It mainly has to do with an enzyme that exists in the milk (and helps digest the milk) but breaks down from heat, and then this is blamed for gut issues (and gut issues are pretty common these days and hard to pinpoint the cause of, so people will latch on to anything to try to solve the issue).

I’m not sure about the accuracy of that enzyme thing, that’s just the information that had me wondering about raw milk.

It’s completely perpendicular to whether or not there’s any harmful bacteria in the milk (other than cooking gets rid of both), which means getting sick from raw milk isn’t guaranteed, which then makes it go through the same pathways gambling does (and we’re notoriously bad at risk assessment in gambling), so some people with gut issues (especially if it actually does help, though I bet many build the habit of getting raw milk without even confirming it does help and just keep the habit going because they feel like they are sticking it to the man) ignore that a recurring low chance of something has an increased chance of running into it over time.

Ultimately, laziness won out for me and I never bothered trying to find a source of raw milk when I was interested in the idea, though I can’t say I ever really fully bought into it as I knew that even if pasturization was more necessary because of unhygienic milk industry practices, it was still being done for a reason.

But ultimately, both this and the anti-vaccine movement are about people losing trust in this corporate-dominated system, which I can’t really call irrational on its own, even if it leads to some irrational conclusions. It wasn’t that long ago that cigarette companies were sponsoring “smoking is great” propaganda, and later “smoking isn’t that bad”. And the opioid crisis didn’t do anything to help credibility since doctors were pushing addictive drugs marketed as not addictive because they were getting kickbacks from the manufacturers.