Unpasteurized vs. pasteurized: What to know about food safety
The polarizing process is pasteurization — a heating process that kills the microbes behind common foodborne illnesses.
Prominent pushes for 'raw milk' consumption are growing, whether it's Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. or Gwyneth Paltrow.
While still on the 2024 campaign trail for his failed presidential bid, Kennedy said he only drinks unpasteurized milk. In April, he suspended a quality control program for testing the nation's dairy supply.
All the while, experts and researchers are advocating for Americans to only consume pasteurized milk.
Pasteurized vs unpasteurized: What's the difference?
Pasteurization is the process of heating a food product for a certain amount of time to destroy bacteria and viruses present, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
Dairy products, eggs, juices, canned food, flour, honey and alcohol, among others, are typically pasteurized.
Unpasteurized products don't undergo the heating and germ-killing process. They can include milk, artisanal cheese, juice, meat and more.
Benefits, drawbacks of pasteurization
By getting rid of harmful microbes, pasteurization can prevent foodborne illnesses like listeriosis, typhoid fever, tuberculosis, diphtheria, Q fever, and brucellosis, according to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).
Pasteurization can also change the nutritional value, flavor and appearance of food, though only minimally, per the National Library of Medicine.
'Pasteurized milk offers the same nutritional benefits without the risks of raw milk consumption. Since the early 1900s, pasteurization has greatly reduced milk-borne illnesses,' the CDC says.
Are unpasteurized foods safe? What are the risks?
Some believe that so-called 'raw milk' and other unpasteurized products are a healthier option, since they are straight from nature.
Some champion positive health returns from drinking unpasteurized milk, including raw milk farmer Cliff McConville: 'I can tell you that I used to get sick like three times a year, like, you know, with colds or flu, and I almost never get sick anymore.'
But most medical bodies and independent experts say the benefits of unpasteurized food don't outweigh the potential health problems.
The CDC and the FDA have warned that raw milk is unsafe because bacteria in it can cause illness or even death.
The bird flu virus can remain infectious in raw milk for over a day at room temperature and more than a week when refrigerated, according to a non-peer-reviewed study from a group of UK scientists.
The study, published in medRxiv, examined the stability of the H5N1 avian influenza virus in raw cow and sheep milk, with researchers simulating storage conditions common in dairy settings.
'High viral titres were detected in milk from infected cows, raising concerns about onwards human infections,' the authors wrote.
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
The Hill
20 minutes ago
- The Hill
The FDA must be modernized for the era of personalized medicine
A baby named KJ was born in Philadelphia with an ultra-rare metabolic disorder that, under normal circumstances, would have required an organ transplant or been fatal. Instead, doctors sequenced KJ's genome and identified a unique mutation. Within six months, they designed and delivered a personalized CRISPR-based therapy — resulting in the first patient to be cured by a bespoke gene-editing treatment. A few years earlier, a young girl in Boston named Mila suffered from a fatal neurodegenerative disease. In just 10 months, a team of doctors designed, developed and synthesized a one-of-a-kind drug just for her, this time using an antisense oligonucleotide therapy that slowed the progression of her disease. These are more than medical miracles. They are proof that it is now possible to tailor medicines to a single person's genetic code. What is missing is a regulatory framework to scale these one-off breakthroughs into a new standard of care. Globally, more than 50 million children suffer from rare genetic diseases — and nearly one in five will die before the age of five. Even children with the same diagnosis can carry different genetic mutations, meaning a one-size-fits-all drug may be ineffective or impossible to make. The problem is our healthcare system isn't designed or incentivized to develop drugs for individual patients. The good news is that science and technology have caught up. We can now sequence a genome for under $100. Artificial intelligence models can design mutation-specific therapies in days and RNA-based treatments can be manufactured in weeks. Operation Warp Speed showed our ability to distribute advanced therapies at scale. And with wearables and digital health tools, we can monitor children's physiological response in real-time, both before and after treatment. The FDA's current approval framework is nearly a century old. It was originally designed to regulate mass-produced drugs for large populations. While there have been reforms since then, most have been incremental and tailored to conventional pharmaceutical development. The current process treats personalized medicines — especially 'N-of-1' therapies — as individual research trials. This approach is time-consuming, expensive and not scalable for the millions of patients who could benefit. Rare disease doesn't just affect patients, it drains families and their communities. Parents leave the workforce to become full-time caregivers. Families travel across the country for access to specialists. Experimental treatments, hospital stays, lost wages and uncovered expenses can bankrupt a family before a diagnosis is even confirmed. In many cases, the child's condition continues to deteriorate while waiting for a diagnosis or cure. The cumulative damage is incalculable. Thanks to advances in genomics, AI, synthetic biology and preclinical testing, personalized therapies are becoming more cost-effective and scalable. For example, the FDA's recent roadmap to phase out mandatory animal testing opens the door to validating therapies using artificial organs or a patient's own cells — improving safety while cutting time and cost. America remains a global leader in the core breakthroughs that made Mila and KJ's treatments possible — from CRISPR gene editing to large language models trained on protein and RNA structures. But that lead is fragile. The FDA has taken steps in the right direction, including establishing a pathway for personalized CAR-T therapies and issuing draft guidance for ASO drugs. But guidance isn't enough. We need a dedicated framework that clarifies the rules, requirements and incentives for those building personalized therapeutics. Without it, researchers and companies will hesitate to invest time and resources into what feels like regulatory guesswork. As the FDA and the Department of Health and Human Services undergo what appear to be structural changes, this is a rare window to modernize regulation and secure America's position at the forefront of next-generation medicine. To turn personalized therapies into a new standard of care, the FDA can take a number of key steps. The agency should create a new regulatory pathway for bespoke therapeutics. N-of-1 drugs can't be evaluated using the traditional Phase 1-2-3 frameworks. We need an entirely new process-oriented framework that considers families, physicians, payers, regulators and industry alike. The FDA should establish a dedicated oversight body. A centralized group within the agency should review personalized therapeutics, set transparent safety and ethics standards and ensure rigorous tracking of outcomes. This will build consistency, speed and public trust. The agency should enable sustainable funding and reimbursement. Cost no longer needs to be the barrier. Clear regulatory rules will unlock investment, while reimbursement frameworks will ensure payers can cover these treatments responsibly. Absent this, safe and effective therapies may never reach patients. Every week matters for a child with a rare, degenerative condition. Acting now can turn scientific breakthroughs into a public health reality. If we wait, we risk letting outdated regulation stall progress — and watching the rest of the world move forward without us. The tools are here. The science is ready. All that's missing is a regulatory system built for the future of medicine that doesn't treat individualized care as an exception, but as the new standard. Nessan Bermingham is an operating partner at Khosla Ventures, where he invests in genetic medicines and AI drug discovery and development. He is also the founding CEO of Intellia Therapeutics, the founder and chairman of Korro Bio, and a board member of EveryONE Medicines.
Forbes
an hour ago
- Forbes
InnovationRx: Sarepta Blinks In Showdown With FDA
In this week's edition of InnovationRx, we look at Sarepta's showdown with the FDA, Moderna's use of quantum computers, a new top drug regulator at the FDA, ARCH Venture's latest biotech company, and more. To get it in your inbox, subscribe here . Sarepta Therapeutics CEO Douglas Ingram Bloomberg Finance U sually when the FDA asks a drugmaker to halt distribution of a treatment, the company complies. Last week, in a remarkable showdown, Sarepta Therapeutics refused to stop distribution of Elevidys, its therapy for the muscle-wasting disease Duchenne muscular dystrophy as the FDA had requested. Then, in a remarkable reversal, on Monday Sarepta blinked and said that it would indeed pause all shipments of Elevidys by Tuesday evening. The latest twist in the saga followed a decision by Children's Hospital Los Angeles to halt use of the drug while it was facing regulatory uncertainty. Elevidys is a gene therapy for Duchenne, a particularly severe form of muscular dystrophy, which typically kills patients before they turn 30. The one-time intravenous infusion was first approved in 2023 in an unusual decision that was made unilaterally by Peter Marks, a top FDA official, despite misgivings of his staff. Last Friday evening, the FDA had requested that Cambridge, Mass.-based Sarepta voluntarily stop all shipments of the drug, citing the deaths of three patients who had taken Elevidys or a similar drug (that's in early-stage clinical trials) from liver failure. Later that evening, Sarepta responded that it would continue to ship Elevidys for patients who do not use wheelchairs (who are generally younger and healthier), citing its own analysis that there were no new safety problems in these patients. It had already voluntarily halted sales to patients who use wheelchairs. The face-off between Sarepta and the FDA comes at a time when investment in gene therapy has slowed, and as Sarepta itself has laid off hundreds of employees. Sarepta's stock is down nearly 40% since last Thursday's close. It's unclear how long the 'pause' might last. The company is working on an enhanced immune-suppressing protocol that could reduce liver toxicity, but a senior FDA official told Stat yesterday that the drug faces an 'arduous and treacherous path' back to the market. Whatever ultimately happens, the ongoing saga highlights the questions about what risks are acceptable for patients with diseases that are fatal at a young age and how the potential for treatment should be balanced against the possibility of death from the therapy itself. Moderna M essenger RNA (or mRNA) is a hugely promising technology for future vaccines and therapies, as was demonstrated during the COVID-19 pandemic. One of its major advantages is that it provides instructions for the body itself to manufacture the medicine it needs, rather than delivering it. But developing new treatments is challenging, Wade Davis, vice president of computational science at Moderna (best known for developing those COVID vaccines), told Forbes . That's in part because of the fragile nature of mRNA–its primary function is serving as a temporary set of instructions for cellular machinery, so it doesn't stick around long. But for the purposes of medicine, it needs to be optimized so that it's both durable enough to provide an efficacious dose, but still transient enough to minimize potential side effects. The potential combinations are mind boggling. For example, there are 10^623 different ways to combine nucleotides in mRNA to encode for the same protein as the company's COVID vaccine, Davis said. To put that in perspective, 'there's only 10^80 particles in the universe,' he said. 'The numbers just go crazy.' Conventional computers, even supercomputers using the best AI algorithms, struggle with this sort of problem, he said. For one, because mRNA is so fragile, there aren't a lot of known structures that an AI program could be trained on. And when it comes to optimization of structures, the numbers are so large that it's difficult to scale, forcing chemists to rely on rules of thumb and oversimplifying the data to try and find solutions. Moderna has found one solution: quantum computing. It recently partnered with IBM to use its quantum hardware to optimize mRNA structures. Quantum computers are uniquely suited to solving large scale optimization problems like this, because they can search and compute potential solutions in parallel. By contrast conventional computers have to calculate everything in sequence, which goes ever slower the bigger the problem gets. Using IBM's quantum computers, Moderna was able to predict a 60-nucleotide sequence of mRNA. The previous record was only eight. While that's still a long way from the sequence lengths, comprising thousands of nucleotides, that biotech companies will need, it shows a potential new way to find new mRNA therapies. More importantly, it could lead to breakthroughs that might have never been discovered with conventional approaches. With quantum algorithms, Davis said, 'you get into the space of possibilities in a different way than some of the classical approaches.' BIOTECH AND PHARMA CAR-T cell therapy has been a life-saving treatment for patients with cancers like leukemia or lymphoma, with many going into remission. But the therapy so far has been less successful on solid tumors, which comprise most cancers. Dispatch Bio aims to change that: The three year-old company emerged from stealth today with $216 million in funding led by Midas Lister Bob Nelsen's ARCH Venture Partners and the Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy. One reason it's challenging to treat solid cancers with CAR-T therapy is that it's more difficult for the cells to identify their targets, Dispatch Bio CEO Sabah Oney told Forbes . To get around this, Dispatch has developed a viral vector that targets cancer cells and then 'tags' them with a protein that the T-cells can use to attack the cancer. The virus uses the cancer cells' own replication system to make copies of itself, making it difficult for the cancer to develop a resistance to it. Because this mechanism is different in healthy cells, the risk is lower that the therapy would attack them. So far, the Philadelphia-based company has tested its therapy in both human cells in the lab and in animals, Oney said. It plans to start clinical trials in 2026, but is still working out what indication it will go after first. 'Ultimately, we have plans to be able to scale this approach so we can get to millions and millions of patients because that's the broad potential of this platform,' he said. 'We can do lung cancer, breast cancer, colon cancer with the same drug.' Plus : AstraZeneca plans to invest $50 billion in U.S. drug development and manufacturing by 2030 as pharma companies look for ways to deal with Trump's tariffs. DIGITAL HEALTH AND AI Mental healthcare startup Slingshot AI launched an AI-powered chatbot to provide support for those dealing with mental health issues. It simultaneously raised $53 million in venture funding led by Forerunner Ventures and Radical Ventures, bringing total funding to $93 million, at an undisclosed valuation. The chatbot, called Ash, has been beta tested with more than 50,000 patients. Plus : Aidoc, which has developed FDA-cleared algorithms for use by radiologists, raised $150 million led by General Catalyst and Square Peg at an undisclosed valuation. PUBLIC HEALTH AND HOSPITALS The FDA has named George Tidmarsh, a pediatric oncologist and pharma company veteran, as its top drug regulator, director of its Center for Drug Evaluation and Research. He will replace Jacqueline Corrigan-Curay, who has been serving in the role in an acting capacity after the departure of former director Patrizia Cavazzoni in January. Tidmarsh has led teams that have developed seven FDA-approved drugs and has served as CEO of several pharmaceutical companies in addition to being an adjunct professor at the Stanford School of Medicine. He takes over as the FDA has faced substantial upheaval under HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. WHAT WE'RE READING How a push for increased organ donation led to people enduring rushed or premature attempts to remove their organs. Wellness startup Truemed, cofounded by RFK Jr. aide Calley Means, helps people buy Peloton bikes and $9,000 saunas with tax-free funds set aside for healthcare. Bankrupt hospital system Steward Health sued its former CEO claiming he conducted insider transactions that drained its assets and led to its collapse. AI companies, including OpenAI, Grok and others have stopped warning users that their chatbots aren't doctors. Life sciences investment firm Omega Funds has raised $647 million for its eighth fund. Researchers figured out a way to deliver a vaccine using dental floss, which has so far been successfully tested on mice. Former Citigroup chair Sandy Weill gave $100 million to harness AI for a West Coast cancer hub. MORE FROM FORBES Forbes Vibe Coding Turned This Swedish AI Unicorn Into The Fastest Growing Software Startup Ever By Iain Martin Forbes Why JPMorgan Is Hitting Fintechs With Stunning New Fees For Data Access By Jeff Kauflin Forbes Go Back To The Office, But Bring Your Own Snacks. Blame Congress. By Kelly Phillips Erb
an hour ago
What is orthosomnia? How obsession with wearable tech could impact sleep
Millions of Americans are turning to devices to keep track of everything from heart rates to sleep. But the latter could pose a problem for some wearable tech users who end up more stressed than rested when it comes to monitoring things like their sleep score. Nancy Chen, a marketing manager and part-time boxing instructor, who was drawn to having access to sleep data, told "Good Morning America" that her device became a problem of its own. "Sleep has always mattered a lot to me, and I would always get a little stressed if I knew I wasn't gonna sleep enough," she said. "It was this cycle of, I knew that my sleep score was gonna be bad, and then I was kind of like stressed about it. It was too much data." The constant monitoring can lead to a phenomenon known as orthosomnia, defined by the Sleep Foundation as an obsessive pursuit of optimal sleep that is driven by sleep tracker data. "Orthosomnia refers to individuals for whom tracking may have become or is potentially stressful," sleep scientist Rebecca Robbins, Ph.D., an assistant professor of medicine at Brigham and Women's Hospital, told "GMA." "The information they receive stresses them out, and then they it causes them to struggle the next night." The harder people with orthosomnia try to control their sleep, the worse it gets. While health trackers can have many benefits, they may be triggering for perfectionists or those with Type A personalities, Robbins said. "The thing about sleep is it's not always going to be perfect every night, and sleep is a function of all of the things that we experience in a typical day -- and some of that might be stressful," she said. While there are many benefits to health trackers, including understanding one's sleep patterns, if you're experiencing stress from those trackers, Robbins recommends putting it in a drawer and returning to some healthy sleep strategies. "Unwinding before bedtime, calming your mind, using some breathing activities, journaling before bedtime, a warm shower," she suggested, adding that people should try to be "filling the moments before we want to be falling asleep with healthy, relaxing activities."
