Raw Milk, Part One
The Rise of Anecdotal Evidence
In the chaos of the last two weeks, it was probably easy to miss an triumphant announcement from Health and Human Services: On March 5, under pressure from RFK Jr.’s administration, fifty-three medical schools agreed to add forty hours of nutrition education to their curricula.
Why is this alarming?
Well, as such, it isn’t. We know that food affects health, and of course young doctors should be encouraged to think outside of their prescription pads. But given the public pronouncements about food that have been coming out of HHS, it’s worth asking: what sorts of nutrition will these young doctors now be learning about?
We might get a clue from RFK Jr. himself, who famously wrote on Twitter that what he termed “FDA’s war on public health is about to end.” This “war” was, apparently, multifronted and included the FDA’s “aggressive suppression of psychedelics, peptides, stem cells, raw milk, hyperbaric therapies, chelating compounds, ivermectin, hydroxychloroquine, vitamins, clean foods, sunshine, exercise, nutraceuticals and anything else that advances human health and can’t be patented by Pharma.”
There is much to be questioned here, including in what ways the FDA has somehow “aggressively suppressed” sunshine and exercise. But since the public health benefits of psychedelics and horse dewormers are probably beyond the scope of this column (and, I hope, beyond the scope of medical school nutrition programs), let’s take a minute to consider raw milk.
Until 1917, all milk was raw milk.
Milk had been prescribed from ancient times as a cure for multiple diseases. But in the early twentieth century, as our knowledge of bacteria and other germs slowly expanded, food (unless properly pickled, salted, or overcooked) was increasingly fingered as the harbor for multiple disease-causing organisms.
In 1917, the American microbiologist Alice Evans—one of the very few women who had managed to carve out a space in the almost exclusively male domain of bacteriology—identified the bacteria Bacillus abortus as the cause of a human disease known as “undulant fever”, feverish pain and night sweats that could last for weeks or even years. Carrier in milk, the bacteria had sickened thousands but had often been misdiagnosed as flu, rheumatism, or arthritis. Evans located the bacteria, experimented with tests that could prove its presence in the patient, and pointed out a simple solution: Heat raw milk to a brief boil, or to the lower temperature of 140 degrees Fahrenheit for twenty minutes. In honor of the French microbiologist Louis Pasteur, who had shown that heat destroyed the bacteria that spoiled fermenting alcohol, this simple method became known as pasteurization.
Alice Evans’s discovery was greeted with slow acceptance. It made the rounds of scientific circles for a decade before the first popular explanation, written by Dutch microbiologist (and World War 1 veteran) Paul de Kruif, appeared in the broad-circulation Ladies Home Journal. The 1929 article, “Before You Drink a Glass of Milk,” began dramatically:
Before you drink a glass of milk, it will be mighty wise for your health, it may even save your life, to ask a simple question…For in American milk today there lurks a terrible, wasting fever, that may keep you in bed for a couple of weeks, that may fasten itself on you for one, or for two, or even for seven years—that might culminate by killing you.
The article was a blockbuster. “Suddenly,” boasted the editor of the Ladies’ Home Journal, Loren Schuler, “here was a story in the Journal with enormous circulation which said to the mothers that milk is a fine food but be sure it is pasteurized because they may get a bad fever if it has this germ in it.”
Over the next forty years, consumption of pasteurized milk rose, and childhood diseases plummeted—in large part due to the “cleanup” of milk.
In fact, when Benjamin Spock, the pediatric guru of twentieth century parents, published the 1968 edition of Baby and Child Care, he had to explain the old-fashioned term “summer complaint” (“serious intestinal infections that afflicted tens of thousands of babies yearly”), since this milk-borne illness had almost disappeared.
Fast forward to the late 1990s.
Selling unpasteurized milk had been outlawed in most American states, but searching out “raw” milk at small farms had also become a poke in the eye to the “Establishment.” A watershed moment in the raw milk movement was the founding, in 1999, of the “Weston A. Price Foundation,” a nonprofit dedicated to promoting a “primitive diet rich in animal foods,” including unpasteurized milk. Search for “raw milk benefits” on your favorite search engine, and the top results will all come from westonaprice.org and realmilk.com (“A Project of the Weston A. Price Foundation.”)
In the links below, you can read much more (if you’re inclined) about the Foundation, about RFK Jr.’s links with it, and also about the ways in which poking the Establishment in the eye by drinking raw milk transformed itself from a left-wing to a right-wing enterprise. But I want to focus in on two aspects of the raw milk movement that give me pause about this forty hours of nutrition education in medical schools.
I’ll deal with the second aspect in next week’s post. But for today, let’s have a look at the extent to which raw milk enthusiasts depend on anecdotal, rather than actual scientific evidence.
“A Weston A. Price local chapter leader reports on a two-year-old boy with very serious asthma. After the mother put the boy on raw cow’s milk, the child went through the entire winter without a visit to the doctor fo any reason and no asthma attacks—except for one, a serious attack that occurred after the boy consumed pasteurized milk while on a family trip.” (on realmilk.com)
“[Maggie] suffered socially because of eczema. She had open sores on her legs and arms …Finally, when Maggie was ten, our parents found a doctor who took a different approach. The doctor saw that she was inflamed due to allergies. Pasteurized milk topped the list of food allergies…Maggie went from eating a typical diet to eating only select foods, and raw milk was…an aid in rebuilding her digestive flora After just three months on her diet, her condition was significantly better. Within six months, her eczema was almost gone.” (on farmandranchfreedom.org)
“I was diagnosed with lactose intolerance. I also have an autoimmune condition. We see a lot of that, where the medicines prescribed are not helping and quality of life is declining and that was my own story,” [Kristina] explained. She says drinking raw milk reversed her lactose intolerance and lessened the impact of her autoimmune condition — and she’s not the only one. “We have folks that come for things like psoriasis, for asthma, [...] autoimmune conditions, and they’re just seeing a return to quality of life,” https://spectrumlocalnews.com/nys/central-ny/news/2025/01/23/the-battle-over-raw-milk)
“As a 50 year old private pilot I fly unpressurized small aircraft 140 hours per year…Until I started drinking raw milk, I always suffered pressure changes in my sinuses and ears as I would either go up or down in altitude in my aircraft. It was painful and it was very distracting to always be concentrating on clearing my ears. The pain of sinus pressure from blocked or inflamed sinus passages was horrible. In 2000, I began to drink raw milk. That same year, I stopped having all ear pressure clearance problems and my sinus pressure challenges went away.” (on https://www.rawmilkinstitute.org/about-raw-milk/#testimonials)
What’s wrong with anecdotal evidence? Well, again, nothing as such.
Unless we’re basing national medical standards on it.
Anecdotal evidence is a foundational part of medical science. In fact, personal experience has often been the catalyst for scientific advances—as in, for example, the day in 1928 that Alexander Fleming found a weird mold growing on a culture plate in his lab. No one else had found that particular culture growing in their lab, ever before. When Alexander Fleming first noted the presence of the mold, that was an anecdote.
What followed afterwards was science. It would be another fifteen years before Fleming’s mold was fully analyzed, reproduced, and used on a whole series of laboratory trials to identify exactly what it could do: kill bacteria. All of that accumulated data led to the first use of penicillin to kill infections, and inaugurated the age of antibiotics.
Anecdotal evidence has to lead to study, to the accumulation of data, to the use of that data to draw conclusions. Compare that process to the stories above.
Raw milk is given credit for wiping out asthma, eczema, autoimmune disease, and sinus pressure—widely divergent problems (and there are many more). What isn’t here? Studies in which raw milk is systematically given to sufferers of asthma, eczema, autoimmune disease, and sinus pressure, and the improvement (or lack thereof) is noted.
No such studies exist.
What laboratory studies HAVE shown is the constant presence, in raw milk, of the microbes that cause tuberculosis, brucellosis, listeriosis and typhoid fever. And as for the claim that raw milk contains probiotics (“bacteria that can support a healthy gut biome): lab tests only find those bacteria in raw milk that has been contaminated with feces.
But that’s science, not anecdote.
Why this preference for anecdotal evidence over lab studies?
Medical practice needs to absorb some of that body blow. For decades, doctors were trained to ignore the personal reports of their patients. I was raised by a physician who went to med school in the fifties; he was a loving father and we were on excellent terms until his death in 2024 at the age of 87. Believe me, though, when I say that he had little patience for any anecdotes that didn’t match his medical training.
But there’s more here to be teased out. RFK’s tweet claims that the FDA has rejected anything that “can’t be patented by Pharma.” This implicates scientific studies as contaminated by commercial interests.
Again I say: Fair enough. We can’t discount the pressure on medical research by drug companies. Look, though, at the pro-raw-milk lobby. Three or four online channels (links below) control 90% of the information about raw milk. Each one of them is connected to at least one farm that makes money selling raw milk. So the “virtuous raw milk vs. greedy commercial pharma” contrast doesn’t exactly hold up.
So maybe we should just go straight to desperation. Because every single one of the anecdotes above reflects the experience of a person, a relative, a family grappling with a problem that the “Establishment” failed to address. And their solution, in desperation, is to go buy a substance which has been proven to contain bacteria that can make their lives even worse.
What we’re not seeing so far from the MAHA/RFK Jr. administration is any recognition of just how complex that desperation is, and how much work it will take to give sufferers real answers.
Anecdotal evidence from individual families that have found benefits from raw milk is a cheap substitute for actual solutions. What will the recommendations, for ALL families, in the newly minted nutrition courses be? “Work to make sure that parents in food deserts have access to produce beyond the dollar store at the corner”? “Provide ongoing support to single mothers who haven’t figure out breastfeeding yet”? “Help poor families figure out how to buy fresh produce on nothing per day”? How will the new doctors be trained to work with their local community to put these changes into place?
Or will they simply be taught to lecture their patients, “Don’t buy the cheap pasteurized milk at the dollar store and go to the super expensive organic farm down the road instead, or else your children will suffer”?
If that message is conveyed, its weight will fall, not on families, but directly on mothers. Which will be my next post in this space.
Pros and cons of anecdotal evidence
Commercial connections with raw milk
Medical school connections to HHS nutrition requirements
Summary of the regulation of raw milk
As always, I appreciate your balanced and nuanced writings on complex topics. As someone who had health concerns downplayed by doctors, I get why people turn towards alternative medicines and health fixes in foods. Unfortunately, the alternative wellness industry can be just as predatory and victim blaming: “If you just gave up gluten/dairy/non organic food, spend all this money on supplements, change your entire environment and eat an expensive diet, you'll be healed, and if you’re not healed you didn't try hard enough!” Human health is complicated and our attempts to apply one size fits all solutions and shame and scold when they don't work seems to be a continuous problem across ideological perspectives.
I think this is a fair and balanced article. When people look at raw milk through history, I think they discount:
1. Historical child mortality rates
2. Production of milk has changed
If your milk is coming from one cow that is kept clean and whose health is closely monitored, that’s going to be far less risky (though not risk free) than milk from a large scale factory farm where hundreds of cow’s milk are all mixed together and each cow is handled largely by automation.