California officials warn anti-vaxxers to avoid Disneyland

boing
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He’s not. Do you know anything about what happens to milk when it’s pasteurised…? I met a farmer at a farmers’ market in York who referred to pasteurised milk as “cow pop”, For those who can’t deduce what he meant, I’ll explain.

The vitamins in milk (and, to a lesser extent, the minerals) are VERY sensitive to high temperature so, when milk is pasteurised, not only are all the bugs killed, but so is the nutrition, making it as nutritious as pop.

If you’ve not guessed by now, I’m one of those ‘nutters’ who advocates the drinking of raw milk (and, if you want to think I’m completely insane, raw meat. I’d never consume bog-standard supermarket meat raw but, then, I don’t buy bog-standard supermarket meat. All my meat (and I’m talking about steak here, I’d never eat raw chicken, but I don’t eat a great deal of chicken) is from one source, it’s 100% pastured, and the cattle has never been shot through with any kind of antibiotics, nor BGH). I’ve been eating raw steak from the same farm for years - it’s more nutritious than cooked. I also eat raw liver, as well as the bone marrow.

There’s a reason many diseases spread so rapidly, and that’s due to lowered immunity; you obviously didn’t consider the irony of your, somewhat ignorant, comment, considering this is a thread about immunisation (yes, I’m well-aware the viruses in vaccines are dead). It’s very difficult to develop effective vaccines against diseases caused by bacteria (how long has science been attempting to develop an effective vaccine against malaria, for example…?).

It may seem like a contradictory statement, but the more sanitary and sanitised we are, the greater our risk of something that wouldn’t be lethal becoming so.

In France, it’s ILLEGAL to produce cheese from pasteurised milk, and any French cheese produced elsewhere which has NOT been produced from raw milk cannot be allowed to bear that cheese’s name (Roquefort being the most famous example, it’s ALWAYS made with raw ewes’ milk).

The constant sanitisation of every little thing we put into our bodies is NOT a good thing, nor is the constant prescribing of antibiotics for trivial infections.

Remember it’s only us in the West who are so pathologically paranoid about pathogens, Inuit mothers, for example, regularly feed their babies reindeer milk, have the Inuit died out…?

No, I’m not saying we should abandon sanitisation completely, that would be just as catastrophic.

There’s a LOT of BS spewed by health depts (in fact, most of what they come out with is utter bollocks; saturated fat makes you fat and causes CVD. Cholesterol will kill you, red meat will kill you, calories in < calories out = weight loss… the list is almost endless).

For the record, I’m NOT an anti-vaxxer.

IT’S ALL BOLLOCKS, PEOPLE!

Okay, minor rant out of my system.

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American eggs aren’t safe to eat raw.
British eggs are safe to eat raw.
This has very little to do with impure practices endemic in the American agricultural community.

Instead, British hens are vaccinated. American hens aren’t

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I make cheese from raw milk… Produced by a single farm, where we have discussed the sanitary protocols, I can see the cows, and their is a record of the temp of the milk for the entirety of storage. I wouldn’t touch raw milk at a store with a ten foot pole.

It makes amazing cheese.

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From the article 90% of British hens are vaccinated. That’s more than Marin county.

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I’m unsure if that was a parody (Poe’s law and all), but assuming you are serious,

  1. Taking nutritional advice from farmers in markets probably is not a great idea. There is no scientific evidence to suggest pasteurized milk loses nutrition.

  2. In Pasteur’s day, tuberculosis and brucellosis were rampant, and drinking milk was a major source of infection. And this was in a time before the factory farm and hormones. Pasteurization contributed to a great reduction in disease rates.

  3. I have no idea if or why France would make cheese from pasteurized milk illegal, but it is true that in cheesemaking the acidification and curdling process kills a lot of the bacteria and so it might not be necessary to pasteurize milk for this purpose.

  4. There’s certainly an issue with the overuse of antibiotics, but the real issue isn’t that your immune system doesn’t get challenged when you use them, it is that the overuse is spurring the evolution of resistant strains of bacteria.

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They are privately owned facilities, surely no true libertarian could oppose the owner’s right to institute such a policy? Bueller?

EDIT: Yes, I am aware that in this case it doesn’t seem to be Disney that is making the policy, I meant to say that we should encourage them to do so instead of their own accord, but never actually typed that part.

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This all depends upon the specifics. One persons experience is an anecdote. But when a number of people compare their experience and get methodical about it - science happens.

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Interesting. NIH says raw milk mostly has the same vitamin content as pasteurized milk (except B2):

You’re going to have a provide a reference on the Calories in < Calories out = weight loss being bollocks. Because, conservation of energy…

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The nutrition is the same, the flavor and texture of raw milk cheese is different (which is experimentally trivial to prove, you can do it in your own kitchen). But I digress, pasteurization truly is a modern miracle (even if it makes cheese taste worse)

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Uh, no. Not even. Lots of pasteurized cheese produced in France. Have you ever been there?

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Yeah, I think what he was trying to say is certain styles, to be given protection, must be unpasteurized. Like reblochon

Reblochon_AOC.jpg1890×1417 997 KB

(Mmm… Cheese mites)

vieux-mimolettesmall.jpg2362×1575 928 KB

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There are multiple approaches to pasteurization, usually different heating regimens (HTST, UHT, or microwave volumetric heating). Then there is an ultrafiltration step that can be added to remove bacteria and allows lower temperatures (ESL). And there is thermization, or “pasteurization lite”, that uses yet lower temperatures, though kills fewer germs.

An interesting experiment would be comparing the different methods’ effect on the resulting cheese organoleptic properties…

Edit: The microwave heating has the advantage against the conventional heat-exchanger system that the heating goes through the volume of the material, without having to contact a high-temperature surface, so fewer changes occur and there are no (or fewer) traces of the “cooked” flavor. Of course there will be some Food Babe out there that will scream bloody murder because “microwaves bad”.

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Cat bites if they puncture the skin equal get to the doc ASAP as they happily carry staph and other nasty bacteria in their saliva. While not enough to care about if they lick you it is definitely enough to get some serious antibiotics for if they puncture the skin and draw blood. I have had 2 coworkers in the past ignore cat bites and end up in the ER with hands as big as ballons. One spent a few days in the hospital with a drain tube in her wrist.

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One irony is in the US organic milk is usually pasteurized at much higher temps and homogenized more radically than conventional, since because of price it sits on the shelf longer. It makes it very difficult to make organic cheese, since the gel doesn’t set as well.

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Not so simple. Food calories are determined by a method known as bomb calorimetry. The food is literally burned to find its caloric value. That works fine until you realize we don’t burn our food for energy in the same way. It is entirely possible for two people to eat the same thing, and retrieve differing amounts of nutrients and energy from the food. Cellulose, for example, burns. But cellulose is also utterly indigestible in humans. This leads to a kind of estimation in calculations for food calories that may not apply the same to every individual.

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Vox notes:

The measles outbreak at Disneyland in California is one of the largest the United States has experienced in years, affecting at least 67 people in five states. But this fact, from USA Today, is arguably the scariest part of the public health emergency:

Six of the cases were in infants too young to have been vaccinated.

The measles vaccine is not licensed for use on babies younger than 12 months. That means that, for the first year of life, babies depend on the fact that everybody else around them gets vaccinated. This essentially creates a firewall: if other people are vaccinated, they won’t catch the disease — and won’t spread it to young children who cannot get protection.

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Likewise, I had chickenpox as a child and have the scars to prove it. But it wasn’t anywhere near as bad as being one of the unfortunates whose Pertussis vaccine didn’t take and then subsequently having whooping cough … Both adult onset Chickenpox and Shingles are seriously unpleasant diseases however. My wife had Chickenpox as an adult and she was very ill, hovering on the verge of needing hospitalisation.

The UK and NZ don’t have chickenpox on the childhood immunisation schedule. The reasoning is twofold. Firstly, having a pool of chickenpox in the community means that most people will have it as a child —when the disease is mild and the serious complication rate is low— which will repeatedly expose adults to the virus on a regular basis. The regular exposure should then reduce the odds of them having a flare up of Shingles as they maintain their immunity. Thus vaccinating might increase the odds of the elderly having shingles (which is very unpleasant). Effectively the young provide herd immunity for the old by keeping the milder disease around. Secondly, the effectiveness of the immunisation fades, so childhood immunisation might mean increased odds of catching the disease as an adult if vaccine uptake is patchy.

Not sure whether I totally agree, but it is logical. Given that humans are the pool and vector for the disease, vaccination could hold the promise of eradication given adequate uptake. But it is a relatively mild disease, the financial burden of a full vaccination program are high and anti-vaxxers are common so eradication isn’t likely to eventuate …

In conclusion, while I’m highly pro-vaccination it isn’t so clear cut for Varicella. Choosing my battles I’d push for higher uptake of Measles, Mumps, Rubella, Pertussis and Polio vaccination as they are much worse diseases.

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I am well aware that some foods are not fully digestible, so their calorie counts are higher than the calories you’re actually getting. All this means is that when you count calories, you might be consuming fewer than you thought you were.

I am also aware that a change in diet will see the body adjusting its metabolism to change the rate at which you’re losing weight (the body’s famine mode).

There’s also some interesting links found between certain kinds of gut bacteria and obesity (although nothing conclusive as yet).

None of this changes the basic principle that when you eat fewer calories than you burn, you lose weight. Because, conservation of energy.

The reason most diets fail is not because this principle is false in some cases, it is more to do with human beings being terrible at dieting and companies intentionally making it hard to count calories.

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Conservation of energy and thermodynamics is all well and good, but fundamentally calories on the box are what people go by, and there is a inherent unreliability. This is what is typically meant by calories in < calories out, and it’s a source of legitimate frustration for people who are too often told this as if it makes sense to go strictly by food labels. I don’t think anyone questions the laws of thermodynamics. My field is chemistry, I know better. I’m just pointing out it’s not so simple as to pretend that what it says on the box is what you’re going to get out of it. And I’m going to stop talking because I think we agree and everything else is just semantics.

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