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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 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...