Why People Won’t Shut Up About Raw Milk
No one on the right has been able to shut up about raw milk. In recent months, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene posted on X, “Raw Milk does a body good. Make America Healthy Again!” and the pro-Trump organization Turning Point USA started selling “Got raw milk?”-branded T-shirts. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. came out as a fan and told a crowd of his supporters he drinks it exclusively. A few weeks before the election, he tweeted that Food and Drug Administration regulations on raw milk were part of the agency’s “war on public health.”
Following Donald Trump’s victory, as well as Kennedy’s nomination to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, raw milk is once again part of the discourse. Some right-wing influencers are gloating that the controversy over raw milk was a factor in Trump’s victory (even though it probably wasn’t) and rejoicing over the prospect of raw milk being available on grocery store shelves. It’s all very weird!
So why, exactly, is the right so obsessed with raw milk? Does it actually have any health benefits, or is buying a jug at Erewhon simply an easy way to end up with vomiting and bloody diarrhea? Here’s what to know.
What is raw milk, exactly?
“Raw” milk is simply milk that hasn’t been pasteurized — that is, heated to a temperature high enough to kill bacteria and viruses. Though the precise temperature required varies depending on the process, most experts agree that milk should be heated to at least 161 degrees Fahrenheit for a minimum of 15 seconds for it to be considered fully pasteurized.
Invented by Louis Pasteur in the 1800s, pasteurization was widely adopted in the United States in the mid-20th century and is widely credited with reducing the spread of foodborne illnesses such as typhoid, tuberculosis, and scarlet fever. In fact, according to FDA data, prior to pasteurization becoming mainstream, unpasteurized milk was responsible for nearly a quarter of all food- and waterborne illnesses. Thanks to pasteurization, the rate of reported illnesses per billion servings of milk is at less than half of one percent, according to one 2015 study.
Is it legal to drink raw milk?
Yes, depending on where you are. It’s currently legal to sell and consume raw milk in 30 states. (In New York, only Department of Agriculture-licensed dairy farmers are allowed to sell raw milk and must do so on the premises of their respective farms.) But even if it’s perfectly legal to drink raw milk in your state, the FDA doesn’t allow the transport of raw milk across state lines. (This is, presumably, the type of regulation RFK Jr. was referring to when he tweeted that the FDA was waging “war on public health.”)
In the European Union, it is technically legal to sell raw milk in all member nations, and some right-wing influencers have cited this as a model for food safety in the United States. But it’s not quite true that the EU allows for the unregulated sale of raw milk. As is the case in the United States, regulations vary across countries. And in Nordic countries like Norway and Denmark, so few distributors are licensed to sell raw milk that it’s all but banned.
Are there any benefits to drinking raw milk?
Raw milk proponents often claim that pasteurization changes the nutritional composition of milk, eliminating beneficial vitamins in the process, and that it removes good bacteria that’s advantageous to gut health. And there may be a grain of truth to this claim, says Rabia de Latour, a gastroenterologist at NYU’s Grossman School of Medicine. “Whether it’s human breast milk or animal milk, raw milk does have a lot of bacteria in it and active microbes” that could be beneficial to gut health, she says.
The problem, de Latour says, is that while raw milk may contain some “good” bacteria, “it also has some dangerous ones that could make you extremely ill.” She says the potential benefits of unpasteurized milk for one’s microbiome can also be gained from eating high-fiber and probiotic foods such as sauerkraut, kimchi, kefir, and yogurt — without any of the accompanying risks.
Raw milk advocates also frequently claim that pasteurization is “unnatural,” akin to how certain chemicals are added to processed foods. But this is fundamentally untrue, according to Céline Gounder, an infectious disease specialist and epidemiologist at NYU and the editor-at-large of KFF Public Health News. “Just as we learned to cook our food to reduce our risk of various pathogens, we learned to pasteurize,” she says. “It’s not an ‘unnatural’ process.”
Okay, so what are the risks of drinking raw milk?
These also range widely. Gounder notes that drinking milk directly from a cow’s udders — which, as one may recall from seventh-grade anatomy class, are located not very far from a cow’s anus — carries with it the risk of serious bacterial infection, including E. coli, salmonella, and listeria. Such infections can result in stomach pain, nausea, and diarrhea, as well as kidney failure, hospitalization, and even death in extreme cases.
“Cows are not like us in that they don’t attend to their hygiene as most humans do,” Gounder says. “If you think about how feces drop from cattle, that might contaminate the underside of the animal, which is where you have the udders.” This is why the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention doesn’t recommend consuming raw milk, particularly because bacterial infections like listeria and E. coli are dangerous for those who are immunocompromised, such as the elderly, infants, and pregnant and nursing people. In the latter demographic, listeria has been linked to instances of stillbirth and fetal loss, Gounder says.
Proponents of raw milk tend to counter by claiming that getting sick is exceedingly rare when dairy farmers use proper hygiene protocols, like conducting pathogen tests to check for E. coli or listeria or testing cattle for illnesses like tuberculosis. Indeed, it’s certainly true that many people have consumed raw milk without contracting any sort of foodborne illness, and even the CDC has found that the risk of death from drinking raw milk is lower than that of, say, oysters. (Approximately 100 people die annually from vibriosis, a disease caused by eating raw oysters. By comparison, raw milk was linked to more than 2,500 hospitalizations between 1998 and 2018 but only three deaths, according to the CDC and FDA.)
The issue, says de Latour, is that there’s virtually no method, short of pasteurization, to totally eliminate the risks posed by raw milk — particularly for the immunocompromised, pregnant people, infants, and the elderly, who are much more likely to experience severe illness as a result of foodborne illness. Most people in the United States have also never consumed unpasteurized milk before, increasing their risk for experiencing gastrointestinal illness. De Latour has experienced this firsthand — as a child, she got “violently ill” after drinking raw milk for the first time when visiting her family in Pakistan. “If you’ve grown up on a farm and you’ve only drank raw milk your whole life, your body is probably more accustomed to it,” she says. “But the average person who’s grown up on pasteurized milk is not going to tolerate that very well.”
How does bird flu come into play here?
The risk of potential gastrointestinal illness aside, public health experts are particularly concerned about H5N1, also known as bird flu, being spread through raw milk. Though the virus is most often associated with poultry, it can be spread via dairy cows and has been detected in cattle in 15 states since spring 2024, including California, Kansas, North Carolina, and Ohio.
The fear, Gounder says, is that the more people who are exposed to bird flu, the more opportunities it has to mutate and possibly become more dangerous. “If you have people being exposed to H5N1 avian flu and then they get infected with regular seasonal flu, they can function as a mixing vessel in which these different flu viruses combine and form a Frankenstein virus to which people do not have any preexisting immunity,” she says. “And that’s how you end up with a pandemic.” If one person consumes raw milk and is infected with bird flu as a result, “that could put the rest of the population at risk,” she says.
Over the past few months, bird flu has been on the upswing, with 52 human cases confirmed in the United States as of November 18. Thirty of these cases were linked specifically to exposure to dairy cows. To date, we don’t know how many of these cases, if any, are attributable to raw milk consumption, and fortunately, the vast majority of the human cases have been mild, Gounder says. But concerns about H5N1 in dairy cows are high enough that the CDC and FDA issued a warning about it in May, recommending people avoid consuming “raw milk and raw milk products.”
Why are we talking about this right now?
Raw milk has been a talking point among crunchier health and wellness circles for years. It’s so popular that even ostensibly apolitical lifestyle influencers like Hannah Neeleman (@ballerinafarm) and Gwyneth Paltrow have come out in favor of drinking it. In March, Paltrow told an interviewer she puts unpasteurized cream in her coffee every morning.
Over the past few years, however, raw milk has shifted from a fringe wellness fad to something of a rallying cry on the right. Part of this stems from the right’s emphasis on “natural” foods, stemming from their (justifiable) frustration over the prominence of processed foods in the American diet, de Latour says. “Foods that can sit on a shelf or in a vending machine for, like, 10 years should probably not be consumed by people,” she says. “There’s no nutritional value whatsoever, and it just exposes you to a lot of thickeners, additives, and agents, some of which are known to be carcinogens. I think lots of people have just had it.”
Conservatives have also pointed to crackdowns on raw milk as evidence of draconian governmental overreach. That reached an apex this year, when two people became ill after drinking raw milk from an Amish dairy farmer in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. The USDA filed a lawsuit against him, alleging that he didn’t have the proper permit to sell raw milk, which prompted backlash within the Amish community. In the months leading up to the election, the GOP took advantage of the controversy, and MAGA influencer Scott Presler vowed to a crowd of Amish voters that the Trump administration would protect raw milk.
The appeal seemed to work: The Amish community reportedly turned out in record numbers for Trump this year, though it’s still too early to tell the number of group members who voted or exactly how many votes went to Trump. (It’s also highly unlikely, despite some conservative pundits’ claims, that the Amish vote swung Pennsylvania; experts estimate that of the 95,000 Amish people in Pennsylvania, only about half are eligible to vote.)
What could RFK Jr. do about raw milk?
RFK Jr. has long been a supporter of raw milk. In 2022, he told panelists at a Children’s Health Defense conference that he exclusively drinks unpasteurized milk, a claim he repeated a number of times during his presidential campaign. Since Trump nominated Kennedy to lead the HHS, which oversees both the FDA and the CDC, many public health experts have expressed concern that he may relax regulations around raw milk. But even if Kennedy is confirmed, he’s fairly limited in what he can do, since the regulations governing the sale of raw milk vary state by state, Gounder says.
There are, however, some actions he could take. “If he wanted to tamper with science and say, ‘Oh, it’s perfectly safe to drink raw milk,’ could he overrule the CDC director and all of the CDC scientists and post on the CDC website, ‘Go drink your raw milk. It’s healthy,’ or liberalize the sale of raw milk across state lines? I suppose he could do that,” she says. Doing so, she says, would require cooperation from other federal departments, including the USDA, but considering the USDA tends to be more pro-industry, it’s unlikely there would be much pushback, she says.
De Latour is less worried about how RFK’s stance on raw milk may affect public health policy and more concerned about the implications of some of his other views, like his skepticism of vaccines. “Ultimately, it’s gonna come down to consumer choice,” she says. “People should be informed about the risks, and it may become easier for people who want to drink raw milk to do that, but they usually find a way to get it for themselves anyway.”
Still, the pro-raw milk messaging has been powerful. Raw milk sales are rising nationwide, even without Kennedy installed as HHS head, and the risks are concerning enough that many public health experts are deeply worried about vulnerable populations becoming sick or even dying as a result. “This is something that can cause meningitis and other severe infections, as well as potential fetal loss,” Gounder says. “Just one of those events is too many. We could be headed towards some really tragic outcomes that are entirely preventable.” The potential head of HHS advocating for the sale of raw milk, she adds, “feels like we’re returning to the 1800s in terms of public health. What’s next? We’re not going to treat our raw sewage anymore?”
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