Before Wisdom

I remember as a child, my mother, an ex-fashionista, telling my older sister, a budding fashionista that what is old will be new again and that the fashions of yesterday would return to be the fashions of today.

The same thing seems to be true with diet fads.

The low carb diet, an obnoxious and unhealthy way to lose weight has been going in and out of style since it was invented by a 19th century undertaker.

Also recently revived from the 19th century, is an enthusiasm for drinking raw, unpasteurized milk. A significant health hazard.

Slate.com has an interesting article about the latest cycle of enthusiasm for drinking raw unpasteurized cow’s milk.

It was actually a German chemist, Franz von Soxhlet (who never seems to get any public credit or, of course, blame), who, in 1886, first proposed using the technique to reduce bacteria in bottled milk.* In the United States, public health advocates began urging dairy farmers to begin using pasteurization as a means of breaking down a near tidal wave of child mortality. Raw-milk followers, including our friend the irate physician, fought the move.

It wasn’t until 1914—compelled by a typhoid epidemic linked to unpasteurized milk—that New York City finally enforced a pasteurization rule. Seven years later, the city’s infant death rate, which had hovered at an appalling 240 of every 1,000 live births, had dropped to 71 deaths per 1,000, a victory many credited to pasteurization.

snip ….

Today, just about 0.5 percent of all the milk consumed in this country is unpasteurized. Yet from 1998 to 2008, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention received reports of 85 infectious disease outbreaks linked to raw milk. In the past few months, physicians have treated salmonella in Utah, brucellosis in Delaware, campylobacter in Colorado and Pennsylvania, and an ugly outbreak of E. coli O157-H7 in Minnesota, which sickened eight people in June. Epidemiologists not only identified a rare strain of the bacteria but matched its DNA to those stricken, the cows on the farm that supplied them with raw milk, and manure smearing the milking equipment and even the animals themselves. When regulators shut down the dairy farm, supporters promptly charged them with belonging to a government conspiracy to smear the reputation of a hallowed food.

Some, like Wisconsin raw-milk champion Max Kane, dismiss infectious disease altogether: “The bacteria theory’s a total myth,” Kane told one interviewer. “It allows us to have an enemy to go after similar to how it is with terrorism. It’s food terrorism.”

After a dairy in Washington state was linked to an E. coli outbreak last December, the farmer himself put it like this in an interview with the Seattle Times. Scientists were wrong to malign his milk because “everything God designed is good for you.”

It seems an odd conclusion to draw from an outbreak of Escherichia Coli O157:H7, an organism dangerous enough to kill people by causing complete renal failure. I wish someone would explain the logic that leads to the conclusion that this apparently divine infection is actually “good for you.”

Full Article

The Los Angeles Times recently published an article about how many mainstream experts, health advocacy groups and scientists are criticizing the USDA Dietary Guidelines. Surprisingly, these non-vegan mainstream experts had a big problem with the guidelines recommending that Americans drink even more cow’s milk:

DR. WALTER C. WILLETT
Chairman of the Department of Nutrition
Harvard School of Public Health (Boston)
Author, “Eat, Drink and Be Healthy”

Also, the recommendation for three servings of milk per day is not justified and is likely to cause harm to some people. The primary justification is bone health and reduction of fractures. However, prospective studies and randomized trials have consistently shown no relation between milk intake and risk of fractures. On the other hand, many studies have shown a relation between high milk intake and risk of fatal or metastatic prostate cancer, and this can be explained by the fact that milk intake increases blood levels of IGF-1, a growth-promoting hormone. The justification for drinking three glasses of milk per day on the basis of increasing potassium intake is also not valid as the extra calories, even with low-fat milk, would easily counterbalance the benefit of the extra potassium. Also, the recommendation for people of all ages to drink three servings of milk per day is very radical and would double dairy production if adopted; this would have huge environmental impacts that would need to be considered.

Full Article

A hard to get food with a maligned reputation but in-credible, but disputed, health benefits is not an usual thing in the alternative health business. One of the latest is raw milk.

From the June 12th – 18th 2010 edition of The Economist, page 36
http://www.economist.com/node/16322762?story_id=16322762

Public health advocates dispute the health benefits, though, and say that raw milk is inherently risky, especially for children, old people, and anybody with health problems. Between 1998 and 2008, according to the Centers for Disease Control, some 1,600 people became sick after drinking the stuff. Nearly 200 were hospitalized and two died. The actual incidence of minor illness may be higher, as many people afflicted by food-borne disease suffer in the privacy of their homes.

John Sheehan, the director dairy safety for the Food and Drug Administration, says that the agency has thoroughly examined the claimed health benefits and found no support for any of them. He adds that regulation cannot guarantee safety: in the states where raw milk is sold legally, there have been nearly three times as many outbreaks of illness as in the states where it is not. Presumably there is also more raw milk drunk in the former group, but there is no good way to measure the size of the illicit market in the latter.

Because of the risk of salmonella and other nasty bugs, it is against the law to sell raw milk across state lines. But more than two dozen states let farmers sell raw milk directly from their farms, subject to various rules, and a handful even allow retail sales. Several states are taking a new look at the issue. A serious blow to the cause came last month in Wisconsin, one of American’s largest dairy states. It already allows incidental sales of raw milk –a few galons here and there — but Jim Doyle, the governor, has vetoed a bill that would have allowed it to be sold more widely.

His veto was something of a surprise. The bill had passed both houses of the state legislature by a healthy margin. Many lawmakers were moved by the idea that allowing raw-milk sales would help small farmers. Mr. Doyle had indicated that he would sign the bill. But after lobbying by the dairy industry and public-health pressure groups, he changed his mind. One concern was that an outbreak caused by dodgy raw milk could damage the reputation of Wisconsin’s entire dairy industry.