The Fashion Awards 2023 Presented by Pandora - Arrivals

Last spring, Gwyneth Paltrow said on The Skinny Confidential podcast that she drinks raw cream in her coffee every morning. In the interview, she shouted out Raw Farm — the same farm that, months later, recalled all of its raw — a.k.a. unpasteurized — whole milk and cream after California health officials found multiple samples were contaminated with bird flu. While Raw Farm disputed the findings, risk of bird flu is just one of many reasons the CDC warns against consuming raw milk. But apparently it’s not enough to convince Paltrow that the risks of unpasteurized products outweigh the purported benefits.

Asked about raw milk in a new Vanity Fair interview, Paltrow repeated her previous claim that there’s a “line of thinking” that unpasteurized milk may be easier to digest. While she acknowledged that critics call such claims “pseudoscience,” she suggested that more research on the topic is needed. But “is someone going to invest in getting a data set around raw milk?” she asked. “It’s not going to be the dairy industry, right?”

According to the New York Times, many experts in the field do agree that more research into the potential benefits of unpasteurized milk is needed, given that epidemiological research has suggested drinking raw milk in childhood may lower the risk of developing asthma and allergies. However, in a recent article for The New York Times Magazine, Moises Velasquez-Manoff wrote that “no researcher I spoke with, including the scientists most familiar with the putative benefits of raw milk, recommended that people drink it,” adding: “The risks are too great to be offset by the possible benefits.”

Speaking to Vanity Fair, Paltrow also repeated the common MAHA claim that “we have for millennia been drinking milk that’s unprocessed and doesn’t have antibiotics.” While it’s true that prior to the invention of pasteurization in the 1800s, raw milk was ubiquitous, it’s worth remembering that milk-borne illness was far more common, too. According to the CDC, unpasteurized dairy products cause 840 times as many illnesses than pasteurized products.

For her part, it’s unclear whether Paltrow herself is still drinking raw milk. While she takes her coffee with “a splash of heavy cream,” when Vanity Fair visited her at home earlier this year, she appeared to be using Clover Sonoma.