Archaeology: The milk revolution
nature.com
nature.com
When the Vikings established their colony in Vinland, they wished to establish peaceable relations with the Native Americans. They invited the local chiefs to a party at their longhouse, in which they served an amazing new drink -- milk -- which the Americans had never seen before. The following morning, suffering from intense abdominal pains, the natives accused the vikings of trying to poison them, and promptly laid siege to the colony until the Vikings packed up and buggered off.
But for this incident, it's entirely possible that the Vikings might have established a durable colony in the Americas, leading to contact between the old and new world 500 years earlier.
http://www.editors-wastebasket.org/nexx/pro/vinland.html
"What drove the two groups apart was a killing. Some of the Norse men killed a skraeling who was attempting to steal weapons, which Thorfinn had forbidden as trade items."
The Skraelings, being mammals, and observers of other mammals such animals they hunted, would have been familiar with milk, even without owning livestock.
If they bought raw milk, they probably intended to use it for their children, but it seems a rather difficult trade item, as a liquid, and having a shelf life of only a day or two.
They probably were trading butter or cheese, neither of which contains enough lactose to cause problems. Fresh cheese would have been known from the stomachs of suckling animals, and might have been a prized delicacy before they were aware it could be manufactured. Butter would have been completely new to them.
I am lactose tolerant; I can assure you that cheese contains enough lactose to cause problems.
Similar to how presidential elections are impacted by a 100 million year old coastline [3], this small genetic mutation has affected the entire world's economy, especially agriculture-based industries. Once we enter the post-natural-selection era where we can select the DNA of our offspring, I wonder how different will the long-term future be.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Revolution_(India)
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amul
[3] http://deepseanews.com/2012/06/how-presidential-elections-ar...
Well, Spain is not entirely sunny. Certainly the north of Spain is not. You can see a darker line in the map that divides Spain. This is divided by a set of mountains called "Cordillera cantábrica" that makes the north way more rainy than the rest of Spain.
There are places in Spain where it rains more than in the north, but only in a very small period of the year. Most of the year is sunny there(the part that is not the north).
Last time I looked, Cádiz (in the very south of the peninsula) is the province with more yearly rain, also one of the sunniest. That's because it's in the straigth between Mediterranean Sea and the Atlantic Ocean. The (not very high, just about 1km height) mountains capture a lot of humidity.
And no, it's not a matter of "a small period of the year", but of a small portion of the province: Sierra of Grazalema.
Personally I am mostly interested in Asian history. We know that South Asian and Tibeto-Burman people have been milk and cheese consumers for a long time, as have the Central Asian peoples including the Mongols, who are said to have actually preferred liquid foods to solid ones.
These days, I know first hand that a lot of people in China are getting stuck in to milk products for the first time. How can this be, if they should keel over in pain and indigestive flatulence? The only person I've ever seen mass-produce cheese in an apartment was a Burmese friend in China, who I'm sure wasn't after the lactose for its apparent usefulness in diluting heroin! Wikipedia states: Some studies indicate that environmental factors—more specifically, the consumption of lactose—may "play a more important role than genetic factors in the etio-pathogenesis of milk intolerance" ... ie. the intolerance notion is largely bullshit and people can adapt to lactose. That seems to fit the observations.
Anyway, interesting to ponder... I went and polished off a block of New Zealand cheddar to celebrate. (Saving Roquefort for a salad tomorrow, then it's off to Indonesia where cheese is no doubt harder to find!)
Its a fairly academic book oriented more toward the spread of proto-indo-european language and related topics. And I got the pointer to that book from a podcast delivered lecture series "WS3710 History of Iran to the Safavid Period" a tolerable recording (tolerable from a technical standpoint; OK to listen to, but not going to win any awards for audio engineering). Its a recording of a class at Columbia from 2008.
My interpretation of the book and lecture series is people kept livestock for quite a long time before some mutant gained the ability to drink milk, which given the herd of meat animals meant they gained a lot of nutrition compared to the non-mutants, which is a huge survival gain.
I've found I enjoy university lectures much more now that I don't need to take midterms and write papers, so thats pretty much all I listen to.
Lactose sometimes feeds bad microbes (because the microbes can use the di-saccharide bond for energy or because the the di-saccharide bond delays the absorption of the sugar, allowing it to feed bacteria residing in parts of the gut where starches and simple sugars are absent because they've already been absorbed upstream.)
In addition, microbes can produce toxins that interfere with the production or the effectiveness of the enzymes that cleave the di-saccharide bond.
The practical application of what I just said is that you might be able to regain your lactose tolerance by scrupulously avoiding lactose for a few months or a few years (i.e., long enough to starve out the offending microbial species). A good pro-biotic supplement might help.
I love how this little plus provide in the long run an overwhelming advantage.
Small bonuses can mean a lot in a game of life.
Raw milk contains lactase producing bacteria, so anyone consuming milk in its raw form would be able to digest it without any digestion problems. Only pasteurized milk is lactase free as heating destroys the bacteria that produce the enzyme. Most milk historically would have been consumed raw so an adaptation to produce lactase would have been unnecessary and would not provide a significant competitive advantage.
> Probiotic microorganisms must be of human origin in order to have an impact on human health (Teitelbaum and Walker, 2000). Bacteria present in raw milk are from infected udder tissues (e.g., mastitis causing bacteria), the dairy environment (e.g., soil, water, and cow manure), and milking equipment. High bacteria counts in raw milk only indicate poor animal health and poor farm hygiene.
> Bacteria in raw milk are typically not of human origin. An exception is Streptococcus pyogenes. S. pyogenes that has adapted to humans can be transmitted to animals. Once S. pyogenes is colonized in animals, it can be re-transmitted to humans as a human pathogen that causes strep throat. For example, S. pyogenes can infect a cow udder to cause mastitis. The infected cow udder can subsequently shed S. pyogenes, a pathogen, into raw milk.
This is one reason many people are wary of 'raw milk': People lie to promote it. They tell bald-faced lies, and they expect people won't check up on them. And then they spin conspiracy theories when someone does check up on them and call them on their lies. It's just cynical advertising from an industry that uses fear to sell its wares.
The best comparison is by analogy in that a raw bratwurst will provide you with a tiny delta better nutrition than a cooked bratwurst. There seems to be no way to successfully argue it isn't better. Although you'd have to be some kind of idiot to eat a raw bratwurst other than some kind of MTV "jackass" tv show stunt to see just how badly you can food poison yourself and still survive.
I don't think this is strictly true, it's more complicated than that. You increase the bioavailability of many of the nutrients (especially proteins) by cooking, but lose some of the vitamins which are heat sensitive.
I was thinking in my numerical function that total caloric intake is going to be reduced by rendering out fat in the cooking process so it would be a net loss. I was inspired to google and pork is a reasonably good source of vitamin B-6 would have to research its heat stability which I'm not quite motivated enough to do. Also I'm unclear if my google source is talking about B-6 pre or post cooking. It may be there's too much pre cooking (probably not, but maybe)
As a case in point, it is generally known that children who grew up on farms have fewer allergies and asthma as adults. The mechanism behind this is not crystal clear, but raw milk consumption is a strong candidate. "Despite these risks there is a growing body of epidemiological evidence suggesting that consumption of unprocessed cow's milk does not increase but rather decreases the risk of asthma, hay fever and atopic sensitisation" (Braun-Fahrländer, C. and Von Mutius, E. (2011))
Treating the human body not as a magical place of cleanliness but as a germ-filled ecosystem is a critical step forward for science. We are only beginning to understand the role of things like gut bacteria in chronic diseases like obesity. I am personally less concerned what "basic research" has to say on the matter (germs make you sick, everyone knows this) and much more interested in the cutting-edge (certain germ exposures may prevent disease).
The real reason for pasteurization is the benefit to large scale commercial dairy farming. Non-pasteurized milk will spoil soon, but once you kill all the bacteria, it will stay longer, thus allowing a supply chain and warehouses full of "milk" at Costco. I am fortunate enough to be able to drink it regularly, but with US laws intended to support large scale commercial operations, I don't know for how long.
And here we go with the conspiracy theories. What's your biological training?
That's a downright ludicrous claim, unless they're claiming priobiotic == human origin by definition, and not the more normal definition of "beneficial microorganisms, regardless of source". If this were true, then there would never be any probiotics, except for ones where our own cells mutated into bacteria. They came from somewhere. We don't have them all in all of us. That alone eliminates your entire argument.
Sure. I believe you. What, if any, training in biology have you had?