cynic, How can we accept your question as an honest inquiry when your claims are almost word for word the proclamations of the PETA propagandists? It seems to me that this thread more properly belongs in GD.
(satisying my daily aliteration requirement)
Ummm… Cynic since you’re new you get the benefit of the doubt. If this is meant as an amusing rejoinder to the “variety of diet” issue you might want to telegraph it as such just a little bit better here in GQ as the mods go for the smackdown pretty quick if they start seeing or suspecting potty mouth answers.
Re the male fertility issue the male sperm making machinery is a lot less complex and thus more robust than the female egg making and gestation capability so it could easily last considerably longer than is necessary for optitimum fertility. In additon recent studies have shown male sperm past the male(s) age of mid-forties or so has increasingly greater chances of having incipient genetic defects.
Once you’re well beyond the age of optimum reproduction you’re a used kleenex in the overall scheme of things from the genome(s) point of view. To some extent, however, this is chicken and egging it from a biological/anthropological perspective as one of the hypotheses about the development of extended human lifespans vs other primates is that having longer human parental and grandparental lifespans enhances the viability and survivability of the genome from an available resource perspective.
I have a layman’s understanding of evolutionary biology, but near as I can tell both a man’s fertility into old age and a woman’s lack of fertility are accidents, biologically speaking. Primitive men (and women) so rarely lived past 40 or so that the ones that did would not have made any particular impact on the process of natural selection. Remember, evolution does not evolve until we are “perfect”, it evolves until we are better than whatever we are competing against. And large numbers of people living into thier 50s, 60s, and 70s is such a recent development that they cannot have had much influence.
I must confess I don’t understand what you are getting at here. The only thing I can figure is that you think that if humans can survive on a wide variety of diets, then they ought to be able to survive on a diet of excrement. That dosen’t make any sense at all: I never said humans could live on ANYTHING, just a wide variety of things. Though I wonder if humans could survive on pure cat feces? They are apparently very high protien (according to a friend of mine in vet school, cat feces contain more protien than dog food, which explains alot, really). Anyway, your body has developed specific enzymes to break down everything from insects to muscle to fat to all but the most fibourous plants to milk. This is why humans have been so successful at spreading out over the planet.
First off, I’m sorry about that last post, Manda JO. I intended for it to be a humorous rebuttal, not a mean-spirited flame. What I should have said is if an organism evolves in an environment eating a particular diet, altering it significantly is bound to have some negative effects. I’m reminded of hard-core vegetarians who try to make their dogs vegans. Similarly, children have been nursing off of their mothers since the dawn of mankind. Breast-feeding is an integral part of their Environment of Evolutionary Adaptation, and to not breast feed your child would likely have adverse health consequences.
To those who insist that I represent PETA or some other political organization, I can assure you that I am not. I have serious disagreements with their stance on animal testing, as I am an insulin-dependant diabetic. I owe my life to animal testing.
I would disagree with some statements:
“Though I wonder if humans could survive on pure cat feces? They are apparently very high protien (according to a friend of mine in vet school, cat feces contain more protien than dog food, which explains alot, really”
Let’s say cat feces have a high amount of protein, why would the protein in cat feces be more avaible to be absorbed in human’s gut than at cat’s? If a cat can’t use it, why a person?
“Anyway, your body has developed specific enzymes to break down everything from insects to muscle to fat to all but the most fibourous plants to milk. This is why humans have been so successful at spreading out over the planet.”
I would say humans are more successful at exploiting animals and plants that have the enzymes that can break down whatever substrates.
Humans can’t digest cellulose, but they can digest meat from animals that can. Humans can domesticate cows, which break down cellulose through sybiotic rumen flora, and eat the benefit that the cows gain in muscle and milk.
Without trying to make this a meat v. vegatarian debate, humans are made of ‘meat’. It makes some sense that a human body would want food in a form more accessible than cellulose.
That debate is for another forum.
But to say that your body has whatever enzymes needed to breakdown whatever foodsource is wrong.
And my point is that humans evolved as scavengers, eating all sorts of things: rather like dogs (which are omnivores, btw, and which can go veg. It’s cats that can’t). Primitive humans ate whatever they could get their hands on, be it vegtables, milk, meat, insects, or blubber. And we managed to reproduce quite niecely on all of those.
I agree that humans can’t break down cellulose, and I didn’t mean to imply that we could. But we do produce enzymes that are geared specifically towards breaking down sugars from a wide variety of sources, from meat to plant to insect. (At least I was told by a nutritionist that we produce enzymes specifically for breaking down sugars found only in insects. I don’t have a hard site for this). This, combined with the fact that the diets of “primitive” humans vary widely from place to place, suggests to me that many different diets are perfectly natural.
Sorry to get back to the OP and interrupt the hijack, but isn’t there a major point we are missing here? Cynic, you compare milk to guns and tobacco. Milk you drink for yourself. If you choose to drink it, and there are possible health problems, that’s your choice. And if you start drinking milk, then later decide it’s bad for you, you stop drinking milk.
By way of contrast, politicians are under pressure to regulate guns because (mostly) they are used by people to shoot other people, and tobacco because it is addictive, so even when you hear the health warnings, it’s difficult to stop.
On that basis, milk is just not comparable.
I grew up drinking milk (whole milk, no less) in large quantities. When I finally bothered to read the label, I was appalled at the amount saturated fat, as we all know this is a heart disease risk factor. I switched to 2%, until I read that this is still high in saturated fat (I forget the exact bacon analogy). I then switched to skim milk, which tastes like crap, IMO. The transition has not been easy for me so far. My fault, admittedly.
Furthermore, if the “addictive” qualities of tobacco are the reason for the political pressure, why are they so lenient with alcohol? After all, we have the best politicians money can buy.
The OP may have deceived by misinformation, combined with bad dietary habits.
It is currently recommended that people over the age of two hold their saturated fat intake to not more 10% of their total calories. It is also recommended that the average sedentary American hold his caloric intake to about 2,000 kcal/day[sup]1[/sup]. As fat, regardless of its composition, has about 9kcal/g, this means that the consumption of saturated fat should be held to 22g/day or less.
One cup (8 fluid oz., about 240g) of whole milk contains about 5.1g of saturated fat. Pretty potent stuff – until we recognize that this means drinking over a quart of the stuff each day to get one’s RDA of saturated fat. Whilst there undoubtedly people who do drink that much milk, whole or otherwise (see the thread in which one person asserts that if God hadn’t meant for a pint of ice cream to be a single serving, He wouldn’t have made ice cream cartons that size), I fear that such a habit cannot but be condemned. (A nutritional guide that I own recommends the total consumption of milk – including that in the sauces, cakes, etc. – for an adult be limited to one pint per day.)
OTOH, we also note that lean ground beef has 5.5g of saturated fat per 3-oz. (about 85g) portion, and that lamb loin has about 8.4g in the same amount (although by carefully trimming away the fat portion, we can cut that to 3.7g). Those genuinely concerned with the saturated fat in their diets may wish to continue drinking milk, and knock off the cheeseburgers and lamb chops instead.
[sup]1[/sup][sub]There are, unfortunately, two units known as the “calorie”. The larger of these is styled the “dietary calorie”, or, worse, the “Calorie”, and is 1,000 times the smaller unit (which allows confusions such as “if you eat frozen food, you’ll use more calories thawing than are in it”). I call them “kilocalories”, abbrievated “kcal”).[/sub]
The only problem I have with your analysis is that people who drink milk tend to consume cheese, as well. This leaves very little room for both whole milk and cheese in our diets.
Okay. In the interest of fairness, I went and looked at a number of PETA anti-milk websites, and I have to say that although I think the OP here is a teeny bit off-the-wall, still it doesn’t sound like PETA’s “if you drink cow’s milk, you are participating in the evil exploitation of innocent animals!” party line.
Cynic’s point is that milk is fatty, not evil. So far he hasn’t said anything about the exploitation of innocent animals, and I’m kinda beginning to think that maybe the OP is just a little tongue-in-cheek, sorta “devil’s advocate” kind of thing. Eh?
Perhaps because tobacco can harm non-smokers through second-hand smoking? And it seems to me that there is already a lot of political pressure to reduce alcohol abuse, especially teenage drinking.