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Paleo/NT, Is Eating Dairy Natural?

6K views 126 replies 34 participants last post by  Metasequoia 
#1 ·
I've just finished reading this thread about the Paleo Diet & NT diet, I still go back & forth between which is right for my family.

Both diets recognize that grains & legumes are hard to digest, in the Paleolithic Era, they didn't eat them, so by following that diet, you'd forgo them altogether. NT also recognizes the grain/legume problem & recommends soaking them to lessen the phytic acid. Personally, for my family, I think I'll avoid grains & legumes as much as possible.

The one difference between the two diets that I'm having trouble with is dairy. We drink raw milk & love it, it would be SO hard to give up, but I also have a hard time accepting that man is meant to drink milk from a cow/goat. It just doesn't seem natural to me. According to the Paleo diet, when man began raising cattle for dairy & growing grains, diseases like cancer, heart disease & diabetes came about. Anyone have any links to debunk those studies?

Nuts too, I suppose the phytic acid would have leached out while laying on the ground & being soaked with rain & drying in the sun - do you think that's how they were safely consumed back in the Paleo Era? That's what I come up with when I think of what the NT diet is mimicking by soaking.

We are omnivores here, I firmly believe in eating grass-fed, organic meat & eggs, but the dairy thing, I'm just not sold on.

Does anyone else have these little battles going on in their mind?
 
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#102 ·
I believe another issue with calcium (and other mineral) availability from dairy has to do with pasteurization. The enzyme phosphatase is destroyed by the heating (in fact, testing to be sure it's absent is how they determine successful pasteurization, or so I've read), and that enzyme aids the body's assimilation of the minerals in dairy.
 
#104 ·
I have never been tested but i think im allergic to milk. I had a raw dairy share for about 6 months... and whenever i drank the milk, while it tasted good... it caused so much mucus that i could not breath at night while sleeping, and i got purple bluish lines under my eyes and where the sinuses are. Now though i just eat butter, and hard sheep or goat cheese occasionaly and I can do okay. I have been wanting to dry goat or sheep milk though made into kefir.

Ps. even though i was allergic (sensitive?)to the milk, i never felt so strong as when i drank a bowl full of the cream the night before exercising :p .

perhaps maybe the cows werent pastured and were being fed to many grains? Around my area, there isnt even sheep milk available... i dont think there is a single sheep dairy in this state.
 
#105 ·
Quote:

Originally Posted by HerthElde View Post
I've been diagnosed "lactose intolerant". I actually had the test in high school, where they give you a glass of lactose and measure the hydrogen levels in your breath. I was waaaaay off the chart. I went home after the test and threw up all night.
However, once I found a source for grassfed raw milk, I tried it. I drank LOTS of it. After not having touched dairy for YEARS. And not so much as a slight gas pain.
Now, another problem I've had with milk is that I get stuffed up. Interestingly, I've come to discover that only happens when I drink milk from grain-fed cows. And I've also discovered it happens when I drink beer or eat too many grain foods. So I figure the grain-fed cows probably have a leaky gut that allows grain proteins to pass into their milk, which are what cause me the problem.
So, when you get your sheep, you might as well give the milk a try. You might be surprised. (Oh, and I'll buy a shearing off you too
. I refuse to buy conventional wool anymore and wool from well-treated sheep is pricey.)
I have heard about this and I am very interested in learning more. It may help ds, if anything. I desperately want sheep, and it would be nice to occasionally get a little milk to make into Romano or something. I have had Romano, and so has dd, and she didn't have a reaction like with cow's milk. I'll be happy to share.
 
#106 ·
I just wanted to pointout for the sake of clarity, that one can be lactose intolerant( meaning lacking the enzyme lactase that digests the milksugar lactose) and/or allergic to the milk protein casein ( meaning that that protein causes a systemwide immune response). Drinking raw milk will often help people who are lactose intolerant since lactase is present in raw milk in significant amounts.
However, if you are allergic to casein, it doesn't matter that you drink raw milk ( and usually sheep or goat milk as well, I hear yak milk tends to work, but good luck findign that)
Alctose intolerance generallt produces GI symptoms ( diarrhea, gas) while an allergy to casein can cause alot of different( seemingly unrelated ) symptoms, but often upper respiratory stuff is involved.

I find it totally fascinating to hear of people getting reactions if the cows have been given grains as feed. Amazing, right? The right food for the right animal!

Tanya
 
#107 ·
I enjoy you ladies a great deal.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Shanana View Post
Fascinating information. Marie, or anyone else in the know, I was wondering if you could talk about this with respect to the paleolithic population? What were lifespans like during that time? What about when you don't take into account infant mortality? Or death from things that probably wouldn't cause death today (e.g., injuries, etc.). A common argument is that "ancient" people didn't suffer from modern diseases because they didn't live long enough. Does this hold any water? Or is there evidence to show that paleolithic peoples frequently lived lengthy, healthy lives?

And I just wanted to clarify one thing ... Marie, I believe you stated that diseases such as diabetes, cancer, etc., could be detected in bones. Can you confirm that this is true? I like to have my ducks in a row for when I share this info with others
.

I'll take my answers off the air
.
Just wanted to address this directly. Sorry I have been "off the air" for some time.

Pre-agriculture: can't find reliable information on it, to be honest. I'm going to look at my notes from my exams, and get back to you.

Post-agriculture: A recently published paper on life expectancy in the ancient NE offers dates around 34 for women and 40-44 for men.

Diseases: yes, you can see many diseases from the bones of ancient people. The book "The archaeology of disease" by Charlotte Roberts and Keith Manchester is a great source for this. Cancers, diabetes, anemia, autoimmune disorders (arthritis, etc.) are visible. Of course, many diseases aren't.

Here is a site with extensive bibliography on the DNA/development of Palaeolithic man: http://home.gwu.edu/~zandra/Reference.htm

And a GREAT course bibliography available on the evolution of the human diet: http://www.indiana.edu/~origins/teach/P380.html

Here is a scientific conference devoted to the topic we are discussing:
http://www.cast.uark.edu/local/icaes/

The conference description:
"An understanding of the diets of our ancestors can provide a unique perspective on our adaptations, and show how a discordance between our diets and the foods we were "designed" to eat has led to many of the health problems faced by industrial societies today. Primates satisfy their nutritional requirements with a broad range of foods. Humans have continued the trend, and we can attribute much of our evolutionary success to our abilities to procure, process and consume a wide variety of foods. While the role of diet in human origins is not yet clear, we do know a generalist strategy enabled our ancestors to survive changing, unpredictable environments when more specialized species went extinct. The range of foods we can eat has played a crucial role in the dispersal and, indeed, the survival of our lineage. Still, very recent changes in our diets may be pushing the limits of this flexibility. In sum, dietary adaptations are closely tied to human evolution, and given our physiological requirements and constraints, they will likely continue to play an important role in human biology in the eons to come."

A discussion of gluten intolerance and dietary evolution:
http://www.celiac.com/st_prod.html?p...=y&p_prodid=78

This site has great bibliography. I haven't read all of it, but that from the "educational institutions" seems to be informative:
http://www.paleodiet.com/

HTH,
Marie
 
#108 ·
Quote:

Originally Posted by Tcarwyn View Post
I just wanted to pointout for the sake of clarity, that one can be lactose intolerant( meaning lacking the enzyme lactase that digests the milksugar lactose) and/or allergic to the milk protein casein ( meaning that that protein causes a systemwide immune response). Drinking raw milk will often help people who are lactose intolerant since lactase is present in raw milk in significant amounts.
However, if you are allergic to casein, it doesn't matter that you drink raw milk ( and usually sheep or goat milk as well, I hear yak milk tends to work, but good luck findign that)
Alctose intolerance generallt produces GI symptoms ( diarrhea, gas) while an allergy to casein can cause alot of different( seemingly unrelated ) symptoms, but often upper respiratory stuff is involved.

I find it totally fascinating to hear of people getting reactions if the cows have been given grains as feed. Amazing, right? The right food for the right animal!

Tanya
Absolutely. Dd is ALLERGIC to cow milk protein, and we believe to goat milk protein. Though sheep milk hasn't caused her any issues (she has only has bm from me after eating a small amount of romano on my salad).

The weird thing is, I am starting to become sensitive to the cow milk (and maybe goat?) protein, as well. I can tell immediately if I even eat a cracker with whey or casein in it with symptoms similar to my lactose intolerance ones.
 
#109 ·
On the subject of dairy tolerance and "denial" - I started noticing/acknowledging a lot of negatives in my body's response to milk after I had kept seeing anti-dairy arguments and information for some time, on MDC and elsewhere. I haven't turned anti-dairy, but I do think we are somewhat culturally programmed not to recognize problems with digesting milk.
 
#110 ·
One thing I've learned in the course of my anthropology studies is that humans are very adaptable, and often in human history, trade-offs have been made and new diets have been adopted. There is no such thing as one perfect, ideal "paleo" diet. Pre-agricultural peoples ate lots and lots of things that weren't neccesarily easy to digest and required considerable processing in order to eat. And it's not true that they didn't eat legumes and grains. How do you think these things were domesticated in the first place?

Eating a diet that is almost entirely made up of one or a few foods is not going to make for good health and balanced nutrition. That's true if that one food is maize or wild yam or wheat flour. Anyone in the world who lived in a time and place where a wide variety of wild foods were not available year round, had to either store food--and there are relatively fewer foods suitable for storage--or eat what was available, which in winter or dry season, depending on the climate, might have meant eating the same thing day in and day out, and not much of it, at that time of year.

Domesticating food was a trade-off: it often resulted in reduced diversity of diet, especially in hard times, and resulted in having to work harder for every calorie, but let you feed more mouths.

What a Paleo diet would look like, for a given population in a given location, time of year, climate, etc. is highly diverse, so anyone saying that X,Y, and Z was a paleo diet and they didn't eat A, B, and C is oversimplifying and generalizing a great deal.

Part of our adaptations to different diets was cultural (things like making yogurt to eat milk, or soaking things to take out toxins, or cooking foods), and part of it was biological. There is variation in the human population in how well people digest different foods. On average people of Inuit ancestry, for example, are more efficient at absorbing certain trace vitamins (like calcium) that were hard to come by in their traditional diet, to the point that some Inuit children become hypercalcemic (overdose on calcium) when given the "recommended daily dose" set by standards in people who had historically very different diets. On the other hand, the lactase persistence mutation which is nearly ubiquitous in certain populations allows them to drink whole milk and digest it with little problem.

In our modern world where few or none of us live in any way even remotely resembling how our ancestors did for thousands of years, let alone relying on the same mix of foods in the same environment they did, and in fact probably have ancestors from diverse places and mixed-up genes not necessarily suited best to one particular diet, what's going to be a healthy, ideal diet will vary greatly from individual to individual. What may have been adaptive for one of your ancestors at some time in the past in the different environment you live in today may well be maladaptive instead.

It depends on your individual genetics and body chemistry, epigenetic effects passed on by your mother, developmental happenstance, and your interactions with the environment, including diet and activity levels, from conception on. If particular foods make you unwell, it is common sense to avoid them. But what is best won't be the same for everyone. About the only sure bet nutritionally for humans is breastmilk. Once you outgrow that, all bets are off, and anything that can be rendered non-poisonous and provide calories and nutrients has probably been eaten by someone, somewhere.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Metasequoia View Post
I've just finished reading this thread about the Paleo Diet & NT diet, I still go back & forth between which is right for my family.

Both diets recognize that grains & legumes are hard to digest, in the Paleolithic Era, they didn't eat them, so by following that diet, you'd forgo them altogether. NT also recognizes the grain/legume problem & recommends soaking them to lessen the phytic acid. Personally, for my family, I think I'll avoid grains & legumes as much as possible.

The one difference between the two diets that I'm having trouble with is dairy. We drink raw milk & love it, it would be SO hard to give up, but I also have a hard time accepting that man is meant to drink milk from a cow/goat. It just doesn't seem natural to me. According to the Paleo diet, when man began raising cattle for dairy & growing grains, diseases like cancer, heart disease & diabetes came about. Anyone have any links to debunk those studies?

Nuts too, I suppose the phytic acid would have leached out while laying on the ground & being soaked with rain & drying in the sun - do you think that's how they were safely consumed back in the Paleo Era? That's what I come up with when I think of what the NT diet is mimicking by soaking.

We are omnivores here, I firmly believe in eating grass-fed, organic meat & eggs, but the dairy thing, I'm just not sold on.

Does anyone else have these little battles going on in their mind?
 
#111 ·
Quote:

Originally Posted by GalateaDunkel View Post
On the subject of dairy tolerance and "denial" - I started noticing/acknowledging a lot of negatives in my body's response to milk after I had kept seeing anti-dairy arguments and information for some time, on MDC and elsewhere. I haven't turned anti-dairy, but I do think we are somewhat culturally programmed not to recognize problems with digesting milk.
I definitely think you're right about cultural programming in that it can be a powerful thing.
But I also believe that how you feel about your food greatly affects how your food will affect you. Your life force (or Megin, Prana, Wei Qi) is affected by your thought processes, which affect biochemical reactions within the body, which in turn affects how your food is absorbed/malabsorbed. So in a way, the fact that you've become more aware of problems may have actually caused the very physiological reactions you expected. Then again, maybe not
I do believe it's equally as possible that you may have always had the reactions and just not noticed. The aspiring healer in me just wanted to throw out an alternative explanation.
 
#112 ·
Quote:

Originally Posted by Ravin View Post
One thing I've learned in the course of my anthropology studies is that humans are very adaptable, and often in human history, trade-offs have been made and new diets have been adopted. There is no such thing as one perfect, ideal "paleo" diet. Pre-agricultural peoples ate lots and lots of things that weren't neccesarily easy to digest and required considerable processing in order to eat. And it's not true that they didn't eat legumes and grains. How do you think these things were domesticated in the first place?
Absolutely.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Ravin View Post
Eating a diet that is almost entirely made up of one or a few foods is not going to make for good health and balanced nutrition. That's true if that one food is maize or wild yam or wheat flour. Anyone in the world who lived in a time and place where a wide variety of wild foods were not available year round, had to either store food--and there are relatively fewer foods suitable for storage--or eat what was available, which in winter or dry season, depending on the climate, might have meant eating the same thing day in and day out, and not much of it, at that time of year.
Yep, seasonal eating and varied eating are very important!!!

Quote:

Originally Posted by Ravin View Post
What a Paleo diet would look like, for a given population in a given location, time of year, climate, etc. is highly diverse, so anyone saying that X,Y, and Z was a paleo diet and they didn't eat A, B, and C is oversimplifying and generalizing a great deal.
I completely agree with this EXCEPT for dairy...there was no dairy in any palaeolithic diet, period...Unless they had domesticated animals and we are unaware of it. There was no milking a wild beast.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Ravin View Post
Part of our adaptations to different diets was cultural (things like making yogurt to eat milk, or soaking things to take out toxins, or cooking foods), and part of it was biological. There is variation in the human population in how well people digest different foods.
There are small variations, and not throughout the entirety of the human species. The emphasis is on small. An extra enzyme here, the ability to absorb calcium better there. But we have not developed, say, another stomach or organ that would help us digest TONS of milk without problem. That is what I mean by our genetics have essentially remained unchanged. We just haven't had enough time eating as much milk as we do for our bodies to adequetly respond.

Thanks Ravin. Great post.
Marie
 
#114 ·
Quote:

Originally Posted by HerthElde View Post
So in a way, the fact that you've become more aware of problems may have actually caused the very physiological reactions you expected. Then again, maybe not
I do believe it's equally as possible that you may have always had the reactions and just not noticed. The aspiring healer in me just wanted to throw out an alternative explanation.
I have read that if people expect to be allergic to a food then they will start having symptoms when they knowingly consume it. When I was veg, meat grossed me out because I thought it would kill me by heart attack if I ate it. Now that I know it is good for me (especially it does gross me out anymore. (Though I still don't like touching uncooked meat).
 
#116 ·
Quote:

Originally Posted by newcastlemama View Post
Good point. It is still amazing to me that they would have all their teeth with no dentist, toothbrushes ect around. I have seen some modern day children's teeth rotting even with dental care.
I read a book which described an anthropologist working in Mali. In some villages, adults had teeth that were very badly rotted and looking into their mouths (to count said teeth for research) took a strong stomach. In other villages, it was the custom to chew on a twig from a particular kind of tree. This natural tooth brush meant that in general, despite having equally minimal access to modern dentistry, more people in those villages still had healthy teeth in adulthood.

Oh, and if I recall correctly, signs of dental caries have been found in **** Erectus teeth, so it's not like it's a new thing. And lifespan for many hunter-gatherer groups, once you got past the hazards of early childhood, was often considerably longer than the 30's. Early agriculturalists, on the other hand...
 
#117 ·
Quote:

Originally Posted by Metasequoia View Post
Source
This totally ignores the reality that we've been undergoing natural selection in relation to those foods we've adopted over the last ten thousand years. Lactase persistence, for example, can be traced to 2 mutations, one found in highest concentration in Northern Europe, the other in West Africa (if I remember correctly). That 13% of the human population with a mutation for lactase persistence have it because under conditions of dietary inclusion of dairy products, it has a selective advantage. In populations that don't eat dairy, there's no advantage to such a mutation so it would be unlikely to become widespread, and in populations that haven't had a mutation that results in lactase persistence enter their gene pool, it won't matter how much dairy they eat, they still won't have lactase as adults.

The sheer variety of food available to us, and the world remix of agricultural crops in the modern era, have turned a lot of these natural processes on their heads. However well adapted indigenous Mexicans are to eating corn and beans, and Chinese people to rice, etc., becomes somewhat moot when large parts of the world population eat many foods now that their ancestors a few hundred years ago could never have seen. Not enough time to adapt, so we see the problems we see. When you add to that the increase in gene migration/population intermixing...well, the process is further disrupted. However, that doesn't mean we can reasonably expect to turn back the clock and find ourselves well adapted to a mix of foods some of our ancestors were eating five generations ago, or other of our ancestors were eating twelve thousand years ago. We aren't them, our genes have changed since then.
 
#118 ·
Quote:

Originally Posted by marieandchris View Post
This debate...about the Neolithic & Palaeolithic. When certain foods were introduced to the diet of modern humans has little to do with a belief system. The Neolithic & Palaeolithic are periods of time long after evolution (whether you belief in in it or not, to entertain you for a moment) has taken place. These periods are well-attested to throughout the world over and over and over, much like gravity and the fact that the earth is round. Humans used stone tools, then better stone tools, then bronze tools, then iron tools. Humans were hunter gatherers, then developed agriculture. These periods of human development are based on our technological know-how, not on evolutionary periods. So you are essentially confusing two things and arguing against something that is tangential to this conversation.

Marie
Marie, you have a fundamental flaw in your argument here, and that is to presume that human beings no longer experience evolution--that is, introduction of new mutations and natural selection. This is not the case. Balancing selection maintaining the sickle cell mutation in sub-Saharan Africa because heterozygous carriers are resistent to malaria, which has only been around for several thousand years, is one example. The mutations for lactase persistence would be another. We still undergo very active natural selection in co-evolution with our infectious diseases, which of course did not exist as endemic human diseases until we became sedentary and populous, and adopted animal husbandry that put us up close and personal with the animals from which the diseases jumped (such as cattle) or kept us in one place long enough for the disease parasite to take us on as a host (as with malaria or schisto).
 
#119 ·
Quote:

Originally Posted by Metasequoia View Post
But they weren't communicable diseases, it was cavities, cancer, diabetes, osteoporosis, arthritis, etc. They didn't "get" these disease from hygeine problems.

But they weren't & there's proof. The Paleo people ate meat (including insects), fruits, veggies & some nuts, that's pretty "limited," it was when a "variety of foods" (diary & grains) were introduced that their health declined.

How can you disagree that **** sapiens sapiens, as we are today, don't have the proper digestive system for milk as adults?

Ethnographic studies of late period hunter gatherers found that they often had over 100 food plants that they would eat in varying proportions. Some would be "starvation food" that they would eat at last resort, others seasonal staples, and others would be highly favored but hard to come by delicacies. Agriculturalists, on the other hand, might have, say, rice making up 90 percent of their diet. Gee, which is healthier?

Not all hunter-gatherers were nomads. By the time ethnographers went looking for them, though, most hunter/gatherer societies that remained were in marginal environments. A few exceptions, such as native tribes in the Pacific Northwest, were sedentary hunter-gatherers. They didn't farm, but they did have food storage capabilities and they did have bountiful resources in their region which allowed them to form sedentary villages.

The same was likely also true for folks in places like the "Fertile Crescent" where wheat was first domesticated. Which is how it came to be domesticated, by a gradual process of increasingly intentional husbandry of the food plants (and animals).
 
#120 ·
Quote:

Originally Posted by Pam_and_Abigail View Post
I was wodering that just a little while ago, too. Were humans were unable to live in cold climates before they mastered agriculture? I live in a place with a very short growing season, and I can't imagine eating seasonally when my garden is covered with a foot of snow...
Yes, and no. The Inuit have lived quite successfully in the cold of the sub arctic for a long time...but it took development of certain technology to be able to hunt whales and seagoing seal, etc. That technology, initially, was stone age. Indeed, the Inuit were more successful in Greenland than agriculturalist Europeans, with their domestic crops and animals adapted from middle-eastern species and though viable for Northern Europe not well suited to the cold of Greenland, especially during the Little Ice Age., because they had better technology for the environment and were willing and able to hunt and eat the available food species that the Europeans weren't.

Most likely, paleolithic northern peoples stored certain foods, and knew how to find others during the long cold. The idea that hunter-gatherer equals incapable of storing food for winter isn't true. It may well be one of the organizational/technological advantages we had over Neandertals, who were physically better suited to the cold climate physically than modern humans.
 
#121 ·
Quote:

Originally Posted by Ravin View Post
This totally ignores the reality that we've been undergoing natural selection in relation to those foods we've adopted over the last ten thousand years. Lactase persistence, for example, can be traced to 2 mutations, one found in highest concentration in Northern Europe, the other in West Africa (if I remember correctly). That 13% of the human population with a mutation for lactase persistence have it because under conditions of dietary inclusion of dairy products, it has a selective advantage. In populations that don't eat dairy, there's no advantage to such a mutation so it would be unlikely to become widespread, and in populations that haven't had a mutation that results in lactase persistence enter their gene pool, it won't matter how much dairy they eat, they still won't have lactase as adults.
I guess the question that I continue to have throughout this thread is whether human adults need to be able to produce their own lactase in order to benefit nutritionally from dairy.

I'm Asian, so probably very unlikely to carry any genetic ability to continue to produce lactase into adulthood, yet I can drink milk (even pasteurized) quite comfortably. My dh (Jewish with roots in Northern and Eastern Europe) is um... noticeably lactose intolerant
, yet even he isn't so uncomfortable that he will avoid dairy. And he tolerates yogurt and cheese without a problem at all. Of course, there are those who really can't drink milk, but I'm wondering if they are perhaps the exception rather than the rule.

So I guess the question that I have to answer for myself is whether dairy is more of a benefit than not.

The implication made by Marie, Metasequoia and others that dairy and grains, in and of themselves, are a root cause of the decline in health among neolithic people seems too far a stretch to me. Nevertheless, I would be really interested in seeing some arguments that are more about the direct links between milk and disease. (I'm not saying this in a snarky "prove it to me" kind of way; I really would like to understand this. Is it a protein-fat-carbohydrate ratio, as some have suggested? Some immunofactor that is good for cows, but maybe not humans?)

And although I have not yet read NPD
:, I'm pretty fascinated by all the references people keep making to those fabulously healthy cheese-eating, milk-swigging Swiss. And the Masai. And the yogurt-eating, long-lived folks in western Asia. And all of Weston Price's results with high vitamin butter oil. Of course, other groups make it clear that one does not need to have milk in order to have a healthy, long life. But still, if milk is genetically inappropriate for humans, I'm having a hard time understanding these reports.
 
#122 ·
Last post on this thread...I will reiterate, as I have before:

Eating grains and milk is small quantities is NOT the problem. We are omnivores and can handle small amounts of almost any food that is not poisonous.

It is the LARGE quantities that is the problem. To the exclusion of other foods. This is our diet today. Take a careful look at your own diet and examine ingredients. How much dairy and/or grains/legumes do you eat every day. I did this for myself two years ago, and it is SHOCKING what is added to processed foods.

I do not argue that humans have not gone through small genetic variations in the last 10,000 years. Of course they have. SMALL ONES. No extra organs, for instance, that would help us digest dairy in the quantities that some cultures (ours) consume it.

My guess is that the cultures cited above eat far less dairy than we do on a daily basis, and eat more variety of other foods. It is a guess, but I'd one I'd wager on.

Marie
 
#123 ·
Ravin, thanks for your posts. I've been reading with interest. I wanted to back up Marie a little bit. From my understanding of evolution, the basis of changes on the scale of species is random genetic mutations that find support in the environment. Because these mutations are so rare, such wide-scale changes are measured by the millions of years, not just the 10,000's. If there was a genetic mutation that allowed humans to produce lactase (considering it was not possible before), 10,000 years is not enough time to have affected the human species universally. Also, mutations must also give the individual an advantage somehow, increasing the chances that the mutation will be passed on. If, for example, milk was the major source of food, the individual with the mutation would have an advantage over the one who did not. However, in places where there is variety, the advantage would be almost nil.

It must be remembered that Lamarck's "functional" adaptation was debunked. The idea is that giraffes stretch their necks to get at trees. The neck stretches according to function. That change enters into the reproductive cells somehow. Environment does not change the gene directly.

According to one source, http://www.nutritionreporter.com/stone_age_diet.html, we are 99.9% similar to our paleolithic ancestors. So I do agree that evolution is dynamic and always in affect. However the preponderance of genetic similarity remains true and will for a long time. We are 99% the same as the **** species before we became sapiens. Millions and millions of years produced changes to the tune of a mere 1%. That is much more compelling to me than possible changes that could have occured over the last thousands of years.

I'm still confused though about whether we do or don't have lactase. I'm asian too, and mostly lactose intolerant. I don't understand why I would be and others would not. Maybe the production of lactase is determined by some form of recessive/dominant gene?

ETA: If I had read your post in full, I would have seen that you already addressed some of the things I posted about. But I think my point about how wide-spread this mutation could be remains.
 
#124 ·
Small changes are generally all it takes. Certainly one needn't be a lactase persister to gain benefit from milk. It just gives a bit of an advantage, a case of cultural practice being part of the environment in which selective pressure works.

The question becomes, is milk good for you, as an individual, given the variety of food available to you and your body's individual tolerance of it? That is highly variable.
 
#125 ·
Mommay,

The thing of it is, changes relative to the healthfulness of what we eat ARE subtle changes. Producing lactase isn't actually a human novelty. All mammals produce lactase during infancy, it's needed to digest milk of our own species. It's the developmental quirk of continuing to express the lactase gene and produce the enzyme past the age of weaning that is the human novelty.

It doesn't take a major speciation event for evolutionary change to take place. The kinds of things I'm talking about are what's called micro-evolution, changes in gene frequencies within populations. We're a young species, our genome isn't very diverse. But of the diversity that is there, some of it is because of a history of regional natural selective pressures in different environments. Those environments are partly physical, partly cultural. Indeed, at this point they may well be primarily cultural. Strong selective forces can change gene frequencies drastically in just a few generations, if a gene is under selective pressure. And heritable changes in gene expression patterns are even harder to track than simple mutations. It's something we're still learning about.

As cultural beings, the effects of the physical environment on us, and thus its selective pressures, is modified. But, as cultural beings our culture can become a selective pressure as well. In our modern Western culture, selective pressure is modified still more thanks to reproductive technology, modern medicine, and the plentiful, varied food available to us. That's not the case in many parts of the world (such as places where endemic disease kills many people, or where having a cow to get milk from may make the difference between good health and protein malnutrition). We have more cultural options, and therefore less need to eat food we can't digest easily, or more ways to help us digest it if we want to eat it anyway (allergic? take an antihistamine. Lactose intolerant? Drink raw milk or lactaid or take an acidophilus supplement).

We do, however, have our own endemic problems which may well stem from poor choices of diet, novel, evolutionarily untried modern food processing methods, lack of exercise, and chemical exposures no previous human population has dealt with. Our reproductive behavior patterns have changed in major ways as well. What sort of evolutionary effect all this could be having on us in the long term is something we simply can't know in the short term. I'm not talking speciation. I'm talking subtle changes that help us adapt to the world we live in.
 
#126 ·
I did mean "lactase persistence" rather than lactase production at all, which wouldn't make sense given we all need bm.

Yes, micro-changes are all it takes. I'm just surprised that two such mutations occured within a relatively short time. I have always wondered why mutations seem to take hold across the board in certain cases within human evolution, even in populations that are not related to each other. Makes one wonder about functional adaptation. For example, gigantism across the board (amongst animals as well).

I think we agree that if we're still in process, we won't know where we will ultimately end up. Am I the only geek who wishes she could see the universe from the big bang forward in super-sonic speed?
 
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