Are Northern Europeans & Tauregs about the only people who can digest milk as adults?

[astro]

Because Northern Europeans (and Saharan nomads) are about the only people in the world who can digest milk as adults,

[astro]

Per the claim in this Slate article linked below about milk.

How a wholesome drink became a villain

@astro

Because Northern Europeans (and Saharan nomads) are about the only people in the world who can digest milk as adults,

[Aeschines]

Then why do so many Japanese people drink milk? It’s available everywhere, and we always have some here at home.

(BTW, I never drink milk myself.)

[dtilque]

According to this page, it was the Fulani, not the Tuareg, who also have the lactose tolerance mutation. (Note that the normal condition of adult humans is to be lactose intolerant. Tolerance is a mutation from the norm, although you wouldn’t know that from much of the medical literature on the topic.)

The prevalence of lactose tolerance varies among ethnic groups. It’s not only northern Europeans and Fulani that have it. See Table 2 on this page for general numbers. Northern Indians seem to be mostly lactose tolerant as well.

[moriah]

@dtilque

Note that the normal condition of adult humans is to be lactose intolerant. Tolerance is a mutation from the norm, although you wouldn’t know that from much of the medical literature on the topic.

Mutants? You mean evolved. And that’s why us milk guzzlers will one day rule the world!

Bovinial Victory will be ours!

[Exapno_Mapcase]

dtilque, your link says:

Additionally, there are a few groups in Africa, such as the Fulani, who have relatively low rates of lactose intolerance (around 20-25 percent).

Few does not mean only. The Slate article quoted by astro talks about Saharan nomads, plural, which is quite correct. In Milk Is Not for Every Body: Living With Lactose Intolerance, Steve Carper mentions the Beja, Bedouins in Arabia and the Libyan desert, Kabbabish in the western Sudan, Tuareg in the central Sahara and the Fulbe (Peulh) in the northern Sahel.

Carper summarizes John D. Johnson, Norman Kretchmer & Frederick J. Simoons: “Lactose Malabsorption: Its Biology and History,” Advances in Pediatrics, 1974;21:197-237:

LP [lactose persistence] is almost certain to appear whenever a cohesive group of people:

1. Have a plentiful food supply
2. Do not process their milk into products that are low in lactose, and
3. Cannot readily obtain from other available foods essential nutrients that milk does provide.

In the case of the Beja, Carper writes:

As recent as 5,000 years ago, northern Africa had a much wetter climate. When the rains dried up, so did the land, leading to a spread of the desert into traditional nomadic pastoral lands, Agriculture became impossible in this desert setting. Only animals could eat the few plants that naturally grew and no other food sources were available (condition 3). Yet the Beja survive as long as their animals do. During the dry season that may last as long as nine months, they live almost entirely on the milk of their camels and goats, up to three quarts per adult per day (condition 1). Milk processing and stage in forms that are low in lactose is impossible given the desert temperatures and the nomadic Beja lifestyle; all the milk must be drunk fresh (conditional 2).

You have it right otherwise, and your sources are good ones for the Net.

The mutation that keeps the supply of lactase from shutting off at about the age of weaning is a simple one that occurs on chromosome 2. It happens regularly and repeatedly in every group on earth. All groups ever studied have at least some members who are tolerant of lactose. It’s only cultural norms that determine whether there is survival pressure for the mutation. If there is, then it spreads rapidly through the population, helped by the fact that it is a dominant mutation.

It’s certainly not a yes/no situation either. Most Mediterranean populations have close to a 50/50 mixture of lactose tolerant and intolerant adults. The gradations in percentages to near 100% as one moves farther north into Europe are indicative of the expansion of Indo-European speaking farmers from the Middle East. (And east into northern India as well.)

There’s a further complication. Technically speaking, you are lactase deficient if your lactase production has declined, and lactose intolerant if you show symptoms while having dairy. Studies show that the two groups are not synonymous. Other factors help determine whether you show symptoms, especially including the type of bacteria you naturally have in the colon. With the right kind, which can occur from eating yogurt and other cultured dairy products, you may never show symptoms even if from a cultural background that would normally mean you are lactase deficient.

That Slate article has it ridiculously oversimplified.

[Exapno_Mapcase]

Condition 1 should be : Have a plentiful milk supply.

[Broomstick]

Don’t forget the Masai - they’re another African population utilizing milk as a major part of the diet.

[Spectre_of_Pithecanthropus]

And I thought it was Europeans generally, not just Northerners, who are lactose tolerant. Otherwise, why would France, Italy, and Greece all be famous for their cheeses?

Or is cheese different from fresh milk in that regard? Is cheese OK for lactose intolerants?

[Gaudere]

Most cheeses are fairly low in lactose (particuarly hard, aged cheeses, or goat cheese) so lactose intolerant people can sometimes eat cheese, or certain cheeses.

[BrotherCadfael]

What I can’t figure out the leap of alleged logic that allows some people to say that, because whites (and a few others) are the only people who can drink cows milk, that therefore somehow milk or milk drinking is racist. I mean, WTF?

[Exapno_Mapcase]

The argument is more of a political one: the U.S. government has put dairy products onto the food pyramid, has heavily subsidized the dairy industry, and subsidizes cheap milk to schools. This money disporportionally benefits whites who can tolerate milk and doesn’t go to food products better tolerated by blacks.

There’s also the historic fact that the medical establishment - overwhelmingly white and of northern European descent - never even realized that the rest of humanity had a problem with lactose until as recently as the 1970s.

And the controversies over sending milk-based formulas in food packages to Africa, where a number of anthropologists have reported they have caused problems due to intolerance. (Although the medical community keeps insisting that the problems are minimal to non-existent.)

That’s about the best face I can put on the issue. Politically it has gone nowhere for the past ten years. The vegan anti-milk forces are doing a much better job in demonizing milk and winning political support.

As for cheese - all cultured or fermented dairy products are naturally low in lactose. In addition to aged cheeses, these include yogurt, kefir, koumiss, and old-fashioned cultured buttermilk. However, acidophilus milk is not low-lactose, no matter how many times you might hear somebody say that.

[Excalibre]

@Exapno Mapcase

The argument is more of a political one: the U.S. government has put dairy products onto the food pyramid, has heavily subsidized the dairy industry, and subsidizes cheap milk to schools. This money disporportionally benefits whites who can tolerate milk and doesn’t go to food products better tolerated by blacks.

. . .

And the controversies over sending milk-based formulas in food packages to Africa, where a number of anthropologists have reported they have caused problems due to intolerance. (Although the medical community keeps insisting that the problems are minimal to non-existent.)

But don’t both your examples here have to do with giving milk to children? Lactase is produced through puberty, and milk-based formulas shouldn’t cause a problem due to their lactose content (putting aside the mounting evidence that their nutrition is entirely inadequate) since they can’t possibly have more lactose than human milk, which has considerably more lactose than cow’s milk.

Granted, I would like to offer a knee in the groin to everyone responsible for those smarmy dairy council ads, for the false implication that milk is somehow a necessary component of the diet. But sending milk to give to babies in other countries shouldn’t pose a problem at least in this respect.

[Exapno_Mapcase]

No, in cultures where most adults are lactose intolerant, the typical time of lactase shutoff is at weaning, long before puberty. This makes children vulnerable.

Carper summarizes the results of several hundred studies included in the major academic metastudy of the subject. Some results for “percent testing as maldigesters” are:

Botswana          Children         100%
Ghana             2-6               73%
Nigeria           1-14 months       32%
Nigeria           8-30 months       79%
Uganda            36-47 months      69%

Similar results can be found for Asian countries.

In the U.S. for black children:
4-5     11%
5-9     58%
6-7     50%
6-13    54%
8-9     72%