Milk: It does a body bad

A reader of An Animal-Friendly Life reminded me this morning of a story I had seen at another blog that I wasn't planning to write about, but it kinda fits over here, and reading up on lactose intolerance convinced me that more people need to know about it. The story basically covered a study by the dairy industry that ultimately encourages lactose intolerant people to continue to eat as much as they can handle.

The link I give you is for a site where the story initially alerted the AAFL reader, though it's since moved off the main page. It's a free dictionary/thesaurus/encyclopedia that also draws on Wikipedia. The entry reinforces what we already know about milk: it's meant for babies.

The normal mammalian condition is for the young of a species to lose the ability to digest milk sugar (lactose) effectively after the end of the weaning period (a species-specific length of time often equal to roughly 3% of lifespan). In humans, lactase production usually drops about 90% during the first four years of life, although the exact drop over time varies widely. However, certain human populations have undergone a mutation on chromosome 2 which results in a bypass of the common shutdown in lactase production, allowing members of these populations to continue consumption of fresh milk and other milk products throughout their lives.

It really is astounding how few people have actually mutated to better digest milk, and yet it's crammed down our throats every day by the dairy industry. As the U.S. and other Western civilizations skew more heavily toward traditionally lactose-intolerant cultures, this will grate even further.

What's truly annoying is that doctors try to help patients find a way to bypass their genetic predisposition against dairy, which is a little like finding a way to allow a person to find a way to safely roll around in poison ivy.

Tags: dairy | lactose intolerance