Is Oklahoma’s Raw Milk Trend Potentially Dangerous?

For whatever reason, a raw milk trend is spreading across Oklahoma. Why is that?

If you're not familiar with dairy lingo, raw milk is regular old cow milk that hasn't gone through the pasteurization process. It's quite literally straight out of the cow.

Three years after watching people eat horse dewormer to treat the covid, it's not the wildest trend we've seen in America--yet there's so much contrasting information surrounding it, it seems to be more of a 'trust your gut' type of thing.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and the Food and Drug Administration, consuming raw milk puts a person at risk of catching a terrible time due to things like Campylobacter, Cryptosporidium, E. coli, Listeria, Brucella, and Salmonella.

Pasteurizing milk eliminates almost all of these bacteria, reducing the odds of a person suffering harsh consequences that could arise.

On the flip side, people that opt for raw milk praise it as natural nutrition and that the benefits are far more worth the potential risks of paralysis, kidney failure, stroke, and death. Claiming that pasteurization reduces the nutritional composition of milk.

It's understandable that Americans are trying their best to move away from the chemically polluted foods we find on store shelves, but should milk be part of that conversation?

Luckily for us, there have been tons and tons of studies done on this topic to offer answers to the rumors and myths surrounding raw milk.

Does pasteurization affect the nutritional load of milk? Sort of, but at levels so low there's practically zero difference between the two.

Does pasteurization create milk allergies in humans? No.

Will raw milk make you sick? Eh, potentially.

As with all things in life, there's a risk to just about everything. Let's look at the data.

During a 13-year study in Texas, there were a grand total of two cases of contracted foodborne illness attributed to drinking raw, unpasteurized milk. Two.

During the same period of time, 486 people got down with the sickness from oysters. 852 people were sickened by turkey. 225 people had their metaphorical Achilles tendon slashed by ham salad--whatever that is. If I'm not mistaken, Blue Bell Ice Cream had a handful of listeria outbreaks that ultimately ended up in a federal indictment for their former President.

All the same, while the two people in Texas affected negatively by consuming raw milk seems shockingly small, you have to wonder how many people in Texas during this time were drinking unpasteurized milk. I'm pretty confident tons more people were eating turkey and ham salad.

I suppose it all comes down to personal choice and each individual asking themselves a question that gets progressively harder to answer as time goes on... Do you trust the government to operate in your best interests?