Humans evolved to be cooperative breeders | Hacker News Reader

Humans evolved to be cooperative breeders

sapiens.org

31 pointsFossilHominid12 comments

This is remotely tangentially related but when I learned that the milk in one milk carton was composed of many hundreds of cows and not just one cow it blew my mind as a child.

This is common for many industrial ag products and part of why it's safety is harder. The safety of multiple containers of milk are the worst of the set of individual cows. So you have the incidence of one sick cow leveraged out to many more consumers than if it were 1:1

Another similar case is ground beef[1] where a hamburger patty can contain material from >100 cows

[1]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/08/05/there...

Regarding milk: at least around here, the milk get tested rather thoroughly, both on composition, bacteria content and taste.

Also all modern dairies pasteurize all milk meant for consumption, which means the bacteria in it are dead anyway.

Source: grew up on a farm, studied agriculture.

Of course, totally agree there are processes in place to mitigate the leverage points. It just points out the necessity for such mitigations to be in place due to the multiplicative nature.

There's a paper, summarized here at Harvard Medical Review, that suggests there there may be some risks for some of the mothers in this milk-sharing group.

> At six months of age, the analysis revealed that 20 metabolites differed in overweight versus lean women. Additionally, milk adenine in obese mothers was associated with greater weight gain in infants.

https://hms.harvard.edu/news/breast-milk-obesity

The title is for a different article. It should be "What Milk-Sharing Communities Reveal".

Actually it's a sentence within the article. There's no article on sapiens.org with this title.

I think it’s interesting about how connected cross-feeding mothers feel to the other kids in their sharing community. I wonder if this could be used to build life-long stronger bonds in communities.

Does the lady in picture shown breast feeding two kids holding a beer? I think it might be harmful to consume alcohol while breastfeeding but more strange is the choice of picture for the article.

Maybe it's root or malt beer, which both are basically sugar water.

It looks like it might be a Dundee Summer Shandy - not a bad choice for a hot day at the park in upstate NY.

It is not considered harmful to have a beer while breastfeeding. I'm sure the subject of the photo was aware of how it would be perceived and didn't put her drink out of frame to help normalize public breastfeeding.

Someone I know is a post-delivery (or "mother+baby" nurse) who just had a baby a few weeks ago. The most recent guidance is that one weak drink in a day is probably fine and the best time to have one is near the end of a feeding session. The alcohol won't have time to make it into the milk, and it gives your body time to clear the alcohol from your bloodstream before the next feeding. But you specifically shouldn't drink for at least ~2 hours before a feeding.

That said, I don't think she's drinking right now at all, just in case. Even if the alcohol clears from your bloodstream in a few hours, I would be surprised if the lingering metabolites and effect on one's endocrine system didn't effect the contents of the milk somehow.

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