Raw milk is not meaningfully more nutritious than pasteurized milk for most people. The heating process used in standard pasteurization does reduce a few heat-sensitive compounds, but the losses are small, and the safety risks of drinking unpasteurized milk are well documented. The full picture, though, is more nuanced than either side of the debate usually admits.
What Pasteurization Actually Changes
Standard pasteurization heats milk to 72°C (about 161°F) for 15 to 16 seconds. That’s enough to kill dangerous bacteria, but it’s brief enough that most nutrients survive largely intact. The vitamins most abundant in milk, including riboflavin, B6, and B12, are relatively heat stable and pass through pasteurization without significant loss.
Vitamin C takes the biggest hit, dropping roughly 15 to 17% after standard pasteurization. But here’s the thing: milk is a poor source of vitamin C to begin with. Raw whole milk contains about 23 to 24 milligrams per liter. A single orange has around 70 milligrams. Nobody drinks milk for vitamin C, so that reduction has almost no practical effect on your diet. Ultra-high-temperature processing (heating to 90°C for 10 minutes, used for shelf-stable milk) causes a much steeper 70% drop in vitamin C, but that’s a different product than what most people buy at the store.
Calcium, the main reason most people drink milk, is a mineral. Heat doesn’t destroy it. The same goes for protein content, fat, and other minerals like phosphorus and potassium. If you compared a glass of raw milk and a glass of pasteurized milk side by side in a lab, the calorie and macronutrient profiles would be nearly identical.
Immune Proteins and Enzymes
This is where raw milk advocates have a more interesting argument. Raw milk contains bioactive proteins, including immunoglobulins (antibodies) and lactoferrin, that do decrease with heat treatment. Standard pasteurization reduces IgA, the most abundant antibody in milk, by about 20%. IgM drops by roughly 40%. IgG barely changes, losing around 1%.
These proteins play real roles in the immune systems of nursing infants, which is why pasteurization of donor breast milk is an active area of research in neonatal medicine. But whether these proteins survive digestion in an older child’s or adult’s gut well enough to deliver meaningful immune benefits is a different question, and one that hasn’t been convincingly answered. Your stomach acid breaks down most proteins before they can function the way they would in a newborn’s less acidic digestive system.
Raw milk also contains enzymes like lipase and lysozyme that are reduced or destroyed by heat. Lysozyme has mild antibacterial properties. Lipase helps break down fat. These sound beneficial, but your body produces its own versions of both in large quantities. There’s no strong evidence that the small amounts present in a glass of milk make a noticeable difference.
The Probiotic Question
Raw milk contains a diverse community of live bacteria, including species from groups like Lactobacillus, Bifidobacterium, Lactococcus, and Leuconostoc. These are the same families of bacteria found in yogurt, kefir, and probiotic supplements, and they’re destroyed by pasteurization.
The catch is that raw milk isn’t a controlled probiotic product. The bacterial composition varies wildly depending on the animal breed, the farm’s hygiene practices, the season, and how the milk was stored. Alongside those potentially beneficial bacteria, raw milk can also harbor spoilage organisms and pathogens. You’re essentially getting a random assortment of microbes with no guarantee of a beneficial ratio. If you want live cultures in your dairy, fermented products like yogurt or kefir deliver them in a predictable, safe form.
Allergies and Asthma: The Farm Effect
One area where the evidence genuinely favors raw milk is childhood allergies. A large meta-analysis published in The Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology found that children who consumed raw milk early in life had a 42% lower risk of developing asthma compared to children who didn’t. The risk of hay fever dropped by about 32%, and current wheezing was 34% less likely. These effects held up even for children living in rural areas who didn’t grow up on a farm.
These are striking numbers, but researchers still aren’t sure exactly what’s driving them. It could be the diverse microbial exposure, the intact whey proteins, the fatty acid profile, or some combination. It could also be partly explained by the broader farm environment, where children are exposed to animal dander, soil microbes, and other immune-training stimuli from a young age. Clinical trials designed to isolate the specific protective components of raw milk are ongoing, but no one has pinpointed the mechanism yet. That means we know raw farm milk is associated with lower allergy rates, but we can’t yet say drinking it is the reason why.
Safety Risks Are Not Theoretical
The case for pasteurization was never really about nutrition. It was about safety. Raw milk can carry Salmonella, E. coli, Listeria, Campylobacter, and other pathogens that cause serious illness. These aren’t rare edge cases.
In a single outbreak traced to a commercial raw milk brand in California between late 2023 and early 2024, 171 people were sickened with Salmonella. Seventy percent of those cases were children and adolescents under 18. Twenty-two people were hospitalized, and 82% of those hospitalizations were kids. Children, pregnant women, elderly adults, and anyone with a weakened immune system face the highest risk, but healthy adults get sick too.
The more recent concern involves H5N1 avian influenza, which has been spreading through U.S. dairy herds since 2024. FDA testing of raw milk samples found that 158 out of those tested were positive for viral fragments, and 39 contained live, infectious virus at concentrations of roughly 3,000 virus particles per milliliter. By contrast, all 464 pasteurized dairy products the FDA tested, including milk, cheese, butter, and ice cream, came back negative for viable virus. In lab experiments simulating commercial pasteurization, the virus was completely inactivated every time, across nine repeated trials. Engineers estimated that standard pasteurization eliminates roughly one trillion virus particles per milliliter.
Even raw milk cheese aged for 60 days, which is the FDA’s minimum aging requirement meant to reduce bacterial risk, failed to eliminate H5N1. The virus survived through and beyond the full aging period. Only heating the milk above 54°C (130°F) for at least 15 minutes, or dropping the pH to 5.0, successfully inactivated it.
Does Raw Milk Help With Lactose Intolerance?
A common claim is that raw milk is easier to digest for people who are lactose intolerant because it contains the enzyme lactase, which breaks down lactose. Raw milk does contain bacteria that can produce small amounts of lactase, but the quantities are far too low to make a meaningful difference for someone whose own body doesn’t produce enough of the enzyme. Controlled studies comparing digestive symptoms in lactose-intolerant people given raw versus pasteurized milk have not found a significant difference. If you’re lactose intolerant, lactose-free milk or a lactase supplement will help. Raw milk generally won’t.
The Bottom Line on Nutrition
The nutritional gap between raw and pasteurized milk is real but small. You lose some vitamin C, some immune proteins, and some live bacteria. You keep essentially all of the calcium, protein, fat, B vitamins, and calories. For most adults, those losses are easy to replace through the rest of a normal diet or through fermented dairy products that deliver live cultures safely.
Where the conversation gets more complicated is around early childhood immune development, where observational data on allergy protection is genuinely compelling. But that benefit exists alongside a concrete, well-documented risk of foodborne illness that disproportionately affects the same population: young children. The trade-off is not abstract. It’s a real decision with real consequences on both sides, and the current evidence weighs heavily toward the safety that pasteurization provides.