What are some of the benifits / cautions to drinking fresh,unpasturized whole milk?
Raw milk is a breeding ground for bacteria, which is why we pasteurize it. It also may be illegal. A number of people will swear by it, but when we look at the outbreak numbers, it just isn’t worth it. Salon was the most unbiased of the news media stories on this topic I could find: Many people come to raw milk as a last resort; one man I spoke to for this article had terrible asthma, one woman had debilitating arthritis, and another had osteoporosis (which pasteurized milk hadn’t improved) — and all saw complete reversals of their diseases after a few months of drinking it. Their stories were persuasive, but in an age where E. coli is turning up at Taco Bell and even in organic spinach, I wondered: Is it really safe to drink unpasteurized milk? In a word: no. A scan of the CDC’s Web site turns up several recent bacterial outbreaks traced to raw milk: Last year in Washington and Oregon, four children were sickened by E. coli O157:H7; in 2002, there was a multi-state outbreak of Salmon
