Not so sure if it was fitness perse, have you ever seen a swede drink a glass of milk? Something very very sexy about it.

Lactose intolerance is not the only problem with lactose.

Those who do not have lactose intolerance split lactose into glucose and galactose, which are absorbed.

Like fructose, galactose must be converted in the liver. In people where either the conversion is slower or they consume a lot of dairy, galactose may persist for longer times in the body. In such cases there is an increased risk of eye cataract.

The numbers vary wildly by race and region. Among people of northern European ancestry, more than 95% can digest lactose.

Either way, many dairy products have little to no lactose, including cheese, butter, ghee, heavy whipping cream, Greek yogurt, and whey isolate.

As a Latin American adult, I offer the counter-evidence that most adults I know can drink milk with little issue, while few are fluent in English. The mutation that allows humans to drink milk beyond their infancy spread about 10 millennia ago, way before the Indo-European family of languages was a thing.

Edit: Did a little sleuthing. I'm from Mexico, and just learned that half of the Mexicans can't digest milk. Seems like we imported the mutation from the Spanish/Portuguese since the indigenous people are the least able to digest milk. I live in Northern Mexico, and while most of Mexico is a cauldron of mixed races, the further South you go, the more pure indigenous people you can find.

That's why in my social circle most people possess the lactase adaptation, but if I lived further South, less and less people would. Live and learn.

>It is an intersting coincidence that ability to digest milk as an adult and fluency in English are correlated.

Last time I checked Scandinavia didn’t speak English, and so is Germany, France, Spain and the rest of Europe, neither as official language nor fluent. Your link between those is silly and incorrect, for one: as said most if not all of European aren’t English native speakers, and the biggest native English speakers are found in North America, specifically in the US, a country that obviously is a mix of all people and ethnicities, even the ones who call themselves “whites” are actually mixed to some degree, so if you consider the fluency in English as your baseline, then Americans from asians roots for example shouldn’t be lactose intolerant while some German dude who barely speaks English is?! That’s idiotic. Second: you are correlating something genetically inherited with something you can learn in the first few years, which is even sillier.

If you correlate that with race, then you might be correct, as maybe the majority of caucasians, asians, etc. are/aren’t lactose intolerant, but I never looked at any studies in that regard, but it will make sense at least.

Consider this...Corn is intended to feed a baby plant. Humans are not corn. Some corns cob for humans is likely not harmful. But beyond that you're ingesting a cocktail of nutrients and hormones intend for a baby plant.

Put another way, just because Big Corn has normalized doesn't mean it's a good dietary decision.

Proceed at your own risk.

PS. Sorry for being so snarky, but I hope you read my silly comment with an open mind, and realize how weak your argument is as of now. You need facts to back up such extraordinary statement. It even has anthropological implications.

This is a weird argument. No food is /intended/ to feed humans. Every single thing we eat is just some random bit of plant or animal that happens to be nutritious.

Humans are mammals, like cows, so biologically we share a great deal in common, including the production of milk for our young.

It doesn't make sense to argue against consuming something on the basis of "what it was intended for". Nature makes no such distinctions when it comes to acquisition of energy.

Fruits and vegetables are not "intended for human consumption" either, they're intended to spread the plant's seed away from other competing plants. Cooked cow muscle fibers, also known as steak or beef, are intended for movement, but they are also delicious and nutritious. Organs of ruminants and birds, such as liver, are also extremely healthy for humans to consume, but they of course were evolved with other purposes in mind.

As for "big milk", well milk is an extremely dynamic food used to produce a large variety of delicious products like cheese, butter, cream, yogurt, whey protein, cake, milk chocolate, etc. Milk consumption also pre-dates modern advertising by 9000 years or so, with earliest signs of human cultivation of milk from cows dating back to the Neolithic.

And to the extent that you choose some milk alternative over milk itself, are you just falling for the Big Almond or Big Soy industry's alternative propaganda?

Humans eat so many different plants and animals that are not from Africa. Everything has hormones and soy can cause issues for some people because it has phytoestrogen.

What's with the "Big Milk" business? People have been drinking milk and eating cheese for thousands of years.

It's a normal part of the human diet.

The ability to drink cow’s milk evolved relatively recently, in the past 7,500 years or so. But that ability made you so much more likely to survive and reproduce that it quickly came to dominate Europe. Obviously we don’t know what traits will be adaptive moving forward, but in the past drinking milk was incredibly advantageous.

thats more of an argument for goat milk which is in fact much easier to digest than cow milk