Study Confirms That Raw Milk Doesn't Work for Lactose Intolerance

News flash! Ball dropped from hand hits ground! News flash! Sun rises in east! News flash! Raw milk is no different from pasteurized milk!

Nobody in the world should be surprised by any of these. Even so, there somehow exists a large community of people who think that for some reason - usually a scientifically illiterate one - people with lactose intolerance who can't drink pasteurized milk can drink raw milk.

A lot of these people get paid by the Weston A. Price Foundation to put out propaganda touting the wondrous properties of raw milk. They even released a "study" in 2008 in which they surveyed a group of raw milk advocates and guess what they found? Amazingly, the people who buy and drink raw milk say that they can drink raw milk. The "study" was never published in a peer-reviewed journal so it wasn't checked by actual scientists. The FDA took one look at the methodology of the study and metaphorically walked out of the room.

I talk about that study and a magazine article by raw milk propagandist David Gumpert in Raw Milk Article Long but Flawed.

Gumpert is back with another article, this one for Grist Magazine.

The folks at the Weston A. Price Foundation, apparently having found out that no one who is not already a True Believer will swallow a fake "study" having as much scientific validity as one of those online "test your own IQ" sites. They hired Christopher Gardner, an associate professor of medicine at Stanford Medical School to do a real, controlled study.

Here's the result you get when you conduct a real study.

"The data fail to support our hypothesis that Raw Milk confers some benefit over Pasteurized Milk in the form of an improvement in the experience of symptoms of lactose intolerant adults."

Man, I would have loved, loved, loved to have seen their faces as Weston A. Price when they got that piece of news.

The study findings came out exactly the way any sensible person would have expected, given the known science:

[P]articipants went through three eight-day phases during which they consumed pasteurized milk, raw milk, and soy milk. Gardner notes that "the severity of the symptoms was virtually identical for the raw vs. pasteurized milk, while the symptoms of the soy milk were quite a bit, and statistically significantly, lower."

Raw milk = pasteurized milk in producing symptoms of lactose intolerance. Science!

Gumpert desperately backpedals to find reasons to discount the study as much as possible. It was small, only of 16 people. Gardner responded, "However, despite the small sample size, the results are remarkably consistent. I do not think the sample size proved to be a problem for the study, and that a larger study would have generated the same overall finding, just more strongly."

Gardner attributes the small size of his study to exactly the same problem I spent a whole month writing about in my series of posts about the NIH State of the Science Conference on LI. It's really, really hard to find people who show symptoms to lactose in the laboratory, no matter how horrible they claim their symptoms are in daily life. It's a mystery why this should be. That's the Phase 2 that really needs to happen, not yet another study on why raw milk turns out to contain exactly the same amount of lactose as um, milk.

I realize this won't stop the craziness. A Mark McAfee of Organic Pastures Dairy Company, another raw milk advocate who co-sponsored the study, was already being quoted by Gumpert babbling something scientifically incoherent. Raw Milk is a religious belief. True Believers are not susceptible to facts that contradict their beliefs.

I have a True Belief of my own. That those of you who follow this blog regularly have learned enough about science to dismiss the irrational beliefs of advocates.

So repeat after me today's science lesson: Raw milk contains exactly as much lactose as pasteurized milk. It will produce the same symptoms ounce for ounce in those who are LI. It contains no magical properties that neutralize the lactose. If you get symptoms from pasteurized milk, you will get the same symptoms for an equal quantity of raw milk.

Simple and scientific. Spread the word.

Another False Milk Claim

Another unique characteristic of Ronnybrook milk is that it's unhomogenized. Instead, the cream that naturally rises to the top of a glass jug of milk remains there, unless you decide to shake it up. The result, Osofsky explained, is milk that the body can more easily digest, especially for people who typically have trouble digesting lactose.

"We have a lot of families that drink our milk because they're lactose intolerant," he said.

The quote comes from an article by Jaclyn Bruntfield in the Harrison Patch.

The article is terrible for our purposes because Bruntfield never bothers to say whether the milk is "raw," i.e. unpasteurized, a claim that is often made - totally wrongly, in my estimation - for milk drinkable by those with lactose intolerance.

If possible, a claim that unhomogenized milk is safer for those with LI is even wronger.

Ignore it at your peril.

Another Denunciation of Raw Milk

Slate.com recently had a long article on the history of raw milk advocacy, "The Raw-Milk Deal: Pure-food worshippers put their health at risk—especially when they drink unpasteurized milk," by Deborah Blum.

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."

Sigh.

My position on raw milk is that its safety is as good as the farm that sells it. The farm has to be pretty near perfect to keep cattle from being infected. If the farm's standards are supremely high, there is nothing wrong with raw milk. However, it is extremely difficult to keep standards that high, and the more cattle the harder it is to do.

The flip side is that there is nothing special about raw milk, although it very well might taste better. It is not healthier for you. For sure it has no special properties that make it drinkable for those who are lactose intolerant. Sometimes it seems like every raw milk advocate spews forth this nonsense about LI and I have to admit that it prejudices me against their case. If they are that wrong on this crucial point, what else might they be wrong about?

For those who advocate raw milk, the comments on that article contain many passionate defenses. The conflicting claims about statistics are a problem. Here's my take. The raw, pardon the pun, numbers of illnesses from raw milk are small, but since so few people have access to raw milk, there are a disproportionate number of illnesses per capita. That worries me.

I'll also fault Deborah Blum on one side issue. Yes, it's true that organic foods aren't more nutritious and that people who say that are simply ignorant. But most knowledgeable proponents of organic foods make the different claim that they taste better. You can test objectively for nutrition; you can't test for taste. That's subjective. We do know, however, that many foods have been bred to travel well so that they can be shipped to market in better condition, often better-looking condition, but that this affects taste. If you want to argue in favor of organics for taste then you have a much better case, and one that Blum should have mentioned.

Is Beta-Lactose Bad for You?

Why does the subject of raw milk bring out so much bad science presented under the guise of being good science? I'm baffled. You'd think that drinking raw milk wouldn't prevent you from using the internet to look up basic facts.

And yet here we go again, At Allvoices.com, another of those deadly sites that allow anybody with a computer to post nonsense, JD Moore wrote Why I Got Raw Milk.

After the usual attack on pasteurization Ms Moore goes on to say:

The problem with pasteurization is that it kills the good as well as the perceived bad, and destroys some of the most beneficial and nutritious aspects of the living raw food. The lactose enzyme is killed, making the milk indigestible for many. Lactose becomes beta-lactose, a sugar far more rapidly absorbed, leaving the child feeling hungry sooner.

Beta-lactose?

Let's go to an expert and unbiased page on milk chemistry from Cornell University:

Lactose is dissolved in the serum (whey) phase of fluid milk. Lactose dissolved in solution is found in 2 forms, called the α-anomer and ß-anomer, that can convert back and forth between each other. The solubility of the 2 anomers is temperature dependent and therefore the equilibrium concentration of the 2 forms will be different at different temperatures. At room temperature (70°F, 20°C) the equilibrium ratio is approximately 37% α- and 63% ß-lactose. At temperatures above 200°F (93.5°C) the ß-anomer is less soluble so there is a higher ratio of α- to ß-lactose. The type of anomer present does not affect the nutritional properties of lactose.

In other words, not only does the presence of beta lactose not make a particle of difference to the digestibility of lactose, the higher temperatures of pasteurization promote the alpha variety over the beta variety, exactly the opposite of Moore's contention.

If for some reason you don't want to believe milk scientists, try checking out the folks at Raw-Milk-Facts.com. They do mention the two forms of lactose. They don't say a single word about either form being more or less digestible.

The Raw Milk Facts site also doesn't provide any evidence for Moore's next sentence, "Up to 20 percent of the iodine in milk is destroyed along with part of the Vitamin C."

Where does this contention, so often found in pro-raw milk diatribes, come from? From the raw milk proponents, the Weston A. Price Foundation. Or, more accurately, from a page they have on their site quoting a 1938 article from Armchair Science. You may think I'm kidding, but this is really cited.

Modern-diets-and-nutritional-diseases.com

This is a statement from Armchair Science, London (April 1938) Armchair Science is, or was, a British Medical Journal.

Chris Gupta

This 1938 BMJ (British Medical Journal) is yet again destroy's [sic] the mistaken notion that pasteurized milk is safe when to the contrary it has been repeatedly shown that most diseases from milk are not from the raw milk (which in fact has curative factors in it) but form [sic] the sloppy and filthy handling during milking and subsequent handling. Both of which can be prevented today yet we choose not too.

My Toxic Tummy

Armchair Science is a British Medical Journal

No, no, and no. And no to all the others who say this, easily found in a Google search.

The British Medical Journal is a British medical journal. Armchair Science was an ordinary popular science magazine, not a peer-reviewed research publication.

This is what the internet is for, what it is best at. A universal library of convenient facts and information at your fingertips, allowing you to check whether what you are saying is anywhere close to accurate in a few seconds.

So what does it say about the people who post nonsense and quote other peoples' nonsense without ever bothering to check any of it?

Bad things. Very bad things.

Please ignore them. Please.

Two Sides of the Raw Milk Argument

AlterNet, as the name implies, purports to give alternative views to conventional opinions, taking articles from a variety of sources in addition to original content. Alternative now apparently means looking at both sides of an issue rather than raw advocacy if The Battle Over Raw Milk: Let's Ditch the Hysterics and Give People a Choice is any evidence. Richardson is founder of the blog La Vida Locavore, a member of the Organic Consumers Association policy advisory board, and author of Recipe for America: Why Our Food System Is Broken and What We Can Do to Fix It...

Although, as the title indicates, Richardson eventually finishes the article by saying that people should have the choice to drink raw milk if they want to, she does list some of the objections to raw milk. She balances that with the usual shaky anecdotal evidence for raw milk. And even reported that in "a survey of milk drinkers in the state of Michigan, over 80 percent of those advised by a health care professional that they were lactose intolerant were able to consume raw milk without problem." She doesn't seem to understand that the "survey" was a bogus one put forth by the leading raw milk advocacy organization, the Weston A. Price Foundation. The survey was only of raw milk consumers who had contracts with farmers producing raw milk, not the most impartial of populations.

Medical studies on the one side, anecdotal testimony on the other, but Richardson still comes down on the side of choice, for the straightforward reason that people should be allowed to take risks. Many states already allow people to take risks by making raw milk legal, while also trying to minimize the risk.

Which is fine, as long as everybody does understand the actual risks. As Richardson points out we eat many risky foods that no agency protects us from.

So everybody's happy, right?

Not in the least. The truly frightening part doesn't appear in the article but in the comments. (Note: many of the comments rightfully complain about a subhead that has now been removed.) Nobody there is thanking Richardson for presenting both sides of the argument. Almost universally the commenters either present their anecdotes about the wonderfulness of raw milk or excoriate her for having the audacity to present both sides. That's unfortunate.

More facts, fewer anecdotes. That's an alternative point of view I'd like to see spread across the Internet.

Southeastern Wisconsin Residents Sickened by Raw Milk

Pasteurization was invented late in the 19th century. Some people hailed it as one of the greatest advances of all history, since thousands were sickened or died from the effects of tainted milk. Some, but not all. Many fought its usage bitterly and for decades. Many of pasteurization's opponents argued that model farms could produce raw milk of such quality and purity that pasteurization was totally unnecessary.

Unfortunately, these model farms never worked as well as proponents hoped. Cows are prone to a variety of diseases and no matter the care given some diseased milk always slipped through. Nor could the time consuming ongoing care be scaled up to meet mass demand. Pasteurization won not because it was a perfect solution but because none of the other alternatives measured up. By about the 1920s it became standard on all milk in the U.S.

Huge commercial milk farms today also face problems with keeping cows healthy. That's one of the reasons farmers started given the cows the hormone rBST. The use of the hormone also raised fears, although the science backing up those fears is lacking.

The backlash to milk manifests itself in many ways, one of which is advocating raw milk, or milk that has not been pasteurized. Raw milk, they saw, is literally healthier than pasteurized milk, which destroys minerals in the milk and kills even potentially beneficial bacteria. You can read an article from 1938 that summarizes much of what raw milkers say today. Although raw milk cannot be purchased in stores in most states, and some states go further than that to ban it, enthusiasts, numbering an estimated 500,000, go to farms to purchase raw milk or even buy shares of cows to designate themselves farmers thus legally allowing them to drink the milk of their "own" cows.

One problem remains. Those pesky cows keep getting sick. In an article titled Southeastern Wisconsin residents sickened by raw milk by Catherine Idzerda in the Janesville, WI, Gazette, we learn that:

Thirteen people in southeastern Wisconsin have been sickened by the consumption of unpasteurized milk, state public health officials said today. ...

The individuals who are sick tested positive for campylobacter jejuni, a bacterial infection that causes gastro-intestinal symptoms and fever, said state officials. ...

People began to get sick between Aug. 14-20. All victims had consumed raw milk or been in households where someone else consumed raw milk and became ill. Campylobacter can be passed between people.

This despite raw milk sales and distribution being illegal in Wisconsin.

I wish cows did not get so easily sick. I wish commercial farms were more respectful of the animals in their care. Both raw milk and regular old commercial pasteurized milk can be problematical. And both can be perfectly safe and healthy and good for you. Neither one is magical. Both have to be produced by farmers tending to cows and getting their wares to markets, sometimes far distant in time and space. It's that distance between cows and consumers that drove pasteurization in the first place. Our society has made that distance farther today.

Drink raw milk if you want. Just don't make claims for it that can't be upheld in stark reality. Cows, even well-tended cows, do get sick and pass those diseases on to those who drink their milk.

If you want to take this as a reason for veganism, you are free to do so. That conclusion isn't my intention, though. Any food can be a vector for disease, as recalls of dozens of vegetables have shown. My advocacy is for healthy food, with consumers understanding the strengths and weaknesses of the vast world-wide farm systems that bring food to our tables. All those systems can be improved, and all are only as strong as their weakest link. Demand healthy food by all means. Expecting magic will just make you sick.

The Dangers of Raw Milk

Yet another major publication has weighed in against raw milk proponents, sneakily using actual science and scientists to combat beliefs and mysticism. The last time I tackled this issue was in Raw Milk Not For "Anyone, At Any Time, For Any Reason", reporting on an article from Time magazine. This year's version is from U. S. News and World Report, which ran several articles on milk, including Kerry Hannon's Raw Milk Is Gaining Fans, but the Science Says It's Dangerous.

Although the number of raw milk drinkers is tiny, probably not more than 500,000, Hannon noted that "From 1998 to May 2005, raw milk or raw-milk products have been implicated in 45 foodborne illness outbreaks in the United States, accounting for more than 1,000 cases of illness, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. And that's probably an understatement, the report notes, since foodborne illnesses often go unrecognized and unreported."

How bad is raw milk?

"It's like playing Russian roulette with your health," says John Sheehan, director of the Food and Drug Administration's Division of Dairy and Egg Safety. The dangers, he says, range from mild food poisoning to life-threatening illness. "One complication that can arise as a result of infection with E. coli O157:H7 is hemolytic uremic syndrome, which can cause acute renal failure, especially in the very young or the elderly," Sheehan says. "There are absolutely no health benefits from consuming raw milk."

Hannon does a good reporting job on the article, which included quotes from actual medical studies of raw milk's potential benefits.

Indeed, it's only in the case of asthma and allergy that some evidence exists to suggest a possible protective effect. A study published in the June 2006 issue of the Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology by researchers at the University of London analyzed the diet of 4,767 children in Shropshire, England, and found that those who lived on farms and drank raw milk had significantly fewer symptoms of asthma, hay fever, and eczema. Children who drank raw milk were 40 percent less likely to develop eczema and 10 percent less likely to get hay fever than their peers who didn't drink raw milk. A second European study of nearly 15,000 children published in the May 2007 issue of Clinical and Experimental Allergy found that children who drank raw milk were less likely to have asthma and hay fever. Still, both reports warned that raw milk often harbors pathogens, and neither recommended consumption of raw milk as a preventative measure.

The important point to take away from those statistics is not that raw milk reduces asthma, hay fever, and eczema, because it probably doesn't. The important point is that more exposure to potential allergens while young, which is more likely for kids who grow up on farms, may reduce future sensitivity.

That's a point I foreshadowed a couple of days ago in 4X Food Allergies in Black Male Children, when I quoted Dr. Anatoly Belilovsky, a Brooklyn-based pediatrician and allergy expert, as saying "Some studies have shown that being on a farm has a protective effect against allergies." This is likely one of the studies he meant.

Dirt is better for you than raw milk, in the long run.

Ron Paul Introduces Raw Milk Bill

I've written many times before about raw milk, milk that has come straight from a cow without being pasteurized. The last big post was titled Raw Milk Not For "Anyone, At Any Time, For Any Reason", quoting an FDA spokesperson. A Bush administration FDA spokesperson, so hardly an anti-business activist.

Ron Paul, the Republican Representative from Texas who is the most libertarian member of Congress, has introduced a bill to rescind current federal regulations against the transport of raw milk. According to the Organic Consumers Organization:

U.S. Congressman Ron Paul has introduced HR 778, a bill "to authorize the interstate traffic of unpasteurized milk and milk products that are packaged for direct human consumption."

Under the bill, the federal government could not "take any action ... that would prohibit, interfere with, regulate, or otherwise restrict the interstate traffic of milk, or a milk product, that is unpasteurized and packaged for direct human consumption solely on the basis that the milk or milk product is unpasteurized."

You can find a number of people commenting favorably on this proposed law in response to Jennifer Lance's column on the bill at Red Green and Blue.org, an environmental site that purports to assemble opinion from the right and left. The commenters give the standard libertarian view that everything should be legal and it's up to consumers to make their own decisions.

What's my take? Well, first of all this is pure political posturing by Paul. As a Republican - and a maverick Republican with no clout even within his party - he knows there's no chance at all that this bill will even be considered, let alone passed. That leaves him totally free to pander to his libertarian fan base with no risk of real world consequences.

Second, except in a very few instances of border areas, this bill would affect almost no raw milk sales in the real world. It would allow for interstate shipment of raw milk, but not change its legality in the many states in which it is banned outright. Even those states that have legalized raw milk allow farmers to peddle it only under extremely restricted conditions. Raw milk is so inherently dangerous that no one takes the chance of shipping it any distance. If the bill were magically to become law raw milk sales would increase hardly at all.

You won't find any of this in the articles themselves. Lance is totally ignorant of any the issues. Her support of raw milk consists of a quote from a 1938 medical journal article. I guarantee you that there are more recent articles to cite.

The other site leads you back to mercola.com, the website of Dr. Joseph Mercola, an anti-pasteurization nutcase, whose rants about the subject are mostly unconnected to reality. (See Oops. The "American Dairy Board" Doesn't Exist.)

One actual microbiologist managed to sneak past the libertarians at RedGreenandBlue and his comments are even more pointed than the FDA's.

That guy over there in the corner bent over vomitting [sic] into a garbage can with bloody diarrhea running down his leg is a libertarian.

Me, I like food regulation. So would those who died from raw milk contamination. So would those people who died during the recent outbreaks of salmonella poisoning. So would... You get my drift. Fortunately, Dr. Paul won't get to kill others because his silly bill will itself be killed. His anti-governmental rants and popularity remain a danger to all.

Raw Milk Not For "Anyone, At Any Time, For Any Reason"

Batten down the hatches, boys, a storm a-gonna blow.

Time magazine ran an article on raw milk in this week's issue, written by Alice Park, and it doesn't say that raw milk is like Louis Armstrong's trumpet mixed with Van Gogh's paintbrush. All the raw milk nuts in the world are gearing up to pound their poor keyboards like a red-headed stepmule.

I've gone off on raw milk myself, the last time not so long ago in Raw Milk Article Long but Flawed. Time's article, unlike that one, wasn't written by a long-term raw milk advocate. When somebody objective writes on the subject, the answers come out completely different.

What heresy did Time commit? Judge for yourself.

The available evidence suggests that without a bug-killing step like pasteurization, even the cleanest dairy with the healthiest cows cannot always expect to produce safe milk. In testimony before Maryland state delegates, the FDA's [John] Sheehan stressed that raw milk in any form "should not be consumed by anyone, at any time, for any reason." He cited 45 outbreaks of disease from 1998 to 2005 that were traced to unpasteurized milk or cheese--and pointed to the dangers of exposing the vulnerable immune systems of young children, the elderly and those with immune disorders to the colonies of bugs that can populate untreated dairy. Raw milk makes up less than half of 1% of milk sales in the U.S. but accounts for twice as many disease outbreaks as pasteurized milk.

Farmers like [Mark] McAfee counter that all raw milk is not created equal. Government surveys, they claim, lump together raw milk that is destined for pasteurization--and therefore doesn't have to be table-ready--along with milk, like McAfee's, that is produced for human consumption. But that doesn't convince Kathryn Boor, chair of food science at Cornell University, who grew up on a farm drinking raw milk--but won't do it now. "You can't always tell when a cow is sick," she says. "And cows can sometimes kick the milking machine off. Generally, what's on the barn floor is not something I want in a glass."

What scientists like McAfee and Boor are saying is that for raw milk to be safe, it has to be perfect every step of the way every single time. Most foods rely on some sort of processing to ensure safety, which is what pasteurization is. Without that needed check drinking raw milk is like, well, as McAfee said, "playing Russian roulette with your health". Not worth the risk.

BTW, you'd think that a magazine with Time's resources could answer a simple question.

Why drink raw milk at all? Fans are convinced that heating destroys the good bacteria--the same probiotic critters that retailers now add back into some yogurts--as well as enzymes that can be beneficial to your health.

So. Is this true? Isn't the absolutely most important point of all to say that this claim either is real or is completely phony?

Yes it is. So why raise the claim -- and then never address it in any way at any time in the article?

Bad journalism, Time. Not as bad as what The Boston Globe committed when it printed that article I critiqued in my earlier post, but still not up to my standards. We're talking peoples' health, here. Get it both right, which you did, and complete, which you didn't.

Raw Milk Article Long but Flawed

David E. Gumpert's article Got Raw Milk? (single page version, from the Boston Globe Sunday Magazine, is a major treatment of the subject. Raw milk is milk that has not been pasteurized. Proponents claim that this improves the flavor of the milk, doesn't damage the nutrients, and is healthier overall. Many states ban raw milk entirely and almost all the rest have strict regulations concerning its sale. Unless extreme care is taken with the health of the cows and of the milk before it reaches the consumer, a variety of diseases can be passed through to those who drink it.

For background check out my own major article on the subject titled Raw Milk Not for Lactose Intolerants.

With that background, the section of Gumpert's article of greatest concern to us follows:

Results of a just-released study of 2,217 raw-milk drinkers in Michigan - conducted by a herd-share group there and by a professor at the University of Michigan and underwritten by the Weston A. Price Foundation - suggest that raw milk can be consumed by most sufferers of lactose intolerance, a condition the study's authors estimate affects about 10 percent of all Americans. This is a tiny sample, but of the 155 people in the study who said they had been "told by a healthcare professional they had lactose intolerance," more than 80 percent reported regularly drinking raw milk without symptoms. (An FDA spokesman counters that because of the study's methodologies, its authors do not consider the findings conclusive, nor do they call the consumption of raw milk a preventive measure.)

Since I've been saying loudly for a very long time that no evidence exists that people with lactose intolerance will be no more symptom-free from raw milk than from pasteurized milk, I need to point out a few facts that Gumpert doesn't include in his article.

First, David H. Gumpert. While newspaper reporters are usually supposed to be objective and report both sides of an issue, magazine writers are normally not under the same obligation. Partisans often write on subjects of concern to them. One of Gumpert's major concerns is raw milk. He's for it. Searching his The Complete Patient journal yields numerous articles over the last several years extolling the virtues of raw milk and attacking governmental interference with it.

Second, the Weston A. Price Foundation, the funder of the study. It is not an impartial observer in the controversy. Quite the opposite.

Specific goals include establishment of universal access to clean, certified raw milk and a ban on the use of soy formula for infants.

One of its major initiatives is the Campaign for Real Milk. Real = Raw.

Anti-milk groups always protest when they see studies on the benefits of milk funded by Dairy Associations and other interested parties. It will be interesting to see their position on this one. My take is that this study should be given the same level of credence, one based on the value of the science it produced tempered with the understanding that special interest-funded studies that hit print almost invariably are favorable to the product being studied.

What of the study itself? I wish I knew. I couldn't find the study mentioned on the Price foundation site. And Gumpert's journal entry says:

Hopefully, they'll get in published in a scholarly journal of some kind.

That appears to mean it is a non-peer-reviewed study that has not been looked at by the rest of the scientific community. The FDA has seen it, judging by the comment Gumpert put in his article, and they weren't impressed.

But what about the claim itself? Lactose intolerance individuals could drink raw milk without symptoms. Doesn't that prove something?

Not without a control group. Here's the fact that either the study doesn't bother to give or Gumpert left out. People with lactose intolerance can often drink any kind of milk, even pasteurized, without getting symptoms. That's a fact that's been showing up in peer-reviewed studies for decades.

If the Beals study did not do a blinded comparison of raw milk to pasteurized milk among its drinkers there is no possible way to know if they people who considered themselves lactose intolerant had symptoms from pasteurized milk. And without that comparison the numbers given by Gumpert are meaningless.

I hope more details emerge soon or the complete study is posted online. I'll keep an eye out for it.

In the meantime continue to view raw milk with the same suspicion you would view pasteurized milk. Don't let a group touting raw milk convince you otherwise.