Fascinating true(?) story about how lactose intolerance changed the course of history, as recorded in the ancient sagas[1]:
When the Vikings established their colony in Vinland, they wished to establish peaceable relations with the Native Americans. They invited the local chiefs to a party at their longhouse, in which they served an amazing new drink -- milk -- which the Americans had never seen before. The following morning, suffering from intense abdominal pains, the natives accused the vikings of trying to poison them, and promptly laid siege to the colony until the Vikings packed up and buggered off.
But for this incident, it's entirely possible that the Vikings might have established a durable colony in the Americas, leading to contact between the old and new world 500 years earlier.
"What drove the two groups apart was a killing. Some of the Norse men killed a skraeling who was attempting to steal weapons, which Thorfinn had forbidden as trade items."
The Skraelings, being mammals, and observers of other mammals such animals they hunted, would have been familiar with milk, even without owning livestock.
If they bought raw milk, they probably intended to use it for their children, but it seems a rather difficult trade item, as a liquid, and having a shelf life of only a day or two.
They probably were trading butter or cheese, neither of which contains enough lactose to cause problems. Fresh cheese would have been known from the stomachs of suckling animals, and might have been a prized delicacy before they were aware it could be manufactured. Butter would have been completely new to them.
The map of Lactase Hotspots is pretty interesting. My family comes from the State of Gujarat in India, one of the darker (70%+) regions in the map. The "White Revolution"[1] was started in the 70s by independent dairy farmers in the district our village belongs to. The Gujarati and neighboring Rajasthani diet has always included milk and byproducts as a significant ingredient. The 3m+ milk producers supplying milk to the dairy cooperative Amul [2] have made India the largest producer of milk and milk products in the world. I highly doubt this would've happened if the region was 30%-40% dark like the rest of India.
Similar to how presidential elections are impacted by a 100 million year old coastline [3], this small genetic mutation has affected the entire world's economy, especially agriculture-based industries. Once we enter the post-natural-selection era where we can select the DNA of our offspring, I wonder how different will the long-term future be.
"But lactase persistence also took root in sunny Spain, casting vitamin D's role into doubt."
Well, Spain is not entirely sunny. Certainly the north of Spain is not. You can see a darker line in the map that divides Spain. This is divided by a set of mountains called "Cordillera cantábrica" that makes the north way more rainy than the rest of Spain.
There are places in Spain where it rains more than in the north, but only in a very small period of the year. Most of the year is sunny there(the part that is not the north).
There are places in Spain where it rains more than in the north, but only in a very small period of the year.
Last time I looked, Cádiz (in the very south of the peninsula) is the province with more yearly rain, also one of the sunniest. That's because it's in the straigth between Mediterranean Sea and the Atlantic Ocean. The (not very high, just about 1km height) mountains capture a lot of humidity.
And no, it's not a matter of "a small period of the year", but of a small portion of the province: Sierra of Grazalema.
There's some pretty vicious comments on that article!
Personally I am mostly interested in Asian history. We know that South Asian and Tibeto-Burman people have been milk and cheese consumers for a long time, as have the Central Asian peoples including the Mongols, who are said to have actually preferred liquid foods to solid ones.
These days, I know first hand that a lot of people in China are getting stuck in to milk products for the first time. How can this be, if they should keel over in pain and indigestive flatulence? The only person I've ever seen mass-produce cheese in an apartment was a Burmese friend in China, who I'm sure wasn't after the lactose for its apparent usefulness in diluting heroin! Wikipedia states: Some studies indicate that environmental factors—more specifically, the consumption of lactose—may "play a more important role than genetic factors in the etio-pathogenesis of milk intolerance" ... ie. the intolerance notion is largely bullshit and people can adapt to lactose. That seems to fit the observations.
Anyway, interesting to ponder... I went and polished off a block of New Zealand cheddar to celebrate. (Saving Roquefort for a salad tomorrow, then it's off to Indonesia where cheese is no doubt harder to find!)
Just last night I was reading "The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World" by David Anthony and I was around the part of the book describing the lactose mutation and its spread across the world etc. Pre-historic time is pretty complicated, and interesting.
Its a fairly academic book oriented more toward the spread of proto-indo-european language and related topics. And I got the pointer to that book from a podcast delivered lecture series "WS3710 History of Iran to the Safavid Period" a tolerable recording (tolerable from a technical standpoint; OK to listen to, but not going to win any awards for audio engineering). Its a recording of a class at Columbia from 2008.
My interpretation of the book and lecture series is people kept livestock for quite a long time before some mutant gained the ability to drink milk, which given the herd of meat animals meant they gained a lot of nutrition compared to the non-mutants, which is a huge survival gain.
I've found I enjoy university lectures much more now that I don't need to take midterms and write papers, so thats pretty much all I listen to.
The article ignored the emergence of lactase persistence in West Africa and Saudi Arabia (where two other hotspots on the map are) but there is more on that in this study:
I became lactose intolerant at the age of 30 with all the described accompanying 'issues'. It took 6 months to work it out though as it was so sudden and I'd consumed milk frequently up until then. Curiously, though, both of my daughters are lactose intolerant, so it seems something weird gene-wise was going on there..
The cause is much more likely changes in the microflora of your gut than your genes. (The human-lactase persistence allele is only one tiny part of the total picture.)
Lactose sometimes feeds bad microbes (because the microbes can use the di-saccharide bond for energy or because the the di-saccharide bond delays the absorption of the sugar, allowing it to feed bacteria residing in parts of the gut where starches and simple sugars are absent because they've already been absorbed upstream.)
In addition, microbes can produce toxins that interfere with the production or the effectiveness of the enzymes that cleave the di-saccharide bond.
The practical application of what I just said is that you might be able to regain your lactose tolerance by scrupulously avoiding lactose for a few months or a few years (i.e., long enough to starve out the offending microbial species). A good pro-biotic supplement might help.
You can simulate this -sort of- by playing Age of Empires. In this game, the civilizations are pretty much the same, except for small bonuses here and there - yet their play style often differs a lot, as in the successful strategies are wildly different.
What load of bullshit. It does not even mention pasteurization. As most of the uninformed comments on this page as well. As a comment rightly notes:
Raw milk contains lactase producing bacteria, so anyone consuming milk in its raw form would be able to digest it without any digestion problems. Only pasteurized milk is lactase free as heating destroys the bacteria that produce the enzyme. Most milk historically would have been consumed raw so an adaptation to produce lactase would have been unnecessary and would not provide a significant competitive advantage.
> Probiotic microorganisms must be of human origin in order to have an impact on human health (Teitelbaum and Walker, 2000). Bacteria present in raw milk are from infected udder tissues (e.g., mastitis causing bacteria), the dairy environment (e.g., soil, water, and cow manure), and milking equipment. High bacteria counts in raw milk only indicate poor animal health and poor farm hygiene.
> Bacteria in raw milk are typically not of human origin. An exception is Streptococcus pyogenes. S. pyogenes that has adapted to humans can be transmitted to animals. Once S. pyogenes is colonized in animals, it can be re-transmitted to humans as a human pathogen that causes strep throat. For example, S. pyogenes can infect a cow udder to cause mastitis. The infected cow udder can subsequently shed S. pyogenes, a pathogen, into raw milk.
This is one reason many people are wary of 'raw milk': People lie to promote it. They tell bald-faced lies, and they expect people won't check up on them. And then they spin conspiracy theories when someone does check up on them and call them on their lies. It's just cynical advertising from an industry that uses fear to sell its wares.
His claim is basically true that (pure, uninfected) raw milk is better for you than regular milk. Good luck being able to buy pure uninfected raw milk. I suppose its the hand of Darwin striking down the gullible, and/or the children of the gullible. His lie is more by omission in that its a fairly idiotic way to obtain nutrition. If you must drink something unhealthy try corn syrup soda, or fruit juice, might make you unhealthy in the long run but at least probably not infected.
The best comparison is by analogy in that a raw bratwurst will provide you with a tiny delta better nutrition than a cooked bratwurst. There seems to be no way to successfully argue it isn't better. Although you'd have to be some kind of idiot to eat a raw bratwurst other than some kind of MTV "jackass" tv show stunt to see just how badly you can food poison yourself and still survive.
> The best comparison is by analogy in that a raw bratwurst will provide you with a tiny delta better nutrition than a cooked bratwurst.
I don't think this is strictly true, it's more complicated than that. You increase the bioavailability of many of the nutrients (especially proteins) by cooking, but lose some of the vitamins which are heat sensitive.
OK fair point. Probably the right way to do it (which would result in arguments...) would be to create a numerical metric of "goodness" based on a huge number of known macro and micro nutrients found in brats.
I was thinking in my numerical function that total caloric intake is going to be reduced by rendering out fat in the cooking process so it would be a net loss. I was inspired to google and pork is a reasonably good source of vitamin B-6 would have to research its heat stability which I'm not quite motivated enough to do. Also I'm unclear if my google source is talking about B-6 pre or post cooking. It may be there's too much pre cooking (probably not, but maybe)
Haha your reply made me smile :) That would be a really interesting thing to do. It would be cool to have an optimum cooking range for different nutritional benefits. I wonder what nutritional values, outside of fat of course, our tastes are most calibrated for.
"Basic research" has been leading us to eradicate any and all microorganisms from our presence for decades. No doubt that this has been a great step forward in protection from acute illness, but far less is known about the tradeoffs we are making in terms of chronic disease.
As a case in point, it is generally known that children who grew up on farms have fewer allergies and asthma as adults. The mechanism behind this is not crystal clear, but raw milk consumption is a strong candidate. "Despite these risks there is a growing body of epidemiological evidence suggesting that consumption of unprocessed cow's milk does not increase but rather decreases the risk of asthma, hay fever and atopic sensitisation" (Braun-Fahrländer, C. and Von Mutius, E. (2011))
Treating the human body not as a magical place of cleanliness but as a germ-filled ecosystem is a critical step forward for science. We are only beginning to understand the role of things like gut bacteria in chronic diseases like obesity. I am personally less concerned what "basic research" has to say on the matter (germs make you sick, everyone knows this) and much more interested in the cutting-edge (certain germ exposures may prevent disease).
The key FDA claim: "There are no beneficial bacteria in raw milk for gastrointestinal health." And their support for that is that "Probiotic microorganisms must be of human origin in order to have an impact on human health (Teitelbaum and Walker, 2000). " So with this logic we sterilize milk to reduce harmful bacteria from commercial farming methods with the theory that there is nothing beneficial in raw milk. Congratulations on that logic
The real reason for pasteurization is the benefit to large scale commercial dairy farming. Non-pasteurized milk will spoil soon, but once you kill all the bacteria, it will stay longer, thus allowing a supply chain and warehouses full of "milk" at Costco. I am fortunate enough to be able to drink it regularly, but with US laws intended to support large scale commercial operations, I don't know for how long.
>Probiotic microorganisms must be of human origin in order to have an impact on human health (Teitelbaum and Walker, 2000).
That's a downright ludicrous claim, unless they're claiming priobiotic == human origin by definition, and not the more normal definition of "beneficial microorganisms, regardless of source". If this were true, then there would never be any probiotics, except for ones where our own cells mutated into bacteria. They came from somewhere. We don't have them all in all of us. That alone eliminates your entire argument.
When the Vikings established their colony in Vinland, they wished to establish peaceable relations with the Native Americans. They invited the local chiefs to a party at their longhouse, in which they served an amazing new drink -- milk -- which the Americans had never seen before. The following morning, suffering from intense abdominal pains, the natives accused the vikings of trying to poison them, and promptly laid siege to the colony until the Vikings packed up and buggered off.
But for this incident, it's entirely possible that the Vikings might have established a durable colony in the Americas, leading to contact between the old and new world 500 years earlier.
1: http://www.ancientworlds.net/aw/Places/District/1009811