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Comment by vfc1 | Hacker News Reader

For babies, not for adults. Adult animals in most species can't even drink milk, they can't digest it anymore past infancy.

Biologically this means that the infant would release the mother so that they could have another child, so there is biological adaption on most species to not drink milk past a certain age.

And we have it too via lactose intolerance, which is normal.

However, some relatively small percentage of humans developed the ability to drink milk around 10k years ago in Turkey, but it's not perfect. It gets worse with age as one would expect.

Human babies shouldn't drink cow's milk, it's completely unnecessary and there are questions about it's effect on long-term human health.

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There are questions about effects of almost anything on long-term human health. Over-stressing about what to eat like any other type of stress might not be that healthy even in the short term :)

> Human babies shouldn't drink cow's milk, it's completely unnecessary and there are questions about it's effect on long-term human health.

1. According to whom?

2. Can you name a type of food that has zero questions about its effect on long-term human health?

>And we have it too via lactose intolerance, which is normal.

Globally seen yes. Locally it depends. Living in i.e Europe and having lactose intolerance is not normal.

Sorry you're completely scaremongering here. Can you point to any actual evidence to back up your claims?

Most of the statements there are reasonably well founded. The specifics of 'Turkey' may be a bit off, but broadly I'd agree with the comment you're replying to.

https://www.snpedia.com/index.php/Lactose_intolerance and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lactase_persistence

Agreed generally but as my own memory of reading these research papers and what wikipedia points out that lactase persistence is not caused by a single gene but there are several different gene variants that can produce this same effect.

And we know since the mid 2000s by a dozen or so genetic studies that these genes did not arrive from a single culture or single timeframe, but are an example of "convergent evolution" aka it was beneficial for humans generally and thus when independent random mutations occurred they persisted longer for those people were more likely to breed and thrive. This happened several times in human history and are not a singular event.

And thus individual humans may have Lactase Persistence in adulthood and other individual humans may not have the persistence. Furthermore how much Lactose you can process with the Lactase enzyme is a dependent process where some people can handle some quantities but not too much quantity of Lactose all at once.

>For babies, not for adults.

There's an entire class of people called "children" who are neither babies nor adults who can benefit from drinking milk (or any other good source of calcium).

> Adult animals in most species can't even drink milk, they can't digest it anymore past infancy.

But we're not animals. Animals cannot drive cars (not even the babies!) and we do. We're different than animals in some aspects.

Some of us are able to digest milk

The rest of the absurdity of your argument aside, claiming that only humans can do a thing that humans invented solely for themselves to make your point gave me a good chuckle.

We are animals like all the others, even if a percentage of our population evolved the ability to continue to digest milk into adulthood.

Indeed, "we have evolved to be able to do something, but other species did not, so we should not do it neither" is a very backward argument.

The point was that its actually a very unnatural thing to be doing, and that we only evolved very recently to be able to even do it.

Also, there is a whole spectrum to it. You don't have to be 100% medically diagnosed as lactose intolerant, it might cause you ocasional digestive issues without you even know it.

Like those unexplained, once a month or once every 3 months diarrheas that many of us take as a fact of life, it's actually not normal and might very well be dairy that is causing it for a lot of people.

Most animals don't eat cooked meat but just raw meat. If you follow that reasoning is very unnatural for us to cook meat, we should switch to raw meat.

The point was that drinking milk is something humans have only very recently in our evolutionary history have adapted to doing, so we are still adapting and a lot of us can't do it very well at all.

At least, a lot of us do it a lot worst than we realize, and there are a ton of people with recurring mild digestive issues which should not be consuming dairy daily at all, but keep doing do due to the public perception that its a healthy thing to do when in fact it's not.

We evolved to do it recently, but lactose tolerance genes have been heavily selected for by evolution. It's one of the most heavily selected-for traits in the past ten thousand years.

Still the majority of the world population is lactose intolerant and should not be consuming dairy at all.

The ones that can digest it, do it usually less well than they think they do. Mild chronic diarrhea is prevalent is western countries, and a degree of dairy intolerance could very well be one of the factors.

It gets worse for most people with age, as elderly people can become lactose intolerant, fully or only slightly. This does not happen overnight, its a progressive thing, many people gradually stop being able to properly digest dairy.

There are different degrees of lactose tolerance, and a good fraction of the world's population is at least somewhat tolerant. Then there are regions of the world where almost all people are completely tolerant, like northern Europe.

There are also lots of dairy products that contain little lactose, from lactose-free milk to cheese. And of course, it's pretty simple to just take lactase pills.

From a completely subjective perspective, dairy products are some of the tastiest foods, and they're objectively a huge part of food culture in Europe. I don't foresee them going away.

I don't see them going away either, but I think that it's important that the public realizes that they are completely optional for good health.

But there is this perception that they are absolutely essential due to decades of dairy industry advertising and lobbying, and it's simply not true.

They're not absolutely essential, but they are very nutritious, which is why the lactose tolerance gene has been so heavily selected for.

Yes, we are animals. We are pretty unique within the animal kingdom but we are still animals.

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