Alex Leaf

MS Nutrition | Researcher 10+ Years | Scientific Communicator

[Alex Leaf @Alexleaf]

The cure for most cases of type 2 diabetes (T2DM) requires fat loss. This thread will discuss research showing restoration of carbohydrate tolerance in those with T2DM through addressing the underlying pathology (ectopic fat) rather than just focusing on symptom management.

[Alex Leaf @Alexleaf]

@brianatheroux @elderpumpkin999 Yeah, this is some weird made up bullshit by a basement dweller whose obsessed with us.

[Alex Leaf @Alexleaf]

@tutordano @xwanyex So, you are admitting that you are a bigot? I'm confused, given that you are the one who outright dismissed "another point of view" because "God".

[Alex Leaf @Alexleaf]

@tutordano What? I'm against spanking. Why on Earth would you think I'd be okay with women-beating???

[Alex Leaf @Alexleaf]

Friendly reminder that spanking is associated with worse cognitive and behavioral outcomes in children, and that the effect sizes do not meaningfully differ from the effects of physical abuse (PMID: 27055181).

This was a huge meta-analysis that looked specifically at spanking, defined as hitting a child on the buttocks or extremities with an open hand, across 75 studies and over 160,000 children.

Spanking was associated with more aggression, antisocial behavior, externalizing problems, internalizing problems, mental health problems, and worse parent-child relationships.

It was also associated with lower moral internalization, lower cognitive ability, lower self-esteem, and a higher risk of the child later being physically abused.

In the subset of studies that directly compared spanking with physical abuse, both predicted harmful outcomes in the same direction, and spanking showed about 65% of the effect size of physical abuse.

The authors also found that the results did not meaningfully change based on study design, measurement method, country, or child age group.

You can discipline children without physically hurting them.

[M.A. Franklin @FoundationDads]

You actually do need to spank your kids.

God showing grace in particular situations where parents have abdicated their responsibility is no excuse to abdicate yourself, nor to ignore his wisdom and commands.

And as soon as someone conflates "hitting" with spanking, as people inevitably do in these conversations to puff up their own pride, know they are trying to manipulate you and poison the well. You don't need to listen to them.

At least on this particular topic.

[Alex Leaf @Alexleaf]

If your position is “the Word of God trumps scientific data,” then any type of discussion will be impossible because we are working from two fundamentally different epistemic frameworks.

To the other part (“most men over 50 were spanked and aren’t violent”)... this doesn’t rebut anything I said.

The claim was never that spanking makes every child violent. The claim is that spanking, defined narrowly as open-hand swatting, is associated with a higher risk of worse behavioral, cognitive, emotional, and relational outcomes on average.

[Alex Leaf @Alexleaf]

The studies I cited are indexed on Pubmed. Obviously an advocacy group is going to put research on their page that supports their ideology. That's completely irrelevant to the veracity of the research itself.

I'm not going to try and "use science" to prove or disprove anything. That's ideology. I much prefer to look at the body of evidence available on a topic or research question and form conclusions based on my evaluation of that research.

And with raw milk, the evidence is more nuanced than people on both sides of the debate pretend. The asthma and allergy data are consistent enough to discuss, especially when multiple studies show similar patterns and boiled or pasteurized milk does not show the same association.

And we have real-world examples showing that raw milk is not one thing, with meaningful differences between carefully produced, tested, hygienically handled raw milk and random unregulated milk from a dirty farm.

Pasteurization reduces infectious risk, without a doubt, but it may also reduce bioactive properties and their associated health benefits. This doesn't mean everyone should drink raw milk, and I've been vocal about how we shouldn't promote raw milk consumption because there are no regulations on its production to help ensure safety.

But when discussing actual scientific evidence, the conversation is far more nuanced than “raw milk bad, pasteurized milk good.”

[Alex Leaf @Alexleaf]

@tylerblack32 For sure, but it doesnt automatically invalidate research, which I'm sure you agree with.

[Alex Leaf @Alexleaf]

I didn’t claim “unassailable” benefits. I said raw milk likely has unique immune-related benefits in childhood based on observational evidence.

Recall bias is a weak critique for the prospective PASTURE data, where infant milk intake and infections were tracked with weekly diaries.

Selection bias and residual confounding are always possible in observational work, but it doesn’t magically explain away the consistency of the signal across multiple studies and mechanistic work giving biological plausibility.

[Alex Leaf @Alexleaf]

I'll push back on two of them.

1) Raw milk is a superfood. I don't like the ambiguous label of "superfood", but raw milk likely has unique health benefits, particularly when consumed through childhood.

2) Sunlight is good for your eyes. This one is simply true.

[Tyler Black, MD @tylerblack32]

Twitter in 2026 is a cesspool of misinformation.

The following all are untrue, not supported by the current evidence evidence, and counter to good health information. Any claim to the below is using weaker evidence than the opposite claim.

❌Vaccines harmful and ineffective
❌Sunscreen cause cancer
❌LDL is good, not bad
❌Keto is better than other diets
❌Seed oils poison you
❌Statins are a pharma scam
❌Fluoride lowers IQ
❌Raw milk is a superfood
❌SSRIs are more addictive than heroin
❌Cholesterol doesn't cause heart disease
❌GLP-1s are ruining people
❌Sunlight is good for your eyes
❌continuous glucose monitor even if you don't have diabetes
❌Vaccines cause autism
❌Tylenol causes autism
❌Carnivore diet cures everything
❌Mitochondria/metabolics are the answer to every chronic health problem
❌Vagus nerve therapy helps everything
❌SSRIs are more addictive than heroin

[Alex Leaf @Alexleaf]

@jlippincott There isn't any good reason to spank children. All it does is increase the likelihood of cognitive and developmental problems down the road.

https://t.co/9cWVskWwmN

[Alex Leaf @Alexleaf]

Friendly reminder that spanking is associated with worse cognitive and behavioral outcomes in children, and that the effect sizes do not meaningfully differ from the effects of physical abuse (PMID: 27055181).

This was a huge meta-analysis that looked specifically at spanking, defined as hitting a child on the buttocks or extremities with an open hand, across 75 studies and over 160,000 children.

Spanking was associated with more aggression, antisocial behavior, externalizing problems, internalizing problems, mental health problems, and worse parent-child relationships.

It was also associated with lower moral internalization, lower cognitive ability, lower self-esteem, and a higher risk of the child later being physically abused.

In the subset of studies that directly compared spanking with physical abuse, both predicted harmful outcomes in the same direction, and spanking showed about 65% of the effect size of physical abuse.

The authors also found that the results did not meaningfully change based on study design, measurement method, country, or child age group.

You can discipline children without physically hurting them.

[Alex Leaf @Alexleaf]

@tylerblack32 I'll also add that Im happy to discuss any of the actual data with you, if interested. This isn't really a topic I care much about; more so, I find it interesting how ideologically motivated people get on both sides of the discussion.

[Alex Leaf @Alexleaf]

Interesting. I wrote all this from scratch while doing research on milk in general and have never visited the website for that activist group, so thats a really strange coincidence if true.

The two other references you mention are their own publications, so I'm not sure what the relevance is of this opinion article you mention (I also have no idea who Ton Baars is).

Anyway, if your point is that some dude with a bias is involved in the research, then I find that to be a pretty weak line of reasoning. My point with this data is that it all points in a direction of benefit, with a plausible biological mechanism.

I can acknowledge that data while simaltaneously holding my position that raw milk should not become mainstream.

[Alex Leaf @Alexleaf]

@ButHisEmails @tylerblack32 None. Are double-blind RCTs your minimum standard for evidence?

[Alex Leaf @Alexleaf]

@HiddenPinky @tylerblack32 Yes, but this response allowed such practices to continue because there was no incentive for being hygenic.

[Alex Leaf @Alexleaf]

@AdrianKviolin I dont think anyone should ever stare at the sun. Completely unnecessary for the visual and circadian benefits of sunlight, and potentially harmful.

[Alex Leaf @Alexleaf]

@ButHisEmails @tylerblack32 We do. Here's a prior post of mine where I discuss them.

https://t.co/TIH8oZsxPk

[Alex Leaf @Alexleaf]

I wrote about the literature on raw milk safety almost a year ago, which I will link to in a follow-up comment, but I think it is also worth looking at the potential benefits.

First, to summarize my prior post, the major routes of milk contamination are environmental contaminants, poor animal health, and unsanitary milking procedures. These issues can be mitigated by hygienic milking practices.

Studies looking at raw milk programs like the German Ferman Vorzugsmilch, The U.S. Raw Milk Institute, and the British Columbia Hershare Association have found that raw milk contains fewer bacterial contaminants than conventional pasteurized (PMID: 32000877).

If the bacteria are the source of infectious disease (which they are), then by pure logic we could speculate that there would be less foodborne illness from high-quality raw milk than low-quality pasteurized conventional milk.

But of course, things can go sideways pretty quickly, and many unregulated farms selling raw milk probably aren't that hygienic and you probably shouldn't drink that stuff. There's also an element of personal responsibility to ensure you store the raw milk appropriately.

Second, raw milk isn't without *any* benefit. Allergies and asthma are the best-researched.

A 2020 meta-analysis out of Germany looking at 8 studies reported that early life (1–5 years old) consumption of raw milk was associated with a 42% lower risk of asthma, 34% lower risk of wheezing, 32% lower risk of hay fever or allergic rhinitis, and 24% lower risk of atopic sensitization (PMID: 31770653).

The effect sizes and confidence intervals were similar between children raised on farms and those who were not, which strongly suggests that it was the milk itself rather than farm life which conferred a benefit.

The authors suggest this benefit could be owed to a variety of factors in raw milk that are reduced with pasteurization and conventional treatment practices, such as bioactive peptides, fat globule structure, prebiotics, probiotics, microRNA, and several cellular structures or fragments.

I'm not going to write about these mechanistic explanations in this post. Too much info there.

I will say, however, that the GABRIELLE study found a protective effect of raw milk but not boiled milk (or pasteurized), and associated it with the bioactive whey peptides (PMID: 21875744).

Also, the PASTURE study found raw milk consumption to associate with a 23% lower risk of respiratory tract infections, which is pretty cool (PMID: 25441645).

Lastly, A pilot study in children allergic to milk found that they could tolerate nearly 6 times more raw milk in a sitting than they could with conventional pasteurized milk (50 mL vs 9 mL) (PMID: 30945370).

The researchers also showed in mice that heated milk abolishes the protective effects of raw milk on acute allergic symptoms, confirming an observation they made in a previous study also in mice (PMID: 28894452).

Many of the mechanisms listed above (particularly bioactive whey peptides and the milk-fat globule membrane) have a good amount of data showing benefits in adult humans, too.

[Alex Leaf @Alexleaf]

Sorry, I should have been more specific that I was referring to the data showing hygenically produced raw milk has lower pathogen counts than pasteurized.

I would never promote raw milk on a mass scale because there needs to be a level of care with creating it that many people arent interested in doing.

Also, just an interesting note about the study that you shared, the absolute risk of illness from raw milk is about 0.007%, or roughly 1 per 14,500 drinkers.

[Alex Leaf @Alexleaf]

Improved hygiene and sanitation were some leading causes of reduced infectious mortality.

Anyway, I dont think raw milk should be popularized or commercialized because there are too many risks with producers taking shortcuts. But I do think the food borne illness risk is nuanced for those who are adamant about consuming it.

[Alex Leaf @Alexleaf]

@tylerblack32 Generally speaking, I agree, but we also have evidence showing hygenic milking practices (long forgotten because of pasteurization) lead to pathogen counts below that seen in conventional pasteurized milk.

https://t.co/obx65U1kqk

[Alex Leaf @Alexleaf]

With all the opinions on raw milk floating around, I want to share my thoughts on what is probably the biggest reason people seem to be against raw milk — food-borne illness.

I think that the risk of becoming sick after drinking raw milk is highly contextual and that it's intellectually lazy to either dismiss raw milk entirely or completely disregard the potential risk.

If raw milk becomes more widespread, I absolutely think that there needs to be regulations in place to minimize contamination, including batch testing for pathogens. If you already consume raw milk, it's important to vet the farm you get it from.

There also needs to be greater education around some myths of raw milk, such as being okay for those with lactose intolerances or milk allergies. Neither is true.

Anyway, the primary concern associated with the consumption of raw milk is the risk of foodborne illnesses. Critics often highlight the potential presence of harmful pathogens such as Salmonella, E. coli, and Listeria, which can lead to severe health complications.

Pasteurization requirements for raw milk arose in the early 20th century when the hygienic quality of milk could not be assured. City life was exploding, and bulk milk was transported long distances without refrigeration or other methods to inhibit bacterial growth. Society basically said “we suck at making great milk, so we will just pasteurize it”, completely ignoring movements throughout the U.S. and Europe focused on increased hygienic production of raw milk.

Authoritative bodies have continued to mandate pasteurization and abandon raw milk, causing unhygienic conditions to permeate throughout the milk supply. We are at a position where consuming raw milk from most dairy farms is probably a bad idea because they put no effort into ensuring good hygiene practices.

The major routes of milk contamination, which include environmental contaminants, poor animal health, and unsanitary milking procedures, are substantially minimized in high-quality, pasture-based farms. These farms typically maintain rigorous standards of hygiene and animal health, which are crucial in preventing the introduction of pathogens into the milk.

Cows that are grass-fed and managed in low-stress environments generally have stronger immune systems, reducing the likelihood of disease and subsequent milk contamination. Additionally, smaller scale operations often allow for more meticulous attention to milking processes, ensuring that the milk is handled and stored properly immediately after collection, which is pivotal in maintaining its safety.

In fact, when looking at Germany’s federally regulated raw milk program (Ferman Vorzugsmilch), which has high requirements for milking hygiene, handling, packaging, and transport, only 0.5% of samples were contaminated with at least one of five pathogenic bacteria, compared to 1.8% of conventional dairy samples. In some cases, such as with E. coli, Salmonella, and Y. enterocolitica, pasteurized milk was more likely to be contaminated than the high-quality raw milk.

The Raw Milk Institute in the US has sought to teach farmers how to produce safe raw milk, and developed standardized operating procedures in milking, chilling, and bottling to reduce the risk of contamination. Adherent farmers consistently achieve bacterial counts that are lower than the requirements for pasteurized milk

The British Columbia Hershare Association in Canada has achieved similar results, with 92% of milk samples below regulatory limits for pathogen counts in pasteurized milk, and all tested samples being negative for the most common causes of illness (Salmonella, E. coli, Campylobacter, and Listeria).

https://t.co/6rn7foPv62

Lastly, the perceived risk of consuming raw milk needs to be contextualized within the broader spectrum of foodborne risks. From 2009 to 2015, there were over 67,000 food-borne illnesses in the U.S., with over 5,000 hospitalizations and 140 deaths. Only 5% of the illness were due to raw dairy, and 1% due to pasteurized dairy. That’s less than the risk from eating seafood (9%), eggs (9%), beef (7%), pork (10%), chicken (12%), turkey (6%), vegetables (20%), and fruits (9%) — where is the outcry over these commonly eaten foods?

https://t.co/BuqM8XuRwv

Plus, when people get sick from food, it's easier to figure out if raw milk is to blame, because not many people drink it, and it stands out. This is different from foods like pasteurized milk, meats, vegetables, and fruits, which lots of people consume, making it harder to track where the illness came from. Also, when an investigation finds that raw milk caused an illness, it's more likely to be reported and talked about because it's less common.

So, if anything, the true risk of foodborne illness from raw milk is lower than currently reported when considered alongside all the other causes of foodborne illness. This is especially true when we consider hygienic farming practices.

[Alex Leaf @Alexleaf]

@tylerblack32 1) I'm saying that we have studies of raw milk consumption in childhood that confer immune benefits not seen with pasteurized milk. I don't think its a superfood, but it is superior to pasteurized in that regard.

2) Agreed; this nuance was missing from your original.

[Alex Leaf @Alexleaf]

This really sounds like a bunch of hand waving. I'm going to stick with the data and bacterial analyses of three separate hygenic milking practices which I cite in my prior write ups.

I do agree, however, that raw milk is higher risk if not produced properly, and I dont think it should become mainstream for that reason alone (because people will inevitably take short cuts and put others at risk).