetics, environmental conditions, and psychology. So the results are inherently unpredictable and completely unreliable.
The unpasteurized crowd all fall for the 'it tastes better so it must be better". They then make all sorts of excuses to justify their instinct. " Big corporate milk is evil!!" Blah blah blah.
The only time I ever liked plain milk was still warm out of the cow. These days, I just don't drink milk except for a very rare (couple of times a year) chocolate milk or milkshake where I don't taste the milk itself, really.
Breed and diet definitely impact milk flavor and fat percentage, but some types of pasteurization seem to as well.
This is not an endorsement to drink milk that has not been pasteurized.
Aside from that, particularly with regard to colostrum, some people think treating the milk can damage things. As mentioned, I'm not a milk drinker to begin with, but I have no idea if (a) there are any studies showing benefits or even effects of drinking colostrum, particularly as an adult and from something other than a human or (b) regardless of point a if there is even any study on heat damaging it. I watch a lot of farming/homesteading content and some people are really into this.
There's a whole subset of idiots that believe that you need to expose yourself to harmful shit to have a strong immune system. (See: all the people licking toilets and crap during lockdown)
There's some credible science to it, in the way that, an immunization is literally putting "harmful" stuff in you to train your immune system. This is known science that I should be able to mostly hand wave around since most people already know this. Immunizations are usually focusing on a key indicator, eg, for COVID, it's the protein on the outside of the vital cell wall (all the spiky bits in the illustrations) or whatever.... I'm no scientist. For other viruses and bacteria, it's a deactivated version of the virus... It's essentially "dead" for all intents and purposes. It just resembles the virus so closely that it effectively trains your immune system to recognize it.
With all that being said, not all bacteria and viruses are something we can develop a natural immunity to, partly because some of them just kill us, partly because there's something that is preventing it. Again I'm not a scientist.
Regardless, these idiots think that by exposing yourself to "natural" viruses and bacteria, you can strengthen your immune system. Bluntly, it's possible to do that, and why the fuck would you want to do it that way? It's literally a randomized version of a science we already have that's tried, tested, and proven effective, called immunizations. With immunizations, you get all the benefits of surviving the horrors of some of the most nasty viruses and bacteria out there, without suffering through what those viruses and bacteria are going to do to you.
The whole thing is stupid.
If anyone argues about "good" bacteria, tell them to eat yogurt. FFS.
It’s just unscientific thinking. People think virus and bacteria are the only thing you have to worry about, but lots of the time it’s the bacteria producing toxins as part of their metabolism that’s dangerous to us. In other words, their shit is poison.
One of the reasons we don’t want some groups of bacteria growing on our foodstuff is because they turn stuff literally toxic to us, completely unrelated to immune responses. Same way some molds can be toxic while others are not. It’s not because the fungus starts growing inside your body and has an epic free for all with your immune system. Its byproducts are just toxic. Like some berries or some plants are toxic.
Many, but not all, of the anti -pasteurization people believe that there is an invisible "life force" in the milk that is killed by processing. This is an old idea, but this unfalsifiable and unprovable "life force" thinking undergirds a lot of pseudoscience. People believe in getting energy aligned and unblocked and so on, and believe that drinking milk with mysterious life force is more natural.
Some people are just defiant against reason and if someone they don't like told them it's safer or better that will assume the opposite conclusion then look for any terrible reason that agrees with their already accepted conclusion.
I don't think it's the heating up from milk that gets these people. It's the mandate that it must be done.
Same with masks. They want the FrEeDoM to do whatever the fuck they want, even if it hurts someone else.
There is beneficial bacteria from what I hear, but of course the risk of harmful bacteria is leagues higher.
Raw milk that is carefully and intentionally produced for direct human consumption is a low-risk food with superb nutritional benefits.
While it's tastier raw, though that's subjective I suppose, no significant amount of nutrients are lost during pasteurization. Most minerals aren't destroyed by that heat. Bacteria and most viri are destroyed however.
The vitamins lost by pasteurization aren't that significant that it compares to the chance of contracting salmonella.
Natural selection is also "going natural"
Look up an old newspaper from say 100-120 years ago and check out the obituaries.
SEWARD, Mark – Died at Gooseberry Cove, Trinity Bay, on the 2nd inst. [January 1891], Mark, youngest child of Thomas and Rosanna Seward, aged 4 years.
SEWARD, Peter – Died on the 10th inst., Peter, second youngest son of Robert and Mary A. Seward, aged 2 years.
SEWARD – Died on the 14th inst., infant child of James and Mary A. Seward.
SEWARD, Richard – Died on the 15th inst., Richard, youngest son of Joseph and Louisa Seward, aged 4 years.
SEWARD, James – Died on the 19th inst., James, second youngest child of James and Mary A. Seward, aged 2 years (Evening Telegram, January 29, 1891)
Or just walk through an old graveyard. There’s a pioneer cemetery near my old place with so many children’s graves. One family gravesite has the mother’s name, the father’s name, a couple of their kids, some young, some adults… and one is just titled ‘babies’.
Like, so many babies died for that mother and father they just put them all in one grave, not even names to remember them by…
Walk into any old graveyard and notice all the tiny little tombstones of children who died before the age of two. Before vaccines were in use.
Now notice how almost NONE of those tombstones are recent.
Smaller graves fit more efficiently into the cemetary, AND they stimulate the economy via the funeral industry, which Im heavily invested in!
- Some political ghoul, probably
Obviously they aren't recent, it's an old graveyard.
You know why nobody living in a town gets buried in its cemetery? Because they are living.
Primitive forms of innoculation, antiseptic, and pasteurizing go back centuries if not millennia. The very idea of the small pox vaccine came out of the recognition that cow pox mitigated the risk of contagion. Milk maids were (unwittingly) vaccinating themselves for some time.
And pasteurization is just cooking your food. Hell, the whole reason primitive people started baking bread, roasting meat, and brewing beer came down to the benefits of sterilization.
These aren't even new ideas, per say. They're advances in technique, understanding of consequence, and means of distribution.
the whole reason primitive people started baking bread, roasting meat,
It's to start the break down of food. We evolved to outsource our digestion to cooking.
Brewing beer is entirely different though.
It’s to start the break down of food.
That too. But killing parasites in meat and fish is another big benefit.
We evolved to outsource our digestion to cooking.
To a degree. But we also just died more often to infection and disease. Cooking reduced mortality rates, which spurred a larger population, whose members transmitted the knowledge of how and what to cook before eating.
Pasteurization is even below what most would consider as cooking temperature. It's getting your food really hot for a while but not boiling. It's kind of like edging but in cooking.
love your username lmao
I saw one on Tiktok today, who worked those jobs before immigrants?
Slaves. Slaves worked those jobs. Then former slaves treated like slaves. Then immigrants. Literally right into the 1940s and then Mexican labor was imported.
As the former slaves' descendants were increasingly shoehorned into the new industrial prison complex
my grandad used to buy fresh milk from a farmer around the corner - until he got salmonella from it and almost died
A world population graph from 1900 til now would be an adequate answer for that question.
No, graph of life expectancy would.
Too much for the world to bear to way too much?
ask any old-timer about polio, and why we don't worry about it as much now.
Well, maybe not any old-timer...a lot have fallen into that conspiracy black hole
If you want to be all natural, get off the internet.
Stop eating modern vegetables and fruits.
Return to monke.
No modern grains: find the original wild versions of wheat, corn, and rice and only process and eat those.
Haha. Good point. Also good luck with anyone being able to do that.
It's been optimized over 100s (1000s probably) of years. It's definitely better because of it.
Just in case - I did not mean you, just the people who spew such shit.
Like my mother. Jesus, I had to explain a lot to her for her to stop saying that stuff near me.
"Going natural" is a shitty euphemism for anti-vax. Call it what it is.
Right, like uhh you know the average life span for a healthy male used to be 25 years right? Did you think that was for no reason? Smfh.
Did you think 90 years passed and suddenly the life span tripled?
The idiocy
Edit: to make sure some of the responses aren't misunderstanding my point - medicine.
Scientific advances. Technology, research, people knowing how to literally wash their fucking hands added years to the lifespan.
And yes it has tripled in some cases. 18th century France the life expectancy was twenty four years old.
This increase to what we see today is LARGELY due to medical care and sanitation alone.
It's all over the board back then, in fact, because of sanitation. Diseases would.come and go and life expentencies would sink like a tanker because sanitation was non existent.
So yes I exaggerated the time span, obviously, but I wasn't kidding about the tripling part - if a bit vaguely.
25, that is quite a historical extreme, isn't it?
In the wild, average live span was around 40 to 50 years. There's even studies about the evolutional reasons why we live longer than other primates/why we are the only hominide with grandparents.
Sure, it is an extreme. As in my edit I stated: this is due to sanitation. It is all over the board throughout the 15th-18th century world because pandemics/diseases/epidemics came and went and sanitation was so low and medicine was so bad that people dropped like flies, and thus did the life expentency average.
In particular, my "25 year l.e." example was about 18th century France.
25 was a shortened life span due to agriculture. We live longer than cave men now, but it hasn't tripled.
Yeah you know what else is all natural? Air. But guess what you don't inject into your blood?
You haven’t lived until you’ve experienced the thrill of watching an air bubble go down the tube and in through your IV!
It’s not super dangerous in a normal IV unless it’s a lot of air, fortunately.
small rocks? no. wood? ... a witch!
Heroin. I don't inject heroin into my blood.
People out there offering you free drugs and you say no?
Well that's just lying be omission. Lots of people were disabled or disfigured too.
Remember the fucking plague? It's making a comeback!
We are the plague.
And then, John was a zombie.
"farewell" and "last date ever", they always say. As soon as the money runs out... BAM! Time for another tour.
Still better than getting the vaccines that cause you to eat the Bill Gates Fake Peach Tree dish meat.
Edit: This was intended to be a joke. https://www.forbes.com/sites/brucelee/2022/05/30/did-marjorie-taylor-greene-say-peach-tree-dish-instead-of-petri-dish/
are you meme'ing or did you forget how to spell petri
Those make sense to me, but I'll be honest with you, where I struggle is with the idea of sunscreen. How did our ancestors live outside constantly without any sunscreen but if I'm outside for more than 2 hours in the summer without it I come home looking like a burnt lobster?
I'm sure the answer is that I'm ignorant, or the "natural causes" of yesteryear were really just undiagnosed skin cancer or something, but I have to admit it does seem like a real negative adaptation here from the viewpoint of my uneducated mind.
If they lived in areas with a lot of sunshine, they developed dark skin. If they didn't, they developed light skin. Beyond that, if they were light skinned and moved to areas with a lot of sunshine they wore long sleeves and wide brimmed hats even in hot weather, and their face and neck skin turned to leather. They typically didn't live long enough for skin cancer to be a concern.
As I said in a other comment, I think "they didn't live long enough" is a bit of misconception. I'll repeat my comment here rather than writing it out again:
"So I'm no expert, so take this with a grain of salt, but it's my understanding that while average ages were much lower in the past, this number is heavily skewed by infant mortalities and deaths due to preventable disease. As I understand it, the expected age of an otherwise healthy individual was pretty comparable to us today. More people died young, but those who didn't lived about as long as us. So I don't think not living long enough for skin cancer to take effect really jives with my understanding of history.
But again, I'm not an expert and the likelihood that I'm just an idiot who is wildly misunderstanding things is, frankly, high."
We need sunscreen becuase we're indoors 8 and months of the year, then run out naked to sunbathe.
If we were outside more and naturally built up a tan it really wouldn't be that much of an issue for most people.
You have to remember that people generally wore long sleeve clothing and hats. They did not expose much skin to the sun historically
That's a great question! We didn't really need sunscreen in prehistoric time because we adapted to the environments that we lived in and we didn't migrate to new environments as quickly as we could in later times. Those adaptations are getting more tan more easily and growing thicker skin. We can still see this now in people who don't use sunscreen and their skin looks tougher and more leathery. Also, there were some ancient sunscreens ranging from simple mud to pastes made from ground plants.
People have been making clothing for ~5 million years or so.
Maybe people didn't live long enough for skin cancer to make a difference?
So I'm no expert, so take this with a grain of salt, but it's my understanding that while average ages were much lower in the past, this number is heavily skewed by infant mortalities and deaths due to preventable disease. As I understand it, the expected age of an otherwise healthy individual was pretty comparable to us today. More people died young, but those who didn't lived about as long as us. So I don't think not living long enough for skin cancer to take effect really jives with my understanding of history.
But again, I'm not an expert and the likelihood that I'm just an idiot who is wildly misunderstanding things is, frankly, high.
Well there is that protective layer in the atmosphere that we fucked up.
The ozone layer is slowly healing itself, but we still have a long way to go before it is stable again.
Also as others pointed out, we don't work the fields and spend most of our time outside any more....so the natural protection isn't building up like it did in the past.
Have you ever seen an Australian rancher? They look like boiled lobsters
When you get old and spend a lot of time outdoors, you look like a dried up prune. Regardless of skin color, typically
"let's ask them"
I mean, they all died. Just as we will all die.
