The Real JunkFoodScience
By Monica @ 10:18 PM   
A silly article about raw milk has been recently published in Clinical Infectious Diseases that ends with a completely inappropriate threat to medical professionals:
"...physicians, veterinarians, and dairy farmers who promote, or even condone, the human consumption of unpasteurized milk and dairy products may be at risk for subsequent legal action."
Every few years Clin Infect Dis publishes an article like this. I think such articles and news pieces will become more frequent as raw milk becomes more popular. The acknowledgments to this particular article thank none other than John Sheehan, BSc, Jd and FDA head of safety for milk and eggs and a raw milk foe, "for valuable discussions on the subject during the preparation of the manuscript."
I don't believe crediting a government regulatory agent is necessarily proof of ignorance or corruption. I am sure there are many honest people who work for regulatory agencies and I don't believe every piece of research produced or funded by government is evidence of corruption. However, the Weston A Price Foundation has already, point by point, rebutted Sheehan's Powerpoint slides on raw milk in a 71 page PDF file. It's quite a read and anyone interested in the whole "controversy" around raw milk should take a look.
Oftentimes bias it is not evident in news media pieces or peer-reviewed articles. This is the case with the current Clin Infect Dis article. It appears to be well-written and most of the points are likely true in the context of grain-fed confinement cows. But the authors of the article make several mistakes, so that the article winds up reading more a like a political position paper than an honest evaluation of the science. Let's go through the major points.
First, they don't really understand the microbial ecology of a milk product in the context of grass feeding. For instance, Listeria monocytogenes is relatively fragile in the face of other protective factors in unpasteurized milk such as lactoferrin and beneficial coliforms that outcompete pathogens. These factors are destroyed by pasteurization and sometimes allow remaining L. monocytogenes to take off. This is why the FDA has considered making ultrapasteurization mandatory. Heat resistant strains have evolved and regular pasteurization is no longer good enough. Almost all organic milk on the retail market is now ultrapasteurized.
Second, the authors are mired in the reductionistic pseudoscience of nutrition that ignores the effect of pasteurization on the function of various proteins in the milk (lactase, phosphatase, immunoglobulins). Good science is timeless, and these authors haven't gone to older papers demonstrating the benefits. Many people anecdotally report reductions in asthma, allergies, and lactose intolerance on raw milk vs. pasteurized milk. Actually, it's not even so much that the mainstream doesn't recognize the existence of these proteins. They do, because the pasteurization test is a negative phosphatase test. Instead, they simply claim that these proteins aren't necessary and don't add any value to the consumer, nutritive or otherwise. This is paternalism on steroids.
No mention is made of the difference in grass-fed milk and grain-fed milk with respect to vitamin content, particularly a vitamin first discovered by Weston Price in the thirties, now believed to be vitamin K2 M-4. Price showed that K2 M-4 was dependent on the method of feeding and was highest in the dairy produced from cows on rapidly growing spring grass. This is widely known among those knowledgeable about pastured methods of raising animals but it still relatively unacknowledged or unknown in medical and government circles (though not unknown in the medical literature at this point).
The authors also ignore the significant difference between milk from Holsteins used for all pasteurized grocery store milk and milk from other older breeds usually used for raw milk. The latter has higher butterfat content, and thus, fat-soluble vitamins. "Milk is milk and it all comes from cows" is the FDA's position. That's demonstrably wrong.
Finally, they ignore that while there may be more outbreaks from raw milk, such outbreaks are small and easily identifiable, unlike food-borne illness outbreaks from pasteurized milk. They also don't discuss the relative risks of various foods, and give the impression that raw milk on a per serving basis is more dangerous than pasteurized milk. I don't believe we really know what the relative risks are, but my understanding is that they are about the same on a per serving basis. The WAP Foundation presents some interesting numbers on this in their two rebuttals, linked above and below.
The Weston A. Price Foundation has recently released a rebuttal to the recent Clin Infect Dis article. Unfortunately, people like Sandy Szwarc at JunkFoodScience obviously haven't seen the rebuttal. Ms. Szwarc's piece is simply a point by point regurgitation of the Clin Infect Dis article. This is curious because from what I can see of her blog she usually looks for an opposing view and does not buy into hysteria. I think this speaks to the power of conventional wisdom in creating a bias in a person's mind.
"Sound science" is not a conspiracy, Ms. Szwarc says. Most science often isn't a conspiracy, but that's really irrelevant to evaluating whether the science is actually sound and unpoliticized. The "science" used by the mainstream researchers to justify their biased thoughts about many aspects of our food is not sound. It is based on faulty assumptions that have since been disproven either in the medical literature or by simple logic and/or it is too reductionistic. Most seriously, it is almost always performed outside the context of evolutionary biology or even the history of food science in the past century. Most nutritional science simply does not operate within an evolutionary framework. It's bad science. Ms. Szwarc's readers deserve a more critical analysis than the one she says she is providing in her blog header.
In the most recent Clin Infect Dis article, the authors state that raw milk consumers "unconsciously process information in a biased manner." They encourage public health officials and physicians to speak with one unified voice against raw milk, repeating the message over and over clearly until the consumer gets it.
In other words, the raw milk consumers are knuckleheads nearly unreachable by reason, while the conventional view is based in reason and science. As I've indicated above, the situation is more complex than the authors would like health professionals to believe. At the very least, the authors and health experts ought to be recommending that people source raw milk and heat it, or that the dairy industry ought to at least convert to grass-feeding to increase fat-soluble vitamin content so critical for development of children and continuing robust health into adulthood.
WAPF responds:
The authors suggest that unlike consumers with strongly held opinions, "experts" with strongly held opinions do not selectively seek out information supportive of their views or process it in a biased fashion, yet they themselves choose to discuss the ability of pasteurization to kill pathogens without acknowledging the ability of grass-feeding to prevent contamination; they themselves choose to discuss illnesses attributed to raw milk without admitting that more illnesses have been attributed to pasteurized milk; they themselves choose to discuss modern assays with little to no destruction of vitamins without accounting for older feeding studies showing dramatic reduction in their biological activity; and they themselves choose to conclude by threatening experts who do not select information and unconsciously process it exactly as they do with the heavy hand of the law. There is a word for this kind of double standard and it is called hypocrisy. Indeed. Just say no to bad science.
Labels: "Safety", De-regulation, Government Idiocy, Individual Rights, Modern Ignorance, Nutritional Guidelines, Pastured, Raw Milk, Vitamin K2
|
2 Comments:
If raw milk is so hazardous, then I just have to ask: What about human breast milk?
I don't know -- I'm sure human breast milk has some bacteria in it. I guess the issue with cow and goat milk is that the source is right next to you know what... :) Which means cleanliness standards have to be excellent. And of course, the cows need to be very healthy.
Post a Comment
Subscribe to Post Comments [Atom]
<< Home