from the Grommit!-The-moon-is-made-of-Ch-e-e-e-e-s-e! dept.
Scientists are trying to explain why people began consuming animals' milk before they developed genetic mutations which enabled them to digest it properly.
The mutations mean people produce lactase—an enzyme which breaks down milk sugars, called lactose—after they reach adulthood. Without the mutations, lactase production stops in childhood, which can lead to lactose intolerance.
"There is at least a 4,000 year gap between when we see the earliest evidence of dairying and when we see first the evidence of any mutations anywhere in the world," said Professor Christina Warinner, head of microbiome sciences at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Jena, Germany.
Only about 35% of the world's population today have lactase persistence mutations. They exist mainly in European populations—especially northwestern Europe—and their descendants, and in parts of the Middle East, sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia.
"If we can work out the evolutionary history and mechanics of lactose intolerance (how diet, human genetics, and gut microbes interact), we will have a powerful model for how to tackle other complex digestive disorders and food allergies," said Prof. Warinner.
[...] "The reason people were able to eat dairy before we had the ability to process lactose is because of fermentation," said Cheryl Makarewicz, professor at the University of Kiel, Germany.
"It shows the power of this kind of processing and how it can impact how your body reacts to different foodstuffs," she said. Fermented foods contain microbes which may also play a part in people's digestion.
Microbes in people's guts may have also evolved to break down the lactose. "This hasn't been well studied … It's something we're trying to test," said Prof. Warinner.
To do this, Dairy Cultures scientists are exploring the microbiome, the genetic makeup of microbes that live in the gut, which include bacteria, viruses and fungi. They are studying samples from herders to see if they contain elevated levels of microbes that aid milk digestion.
"The more we can understand about how the microbiome functioned in the past and what it is capable of, the better we will understand how and why the microbiome is changing now and why it is associated with so many health problems today," she said.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 25 2020, @07:03PM (6 children)
Yogurt, cheese, butter, cream, sour milk, all contain minimal amount of lactose. GIve the milk to kids, and adults eat the preserved one, problem solved.
(Score: 0, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 25 2020, @07:07PM (5 children)
And if you are a white person, enjoy whatever dairy products you want, including milk.
This defocus on white people that is all the rage makes it sound like this is a worldwide problem. It's not.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 25 2020, @07:15PM (4 children)
Even among "whites", only a minority are lactose tolerant.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 25 2020, @07:27PM (3 children)
This is completely untrue. Did you even read the summary?
"Lactose intolerance" is claimed by a lot of whiny white people just like "gluten intolerance" or whatever is the thing of the day that makes people feel like special snowflakes. If white, you MAY have lactose intolerance, but odds are heavily against it.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 25 2020, @07:37PM (2 children)
AC to AC, you are full of shit.
There is a reason why "drinking milk is for kids" is a common notion. Many females try to avoid milk (and even other dairy) because it gives them gas and bloat.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 25 2020, @08:09PM
Facts are for snowflake liberal beta cucks dontchaknow?
(Score: 2) by aristarchus on Sunday January 26 2020, @12:01AM
So, it has come to this! https://xkcd.com/1022/ [xkcd.com] AC on AC violence! SoylentNews has turned upon itself! Only one thing [wikipedia.org] can save us now!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 25 2020, @07:05PM
-nt
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 25 2020, @07:05PM (1 child)
I thought this was all common knowledge.
(Score: 5, Funny) by barbara hudson on Saturday January 25 2020, @07:33PM
It is. Welcome to "the information superhighway 3.0", where every day is Throwback Thursday. And people who don't want to actually do any "work" but want to be published recycle common knowledge.
Coming soon:
1. Lightning is electricity. If we could find a way to harness lightning ...
2. Maybe we could solve immigration by building a big beautiful wall ...
3. #GreyMatterMatters. (Gray matter, not so much ...)
4. Is ice wet? It's water, so it should be. But it's a solid, so it shouldn't be. #GimmeResearchMoney
5. If children are not "under the judgment", shouldn't Christians embrace abortion because aborted children go to heaven without ever being guilty of sin?
6. If Hitler had been aborted, would Christians accept a heaven with Baby Hitler?
Hey, when research sounds like the front page of the National Enquirer ....
SoylentNews is social media. Says so right in the slogan. Soylentnews is people, not tech.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 25 2020, @07:26PM (1 child)
Nothing beats a freshly squeezed glass of milk!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 25 2020, @07:31PM
...from a human boob. So sweet.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Arik on Saturday January 25 2020, @07:50PM (12 children)
There's an obvious answer here. And I'm not even talking about
"fermentation"
though there's good reason to think that's a significant part of the overall picture of early use of milk. They still ferment raw horse milk to make a tasty beverage in Mongolia, after all. But that's more about how, not why.
Cattle domestication would have taken time, first we hunt the cattle, then we learn to conserve the hunting resource. We intervene to *help* the prey grow faster, fatter, and to pursuade them to stay nearby, where they will be easy for us to harvest where we're ready (and also so they won't wander into another area for someone or something else to eat instead.) So we get semi-tame cattle, that are used to hanging out near our settlements for various advantages. If you're conserving cattle like that, it's going to naturally occur to select a few of the bulls that have characteristics you prize (including docility) and eat the others. You'll try to avoid eating the heifers because you want the herd to increase. Boom, the genesis of cattle-keeping in a nutshell.
No dairy yet, nope, not at all. But we do have a bunch of female cows and it's a short step to realize you can get away with some milk. Probably first used to feed an infant, but you know, people get hungry, and we crave variety in our diet as well, and sooner or later an adult was going to try it.
And contrary to what some of the more breathless bits on lactose intolerance you might have read might have lead you to believe, that might have caused them no problem at all. The lactose isn't the only nutrient in the milk, and failing to digest it doesn't result in any symptom or discomfort in and of itself - it's when you ALSO have gut bacteria that WILL digest the lactose that you start to have a problem. So there's no way to sure whether the drinker got sick or not, either is possible. But either way, at that point, it became clear that a new source of nutrition had been discovered, one sitting right under our noses and easy to collect. And so of course we immediately started trying different ways to prepare it. If it had already made us sick we would be particularly looking for a way to weaken or eliminate that affect, but also to make it taste better and to make it easier to store and transport. Cheese was very valuable because it had those properties. Remember, no refrigeration, no trucking, no grocery stores, not even farms. There were very few foods you could eat without going out and working several hours first to acquire and produce, and then having to consume it quickly before it went bad.
Oh, and it's also quite possible that milk drinking didn't start with cows milk. Horse milk (even higher in lactose than cow) may well have been first, in the central Asian steppe. Or perhaps it was goat milk, which has just a bit less, and is generally easier to digest, perhaps in Anatolia, the Middle East, or even India.
No matter which was first, once one type of milk started to be used the idea would have spread, and the processing technology would have developed. And while the ability to digest lactose isn't *required* in order to benefit from the new food source, it would certainly be advantageous. Lactose is 'milk sugar' and unlike us, the ancients generally had plenty of room for extra sugar in their diet. Forget about any possible discomfort or digestive difficulties, just getting a whole bunch of extra calories out of the same food would have been very beneficial at the time.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 2) by Joe Desertrat on Sunday January 26 2020, @12:02AM (4 children)
This was my immediate thought. My guess would be that drinking animal milk started in more environmentally marginal areas where protein and food in general were somewhat scarce, and such places generally make it tough to raise cattle as well. I would think a small docile goat or sheep would be easier to try such an experiment with than larger animals.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Sunday January 26 2020, @02:55AM (3 children)
Run a life simulation, any kind. Restrict the food source to something "difficult" for the general population to handle, but allow mutations that can make handling it easier - see what happens in just a few generations.
When milk was readily available, those rare people with the lactase genes were clearly more attractive and more likely to mate and raise children to adulthood than the ones who were too malnourished to raise children, or constantly bitching about an upset stomach.
We're doing it again, with Roundup Ready (TM) soybeans, and whatever f-ed up selectively bred "short wheat" they've come up with that has taken the market by storm but made so much of the population gluten intolerant. Unfortunately, life is too easy these days and most people still get to breed and raise children even if they're suffering from these food challenges.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by Joe Desertrat on Sunday January 26 2020, @11:13PM (2 children)
That's true to an extent, but remember evolution works at a slow pace. First you get genetic drift to the limits, then the mutations start to have more and more effect. Who knows what we will end up with in the end.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Sunday January 26 2020, @11:27PM (1 child)
When it's an effect like modern gluten intolerance, that's true - maybe there's a 5-10% breeding prolificacy advantage when you're not whining about being gluten free, but when it's a matter of life and death by the age of 12 like the Ashkenazi Jews [newrepublic.com] it seems to happen within just a few generations.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by Joe Desertrat on Saturday February 01 2020, @01:43PM
That is natural selection operating on an outlier of genetic drift. Still a long ways from becoming a new species...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 26 2020, @01:24AM (2 children)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 26 2020, @02:44AM (1 child)
Yes, that's what makes this hard.
I'd suggest that it's likely that early people realized that women lactate to feed their babies, so when they saw other animals lactating, they tried drinking it. But, I'm not even sure how you would go about proving/disproving that hypothesis as we already know that humans can drink milk and the benefits/consequences of doing so.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 26 2020, @02:58AM
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Sunday January 26 2020, @03:04AM (3 children)
Nice write up.
I've wondered just how lactose intolerant people are. Will 4 ounces of raw, whole cow's milk kill a guy? Or, does it only give him a little extra gas? For people who are just scraping by, where food is hard to find, no one will give a small damn that everyone is passing gas all day long. If their bellies are full, the world looks rosy, who cares if it smells rosy?
(Score: 3, Informative) by Arik on Sunday January 26 2020, @03:32AM (2 children)
The latter. The symptoms are diarrhea, gas, and bloating.
What happens is since you lack the lactase, the lactose passes on down the gut, and then somewhere about the colon, they encounter a bacteria that *can* break it down, which immediately chows down on the flood of raw nutrients and starts reproducing rapidly. Bacteria break down lactose by fermentation, hence the symptoms.
You're still getting protein, fat, and calcium that you *can* digest however, so if food is short you might well be happy to deal with the bloating.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 2) by deimtee on Sunday January 26 2020, @09:53AM
I wonder how the effects vary with physical exertion. If you are working hard, the content of your guts gets churned a lot more. That might alter the fermentation rate or make it easier to get rid of the gas, reducing the symtoms.
If you cough while drinking cheap red wine it really cleans out your sinuses.
(Score: 2) by Muad'Dave on Monday January 27 2020, @02:18PM
It's the same story with beans, since they have a lot of oligosaccharides that we can't usually break down fully [verywellhealth.com]. You can take a supplement (ex: Bean-O) that provides alpha-galactosidase.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 25 2020, @09:23PM (1 child)
if the founders of the roman empire would have had lactose intolerance, well we would probably all still live in caves.
also, maybe the modern way of consuming milk by the gallon would have seem strange to them?
maybe it was mostly cheese and used to flavour (umami) other dishes ... spareingly?
chuncking milk by the glassful or cereal bowl full is probably thanks to marketing so momma cows dont explode because the baby cow was eaten already and all that excess milk needs to go somewhere ... hopefully profitably?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 26 2020, @01:15AM
I love me beef, but veal is something else. Especially in meatball.