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from the it-does-a-body-good-(in-small-doses) dept.
Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:
[...]Research on 5,834 U.S. adults by Brigham Young University exercise science professor Larry Tucker, Ph.D., found people who drink low-fat milk experience several years less biological aging than those who drink high-fat (2% and whole) milk.
[...]Tucker investigated the relationship between telomere length and both milk intake frequency (daily drinkers vs. weekly drinkers or less) and milk fat content consumed (whole vs. 2% vs. 1% vs. skim). Telomeres are the nucleotide endcaps of human chromosomes. They act like a biological clock and they're extremely correlated with age; each time a cell replicates, humans lose a tiny bit of the endcaps. Therefore, the older people get, the shorter their telomeres.
And, apparently, the more high-fat milk people drink, the shorter their telomeres are, according to the new BYU study, published in Oxidative Medicine and Cellular Longevity. The study revealed that for every 1% increase in milk fat consumed (drinking 2% vs. 1% milk), telomeres were 69 base pairs shorter in the adults studied, which translated into more than four years in additional biological aging. When Tucker analyzed the extremes of milk drinkers, adults who consumed whole milk had telomeres that were a striking 145 base pairs shorter than non-fat milk drinkers.
-- submitted from IRC
Larry A. Tucker. Milk Fat Intake and Telomere Length in U.S. Women and Men: The Role of the Milk Fat Fraction. Oxidative Medicine and Cellular Longevity, 2019; 2019: 1 DOI: 10.1155/2019/1574021
(Score: 3, Interesting) by VLM on Saturday January 25 2020, @02:18PM (22 children)
Note that depending on study, somewhere around ninety percent of Africans and Asian adults are lactose intolerant and can't or shouldn't drink milk, and for northern euros the lactose intolerance rate is around ten percent.
Note that symptom level varies and just because you "shouldn't" doesn't mean you'd die. See ethanol consumption, for an example of "you shouldn't but almost everyone does and mostly nothing bad happens".
Anyway the concept of "everyone gotta drink milk" is a very white privilege cultural thing. Only white people should be drinking and digesting this magical 1% milk.
And the point is you'd think a genetic age difference of 5 years would show up in lifespan numbers because entire races can't or shouldn't drink this magical fountain of youth milk at all, but it doesn't seem to, as per the wikipedia article for "race and health in the united states".
From a meme point of view this is really going to set off those GOMAD gallon of milk a day fitness weirdos. A gallon of milk a day can't be healthy for anything but a growing calf, but some white guys propose it for fitness so I donno.
Milk has a lot of contaminants and 1% should have half the fat soluble pesticides and hormones of 2%, shouldn't it? So maybe its as simple as the 1%-ers consume half the pesticides of 2%-ers.
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 25 2020, @02:21PM
It's a Mormon thing... the space lizard Moroni told Joseph Smith to drink Coca-Cola, not milk, so now they'll do anything possible to discredit milk.
(Score: 2) by bussdriver on Saturday January 25 2020, @03:38PM (5 children)
It will not be easy to get numbers from different nations with bigger factors between the people influencing lifespan. Sticking to a biological marker is much better even if it's not a direct outcome based marker. Not having any milk might be a disadvantage, but I think it's probably completely harmful once you remove the nutritional needs of malnourished children in the EU 1000 a years ago.
Lactose Intolerance is a gut bacteria problem; you could turn somebody either direction.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 25 2020, @04:49PM (4 children)
Actually, no. Lactose intolerance is a lactase enzyme production problem.
We're mammals. Like all mammals, most humans stop producing lactase enzyme around five years of age. After that, lactose moves untouched to the small intestine, where gut bacteria (yes, they have a role in this) ferment the sugar, causing bloating, cramps and gaz, the classic symptoms of lactose intolerance.
But at some point in human history, a group of caucasians, particularly those living in cold northern european areas, had an evolutionnary advantage if their bodies kept producing lactase longer, because that gave them access to a food source available all year long, including the cold harsh winters, providing them with essential nutrients not easily obtainable during the cold season. Darwinism ran its course, soon giving birth to an entire human population who kept producing lactase enzyme even late in life.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 25 2020, @05:46PM (1 child)
This is more or less what I was always told, but it fails to explain how not eating dairy for a year could result in lactose intolerance that wasn't present perviously.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday January 25 2020, @05:49PM
(Score: 2) by Arik on Saturday January 25 2020, @06:13PM
Not just them. Several groups across Asia and Africa did this independently as well.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 25 2020, @11:10PM
It’s probably a combination of genetics and epigenetics. Genes can be turned on and off.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 25 2020, @04:03PM (7 children)
Lactose intolerance, is mostly about your gut bacteria. I had no problems with lactose until I moved to Asia and had a couple rounds of antibiotics. After that, I became lactose intolerant. Genes can change their expression, but not that quickly.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 25 2020, @04:56PM (1 child)
You were probably already lactose intolerant at the genetic level (your body stoped producing lactase enzyme when you were around five), but you didn't notice it because you had little or no lactose-fermenting bacteria in your gut. At some point in your life (probably due more to your move to Asia than to antibiotics), those latose-fermenting bacteria moved in to your gut, starting to cause the classic symptoms of lactose intolerance that you didn't experience before.
Come to think of it, maybe the antibiotics played a role as well, decimating a formerly well established gut flora, breaking the equilibrium and opening the door to a new population that were present in your new country of adoption.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 25 2020, @05:57PM
That's more or less what I was observing. There was a period where I was consuming a ton of live culture yogurts with strains of bacteria that are known to be able to digest lactase and it seemed to help. including S. Thermophillus, IIRC. But, eating enough to make that work is somewhat of a challenge and I haven't yet figured out how to get it to be self-sustaining.
I remember from my days studying microbiology that it's usually not a problem of too many bacteria, it's a problem of having the wrong mixture of bacteria or having bacteria in the wrong places. If you're going to nuke the population with wide band antibiotics, then you really ought to have a plan for restoring the ones that are friendly or neutral. If you've got the right mixture of bacteria, the ones that secrete nasty chemicals have to compete with ones that are either beneficial or neutral and the net result is a limitation of the harmful byproduct.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Arik on Saturday January 25 2020, @05:41PM (4 children)
The other poster may be somewhat on the right track, gut bacteria is the other major factor that gets overlooked.
As far as I understand it, virtually no one in Japan is able to digest lactose (lack the milk drinking gene) yet they consume quite a bit of dairy with no apparent symptoms. As far as I understand it, that's supposed to be down to their gut bacteria *also* being unable to digest lactose, so it simply passes through untouched.
You only get symptoms if you can't digest the lactose yourself, but your gut bacteria can. It's their subsequent excretion that causes the symptoms. So it makes sense you might have been not digesting the whole time, but the antibiotics caused catastrophe in your gut bacteria and this somehow caused you to start experiencing symptoms.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 25 2020, @06:02PM (1 child)
It was mainland China and for that year I hardly even saw butter. There was a near complete lack of any dairy products, even finding butter was often an issue in some of those small towns. The only butter I could find would usually be in those little packets. I could generally get soft serve ice cream and apple milk. (Actually pretty tasty)
My suspicion has been that it's the wrong mix of bacteria. I had a great deal of luck by introducing massive amounts of bacteria back into the body via live culture yogurt including strains that are known to digest lactose in a less problematic way, but the amount it took was a lot and I haven't been able to figure out an appropriate mix or schedule to make it self sustaining. I was eating about a gallon of live culture yogurt a week to see much effect and at that point, it was unclear whether it was just extra lactase from the bacteria or if some had set up shop in my digestive track.
(Score: 2) by Arik on Saturday January 25 2020, @06:11PM
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 25 2020, @08:37PM (1 child)
Even people who can digest lactose can be lactose intolerant depending on their gut bacteria.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 28 2020, @02:05AM
Who upvoted this?! This is the most anti-intellectual comment in the thread...
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Saturday January 25 2020, @04:26PM
There are a ton of variables to consider in a study of this sort. I'm a bit skeptical that they've been able to control for everything else and managed to pin down this supposed correlation between whole milk and shorter telomers. As in, perhaps people who drink 1% milk are more health conscious in general? Fat soluble contaminants is a good point, and definitely another possibility.
For centuries, Europeans have shunned drinking of water because it was too hard to get clean water. Instead, they drank beer, wine, and other alcoholic drinks on a regular basis, and consequently evolved greater tolerance for alcohol. Milk (and beer) goes back at least to Bronze Age times in the Middle East. Same thing. Peoples who herded goats and cattle evolved lactose tolerance that extends into adulthood. The custom of adults drinking milk spread over most of Eurasia and North Africa, but not into Sub-Saharan Africa.
Goign all the way to fat-free milk is not fun. Most fat free milk tastes horrible. The one exception I know of is Braum's (a regional restaurant specializing in dairy) fat-free milk. That stuff tastes just fine.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Arik on Saturday January 25 2020, @06:09PM (2 children)
Note that symptom level varies and just because you "shouldn't" doesn't mean you'd die."
As to the first, that's very much an artifact of history. Most Americans of African descent are from a few areas in west Africa that specifically lack this gene. That's not even true of west Africa as a whole, there are groups that historically keep cattle; the Fulani, for instance, keep dairy cows, make cheeses, etc. And many of them have the lactase persistence gene. They are West African, they're just a bit further inland than the groups that were most often enslaved. The jungle and coast aren't the best places to keep cattle, but that's not all of Africa, or even all of one region inside of Africa.
And on top of that, even those who lack the lactase persistence gene can and often do drink milk. The gene doesn't cause symptoms, it simply prevents you from digesting the lactase. You'll absorb the other nutrients and pass the lactase through untouched, and that's not really a problem. There's no problem unless your gut bacteria *does* start digesting the lactase. So it's more complicated than just 'you shouldn't drink it if you don't have the gene.' Lots of Japanese (for one example) eat dairy regularly with no symptoms, no ill effects, despite not being able to digest the lactase.
"Only white people should be drinking and digesting this magical 1% milk."
And that's just racist nonsense. No matter how you define this "white people" group, it will include many people who lack lactase persistence, and exclude many who do not. Unless you define "white people" specifically as those who do have lactase persistence, in which case 10% of those blue-eyed blonde haired Swedes are NOT white, but 50% of those black-eyed, wooly-haired, black-skinned Fulani ARE white, and a whopping *90%* of the black-eyed, wooly-haired, black-skinned Tutsi in central Africa must be white as well! The same proportion of Tutsis as Swedes.
Now "white people" is so vague and undefinable I don't advise using the phrase at all, but somehow it still doesn't seem *quite* vague enough to allow for that outcome.
This isn't a "racial" difference (and neither is anything else, but that's another topic) it's a population or individual difference. Cattle farming, and lactase persistence, was developed in multiple places around the world - multiple places in Africa, multiple places in Asia, and possibly multiple places in Europe as well (certainly at least once, independent of the other continents.)
"Milk has a lot of contaminants and 1% should have half the fat soluble pesticides and hormones of 2%, shouldn't it?"
That sounds like a hypothesis worthy of investigation to me.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 25 2020, @09:57PM
50% of those black-eyed, wooly-haired, black-skinned Fulani ARE white, and a whopping *90%* of the black-eyed, wooly-haired, black-skinned Tutsi in central Africa must be white as well!
No. That is "cultural appropriation"! We need to take action now!
--
drinka-pinta-milka-day.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 26 2020, @04:17PM
Agree with your comment, just wanted to snark that we now have racial essentialist legality. Can't drink milk? You're fired from the white snowflake race! If essentialist legality doesn't work with something that has an objective basis like gender, even if not understood completely, it's hopeless to work with something that's fundamentally a social construct like race.
Conservatives seem to like their social constructs, both with gender and race.
(Score: 1, Troll) by Captival on Saturday January 25 2020, @10:40PM (1 child)
This site has 'Flamebait' and 'Troll' options, but is sadly lacking a 'This Person Is Clinically Insane And Happily Proving It' mod.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Sunday January 26 2020, @03:44PM
Every post would end up -1 Nuts.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Sunday January 26 2020, @12:02AM
You...*do* know large swathes of sub-Saharan Africans are descended from the pastoralist Bantu, don't you? Or that the Maasai drink plenty of it? Or that (Asian) Indian people have a culture which heavily emphasizes a lactovegeterian diet?
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...