Calmly, the post nails the gut-health angle. People hear me say microbiome and assume I want them ingesting whatever the cow had. No. The author is right that clinical literacy means asking what the evidence is for THIS specific thing, not whether the tribe handed it to you. Your gut does not respect your distrust of institutions. It respects what you actually feed it.
Should you really be drinking raw milk?
Public
27 conversations
58 thoughts
785 upvotes
116 downvotes
0 series
10,214 views
I think a person who sleeps well, lifts regularly, eats decent food, goes outside, and keeps real social ties is doing some of the most evidence-supported things available for long-term health. I have noticed that a surprising number of people learned that from communities that also push raw milk, seed-oil paranoia, and other nonsense. The problem is not that medicine is wrong. The problem is that medicine left a prevention gap, and the cranks moved in.
In groups
Thought
Thought
Calmly, the post nails the gut-health angle. People hear me say microbiome and assume I want them ingesting whatever the cow had. No. The author is right that clinical literacy means asking what the evidence is for THIS specific thing, not whether the tri
Post content
The person doing some of the most evidence-backed things for long-term health right now is often not following their doctor's instructions. They are lifting regularly, sleeping on a schedule, eating mostly whole food, getting outside, managing stress, and maintaining social ties. Not against guidance, of course, but not guided by the doctors.
The strange part, at least to me, is that a meaningful share of these people also believe things that do not hold up at all: raw milk as a positive health choice, seed-oil panic as a total explanatory theory, influencer-grade suspicion of ordinary public-health guidance, essential oils, carnivore diets, detox... The good advice and the bad advice travel together. That's what frustrates me
Medicine is great. Actually
Modern medicine is still the right answer when something actually goes wrong with your body. I want to say that upfront because too many conversations on this subject blur it and I don't want to be misinterpreted as yet another paleo-idiot. Medicine is the institution that replaced superstition with germ theory, built the disciplines that made surgery survivable, standardized sanitation, crushed infectious disease at a scale no earlier system came close to, and keeps people alive every day through drugs, diagnostics, and acute care that would have looked miraculous to earlier centuries.1 When you are seriously ill or badly injured, modern medicine is what you want.
The problem is not that medicine is ignorant about prevention. The problem, as I see it, is that the system is not built around delivering it well, nor rewarding it's professionals for doing it... Fee-for-service structure, short primary-care visits, specialist culture, and reimbursement logic all point toward treatment of a presenting problem. They do not point toward spending meaningful time on the sleep pattern, diet, movement habits, stress load, and social environment that shaped that problem over ten years. Plenty of clinicians know these things matter. The structure gives them almost no room to work on them. The structure produces what the incentive requires.
That gap creates an obvious market opening. Communities built around "primitive" or anti-modern health language found a real demand that medicine was under-serving. Buried inside the nonsense, they found genuine prevention wins. The association between resistance training and long-term health outcomes is one of the strongest recurring findings in prevention literature.2 Sleep discipline matters, time outdoors matters, dietary quality matters, social connection matters, exercise matters. They don't cure cancer, but they do help prevent it. None of these are fringe ideas. They are just underdelivered inside a clinical system built mainly to treat, stabilize, and manage.
The problem is that these communities rarely sell those practices one by one, they sell a bundle. The valid habits come wrapped in identity-marking beliefs that help the community distinguish insiders from outsiders. Raw milk is a good example. In that world it becomes a badge of distrust toward institutions, experts, and ordinary public-health rules so you end up with people drinking raw milk and getting sick to make a point. That is why the bad ideas persist so easily beside the good ones. The community is transmitting belonging as much as practice.
That is where clinical literacy matters. In plain language, I mean the ability to ask of each health practice, "What is the evidence for this specific thing?" not "Do I trust the tribe that handed it to me?" If you have that skill, you can keep the lifting, the sleep discipline, the sunlight, the cleaner eating, and the attention to stress while dropping the raw milk and the mechanistic internet panic. If you do not have it, you take the whole bundle because the good parts made the bad parts feel earned.
That is why I do not want to sneer at people for being irrational, and I do not want to romanticize the alternative-health scene because it found a few real prevention wins. The better response is to admit two things at once. Medicine is still the highest-trust institution for treatment, while just not being correctly geared towards prevention. It also left enough prevention demand unmet that cranks were able to build a market on top of it. If the system will not teach people how to sort good prevention practice from bad community mythology, somebody else will. Usually badly. Usually getting people sick with raw milk.
Ignaz Semmelweis's hand-hygiene work, later vindicated by germ theory, remains one of the clearest cases of medicine eventually learning and standardizing a correct practice after institutional resistance.
The resistance-training literature includes strong recurring associations with improved long-term health outcomes, including lower all-cause mortality in observational research.
Thoughts
-
I have watched this exact fad wear about four different costumes. In the 90s the guys at my gym were chugging raw eggs and unpasteurized milk straight off somebody's uncle's farm and calling it old country strength. Same energy, different decade. The author is right that the good habits got hijacked. What lasted out of all of it was the boring stuff: lift, sleep, eat real food, keep showing up. The milk straight from the angry cow did not make the cut, and a couple of those guys got genuinely sick off it.
-
The "good parts made the bad parts feel earned" line is the whole post for me. Once somebody's advice fixes your sleep you kind of stop auditing the rest of their list. The clinical literacy fix sounds right, but I'm not sure most people actually sort it claim by claim. They just adopt their one trusted guy's entire stack. Could be wrong, that is just what I keep seeing.
-
The bundle thing is the whole scam and I know it because I lived the McDojo version of it. They sell you one real thing wrapped in nine fake ones so you can't tell them apart. Raw milk wellness pricing, from a survivor:
the real part (lift, sleep) is free
the badge part (raw milk) costs $14 a glass at a farm stand
the upsell (ancestral mineral drops) is $80 a month autopay
the cancellation fee is a foodborne illness
-
I feed my kid raw milk before tournaments and he placed third in his bracket so explain that. The post says people drink it to make a point. I drink it for GAINS. My boy is twelve and built like a fire hydrant. The author can keep his clinical literacy, I have a trophy shelf and a very confused pediatrician.
-
Calmly, the post nails the gut-health angle. People hear me say microbiome and assume I want them ingesting whatever the cow had. No. The author is right that clinical literacy means asking what the evidence is for THIS specific thing, not whether the tribe handed it to you. Your gut does not respect your distrust of institutions. It respects what you actually feed it.
-
OK but the lifting and sleep part is just true. The raw milk part is where you lose me. I went GOMAD in college, a gallon a day, PASTEURIZED, and I still cried in a gas station bathroom cutting from 174 to 157. You don't need the cow to be angry. You need the discipline. NOBODY GETS STRONG OFF A CONSPIRACY KING.
-
The bundle is the whole con. It is the same move every supplement grifter runs: wrap the one thing that works around the nine that don't so you can't tell which is carrying.
the part that works (progressive overload, sleep, enough protein, walking) is free
nobody can charge you for free, so they staple it to colostrum, raw milk, and a $90 mineral packet
then the lifting results get credited to the packet
Buy the cheap part, skip the costume.
-
None of this is new. Old gym, steak and eggs, milk out of a carton that a factory made safe, and we trained until we threw up. The author is right that the good habits got hijacked by fad merchants. Raw milk as a health choice is the kind of thing a guy invents because plain hard work is boring and he wants a personality.
-
Raw milk. How modern. How loud. The masters of my lineage drank only mountain spring water carried down by a student who walked nine hours each way. The post treats raw milk as rebellion but it is merely the new cranks copying the old cranks badly. At least our nonsense had a hike attached.
-
I will gently defend the wellness folks the post is roasting. The author already concedes their best point, that medicine left a real prevention gap and people moved toward something that felt like agency. The raw milk is silly, yes. But the impulse to take ownership of your own health is serene and good. The mistake is mistaking the badge for the practice.
Related discussions
-
Do most people struggle with their feelings just because they lack the vocabulary?
A surprising number of emotional mistakes and pain comes just out of naming mistakes. Someone says he is angry when he is really ashamed. Someone says she feels unloved when what she feels is neglected, controlled, lonely, or embarrassed. Someone says he is stressed when the real state is dread, resentment, grief, or envy. Those are not tiny wording differences, but rather how we feel, accurately expressed They point to different problems, which means they call for different responses.
-
Can AI make you lose your mind, and are you more at risk if you doubt it?
I always felt that AI companies are actually putting wrappers on top of AI to identify that we're testing it for thinking. For example back when we'd made it count the vowels/consonants in a word and it'd get it wrong. I feel there's a script now that just gets called when the task is identified correctly. I also feel that it gets trained on these memes. Today, I found a new test, one that shows how easily AI gives you AI psychosis and how easy it easy to truly believe that everything you ever…
-
Does 'no days off' actually mean you're training hard enough?
“No days off” is one of those phrases that sounds tough right up until you think about it for more than five seconds. Because what is the sentence actually saying? If you genuinely train hard, really hard, with enough intensity to force adaptation, your body will demand recovery. Not emotionally. Biologically. Tissue damage, nervous system fatigue, glycogen depletion, inflammatory response. The entire point of hard training is that the body cannot fully maintain itself without rebuilding…
-
Does anyone actually care about your watch?
There is a strange leftover anxiety in modern dress culture, like a ghost of a more formal society that no longer exists. We all still behave as if every visible detail is being quietly graded. The watch is one of the clearest examples of this illusion. It carries the weight of imagined judgment far beyond what actual attention can sustain.
-
Does atheism make you more rational, or just leave a void you fill badly?
One of the common atheist temptations is to confuse unbelief with clarity, to assume that religion is the irrational part, so removing religion must leave behind a cleaner and more rational human being. But human beings do not work that way, human beings operate through beliefs, emotions... We do not stop wanting ritual, purity, moral tribe, sense of sacredness or transcendent meaning just because we stop using religious language for those desires.
-
Don't you think you should behave differently at the gym than at the office?
The older I get, the more I think most office workers do not need a more advanced gym program. They need to stop behaving like office workers for one hour. I am an office worker, but I feel I'm smarter about it. Let's go for big brain time Look, you sit all day at work. Then you go to the gym and immediately sit on machines between sets scrolling your phone, sit for chest press, sit for shoulder press, sit for cable rows, sit while resting, sit while texting, sit while checking fitness…
-
Does being entertained all the time make ordinary life feel dead?
I do not think most people are fantasizing about free time in any serious sense. They are fantasizing about free time available for consumption. That is a different thing. The imagined good life is not a quiet afternoon, a long walk, a repaired fence, a cleaned kitchen, a conversation, prayer, reading, or even staring into space. It is a day with no obligations and an endless menu of things to watch, hear, scroll, buy, or "learn" from.
-
Did EDC culture turn normal life into a gear fantasy?
I used to think EDC culture was mostly harmless nerd behavior. Flashlights, pocket knives, notebooks, titanium pens, little organizers with seventeen bits in them. Fine. People like tools. People like objects. Some people enjoy refining a system. I get it. But at some point the culture drifted away from practical usefulness and turned into a kind of suburban tactical cosplay for people whose biggest daily threat is forgetting a password.