5d ago

You keep your Western food science. I've got an immune system. Thanks.

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Doesn't raw milk have an even shorter shelf life?
- Depends on how you look at it. Raw milk spoils at the same pace as [Edit: ultra-]pasteurized milk. Only for raw milk the counter starts ticking once the milk leaves the cow, whereas [Edit: ultra-]pasteurized milk remains sterile until you open the package.
  
  Pasteurised doesn't equal sterilised. Not sure ofcourse where you live since apparently that matters for this term since some places used pasteurised for what is double pasteurization and thermized for single pasteurization.
  I know the pasteurised milk I buy will spoil in a matter of days, even if unopened. The only milk that will stay good unopened for months us UHT.
  
  Thanks for the heads-up. I just checked the German Wikipedia article. Apparently there are several ‘levels’ of pasteurization ranging from 70°C through 150°C. Since I’ve only encountered the kill-all-that-has-ever-lived kind (UHT), I assumed that’s what everyone does.
- in a way, no, because raw milk is already unsafe to drink by the time it's packaged
  
  +1 for this: I have very personal experience with an E.Coli outbreak in a small town in southern Utah in 2017. Although the infections did not come from raw milk directly, the infections were traced to the area where the milk was packaged - and albeit anecdotally, there were several related deaths over the years that I was aware of, that were never reported due to the...uh...unique religious background of the place.
  so yeah, I mean...don't let your children play in manure but also...don't drink milk that you sanitize less than you sanitize your hands.
  
  Actually the science on this shows that kids who grow up close to manure have lower incidence of allergies and other autoimmune problems.
  
  what about the infant and early childhood death rates
  
  before i knee-jerk react to this, i need to know:
  source? give me a link at minimum, preferably a scientific journal since you're citing "the science" - much else isn't gonna make the cut here.
  if this is the case, why did i and my peers have crippling allergies for the entirety of my childhood? we spent tons of time around manure, thousands of hours literally walking in it. we still couldn't breathe outdoors without getting allergy symptoms.
  edit: also, what does alleged lower incidence of allergies and "other autoimmune issues" have to do with the relation between playing around manure or drinking raw milk, and getting E.Coli infections/dying? those two are quite closely correlated, the "science" also shows that.
  
  I can't get deep into the search right now, but you can check the big overviews. It's called the 'Hygiene Hypothesis' and it's been a topic for quite a while. Some interesting articles that will get you in the general area are about some specific allergens, microbiome influence on allergens, and this one I can't find a link for right now, but look up the research on Finnish children who became politically separated from their close relatives by a political border (when the USSR and the 'western world' became contentious and the flow of people became stymied). That one is particularly interesting because you have three populations: the USSR folks at the border (a rural area), the Finnish folks at the border (a rural area), and the Finnish folks away from the border in the urban areas. If I remember correctly, the Finnish word for autoimmune disorders has literal translation of 'clean house disease' or something similar.
  What makes the border research interesting is you have two 'western medicine' groups split by the rural/urban divide and a rural 'other' category to compare to. I can't remember if they had issues and couldn't include the USSR urban group, or if it was too great of a divide genetically/diversity-wise to include to accurately compare without adding a third condition.
  
  Yeah. Calling bullshit on this.
  I'm the 2nd oldest of 7 kids. That house was never clean. We had all kinds of pets. I would play in the woods, make mud pies, catch weird bugs, eat wild berries and onion grass. I pretty much had the "go outside and play in the dirt to build character" childhood. I've got a couple of food allergies and pet dander allergies. My oldest sibling has an auto-immune issue, the ones just after me are pretty healthy, just some minor lactose intolerance, and the two youngest (from my step dad) have a bunch of weird allergies, like potatoes and milk.
  It's a genetic roll of the dice. The reason why allergies seem more common is because more kids are able to survive anaphylaxis at a young age thanks to modern medicine and quick emergency response times... Like I went through when I spontaneosly developed a severe fish allergy at 4 years old.

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