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Comment by vfc1 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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