Dr. Paul Saladino (38:22)
So historically, I think that humans have been tending animals for 10 to 15,000 years, and we've been milking them and making cheeses and perhaps turning it into butters for the last few thousand years. And most of our time with animals, we've been just milking the animal and drinking their milk. And there's lots of examples of this, like the Maasai tribe in Africa that even mixes milk with blood from the cows. But milking of animals is something that's been around for a good amount of time. It's only really within the last, say 100 years that we've been pasteurizing milk. And that means we've been heating it to pretty high Temperatures ostensibly to kill bacteria that occur in milk. Milk is a very interesting substance. It naturally contains hundreds of species of bacteria, whether it's human breast milk, which is not sterile. Right. The mother's dermal flora go into the breast milk and affect the baby's immune system and the baby's gut flora. Whether it's milk from a cow, a goat, sheep, a horse, a buffalo, whatever. There are hundreds, I think, on the order of 500, give or take, species of bacteria in the milk. Now, most of those bacteria, if not all of them, are commensal. They're not going to make the infant sick. That would be sort of, doesn't make sense evolutionarily. You know, a cow is not trying to kill their baby, know we're not trying to kill our babies. Every once in a while in milk, you can get an organism that is pathogenic. And when you have an unpasteurized milk, generally the other species of bacteria out compete that bacteria. This is kind of the terrain hypothesis. It goes back to this long standing debate between Louis Pastour and, I forget the name of the gentleman who was the advocate of the terrain hypothesis. We can look it up. But that idea was that the question was, are people getting sick because of a microbe or are people getting sick because the terrain of the body is imbalanced? And this is interesting to me because when we look at people who are diabetic, people who are diabetic get profound infections with the same bacteria that those of us that are not diabetic handle just fine. And when I was in medical school, everyone was very worried about MRSA methicillin resistant Staph aureus or vre, vancomycin resistant enterococcus. They were super bugs, right? And so we've also been fed this ide idea of superbugs, these bacteria that are just so virulent that even those of us with profoundly healthy immune systems will not be able to combat them, which I think is a little bit misleading because most of us can handle, you know, exposure to something like a little bit of mrsa, even though it's such a, it's such a vilified organism and it's very virulent. But most of us don't really have problems with that or can outcompete it in our systems. Now that's a fraught conversation. But this idea of terrain versus microbe is interesting because when you think about raw milk, you have all of these commensal bacteria in the raw milk. So even if a little bit of listeria or enterococcus gets in there. Listeria being a pathogenic organism that really shouldn't be in high numbers in a milk culture, the other guys kind of out compete it. This is also relevant to what happens in our guts. And how you achieve a healthy gut microbiome is not by completely carpet bombing all the bad ones out there. It's probably by supporting the good ones to out compete the bad ones. We are so teeming with microorganisms at every orifice of our body, every skin, every toenail, and, you know, we can't sterilize ourselves. There's a real fallacy around hand washing and sterilization. But it's interesting that when you pasteurize milk, you eliminate all of those commensal bacteria. And the reason it became popular is because in the 1920s, when milk was becoming something that people wanted in cities rather than just farms, cows were being milked in subsanitary conditions, right? They were being milked in very dirty places. They were being fed swill, which is the spent grains of alcohol from an. So cows are fed garbage food. Cows are being milked in very subsanitary, dirty places. And there were the beginning of significant outbreaks of endemic sort of contagious bacterial diseases in the milk. So someone came up with the idea of all this. Pasteurize the milk and we can heat it, and then it will be safer for humans to consume. So most of the milk that we've had for the last 100 years has been pasteurized. That's what I drank growing up. In fact, I drank skim milk because my parents were also fat phobic, you know, being traditionally trained doctors. But what was interesting for me in the last couple of years to explore and I did not drink raw milk when I was a carnivore. I was just drinking, doing meat and organs. So is that there's a large body of literature around the unique benefits of an unpasteurized milk versus a pasteurized milk. There's many, many studies showing that there are probably differences in the whey protein in the milk and potentially in the obviously in the flora that's in the milk that affects our immune system in certain ways. There's one study called the Gabriella study. Other studies looked at the same thing, and they found consistent, statistically significant differences. Lower rates of asthma, eczema, and allergies. So the same things that I suffer from as a kid in children on or off farms who drank raw versus pasteurized milk in their childhood. So that's interesting, right? There's something about A cross species mammalian milk that is unpasteurized potentially having a positive effect on the immune system. And whether or not a pasteurized milk is having a negative effect or it's the absence of the positive effect of the unpasteurized milk that was interesting to me. So I kind of went further down this raw milk rabbit hole and found that there's all sorts of benefits to raw milk that either infant immune system, resistance to respiratory diseases in kids who are exposed to raw milk. And when you talk about that you get a lot of pushback because people say raw milk is dangerous and you think yes, any raw food is dangerous. There are thousands of outbreaks.
