Pasteurization is hot milk for a short time. Holding it at 72 °C for fifteen seconds drops the pathogen count by a factor of a hundred thousand or more, while flavour, calcium, protein, fat, and lactose come through unchanged; the cost is a five-to-ten percent dent in a few heat-sensitive vitamins that no normal diet notices ^{1 2}.

The tolerance claim fails its own first test. In a double-blind crossover, sixteen lactose-malabsorbers drank raw, pasteurized, and soy milk on separate days; raw cut nothing, matching pasteurized on hydrogen, cramping, and gas ³. The "live enzymes" story fails simpler still: stomach acid near pH 1.5 denatures them before the gut. The lactase that digests milk sugar is made by your gut lining, not delivered by the glass.

One claim survives, narrowly: farm children who drank unboiled milk early had about a third lower odds of asthma ⁴. But the effect sits in farm toddlers, isn't shown in adults, and the investigators who found it recommend against raw milk anyway.

The risk is real, and it isn't flat. Per unit consumed, unpasteurized dairy runs about 840 times the illness rate of pasteurized and 45 times the hospitalization rate ⁵. Most of that is stomach flu; the tail is what matters. A small child's E. coli O157:H7 infection can shut the kidneys down, and the 2007–2012 CDC window hospitalized over a hundred children from raw-dairy outbreaks ⁶. In pregnancy, listeria crosses the placenta and ends about one in five confirmed infections in fetal or newborn death ⁷. And H5N1 bird flu now turns up at high levels in raw milk from infected herds ⁸.

Every real reason to reach for raw milk has a safer answer. Buy the thing you wanted; the pathogen load is the only part dropped.

What skipping it buys back. For a daily-drinking family of four, roughly $1,500 a year stays in the account, since raw runs $8 to $15 a gallon against three to five. The largest payoff never arrives as a notification: the pediatric ICU admission that didn't happen, the pregnancy that went to term.