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Comment by skjfhskjhf | Hacker News Reader

Humans are the only animals that drink milk after infancy. We are also the only animals that are influenced by advertising.

Got Milk? Does a body good. And other bullshit to help you decided.

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We're also the only animals that cook meat, or eat chocolate, or who get to eat fresh strawberries in the winter.

I always find it odd when people consider drinking milk to be unnatural, somehow -- as though it's any more unnatural than the other 99% of our modern diet.

> We're also the only animals that [...] get to eat fresh strawberries in the winter.

My cat would disagree with that.

> I always find it odd when people consider drinking milk to be unnatural, somehow -- as though it's any more unnatural than the other 99% of our modern diet.

Well, the fact that most non-Northern European adults are lactose intolerant is a better basis for concluding that drinking milk is, for most people, "unnatural" than is available for most other foodstuffs.

> Well, the fact that most non-Northern European adults are lactose intolerant

The statistics about lactose intolerance are a complete jumble of inconsistent data; I'm very skeptical.

I can't speak for many groups/countries, but for the one I've been in extensive contact with, the published numbers are simply out of whack.

Do you know why we drink milk after infancy? Because we evolved to. It was when man domesticated the Auroch (the predecessor to the cow) that it is thought they started holding on to lactase production farther into life. Milk allowed the humans to live better and fatter when times were lean. As such, there was an evolution towards continue lactase production. There's some really interesting work in this area done by McCracken out of UCLA. There's also some cool studies since then around the cultural migrations of lactase and lactose intolerance by Enattah and Tishkoff.

Pretty neat stuff seeing how evolution affects all of us.

> Do you know why we drink milk after infancy? Because we evolved to.

"We" in this case being, essentially, Northern Europeans. Lactase persistence isn't really the global norm.

"We" in this case is actually those human cultures with large backgrounds in herding. For example the Maasai, Kenyans, Tanzanians, and Sudanese tend to not be lactose intolerant. I think we'd agree they're not Northern Europeans.

That being said, yes it's not a global norm.

It is more widespread than you might think. This article tells the story of the potential role of milk in the growth of the agrarian way of life: http://www.nature.com/news/archaeology-the-milk-revolution-1...

I'd suggest that it was not advertising but a harsh environment and natural selection that led humans in Northern Europe to develop lactase persistence so they could drink milk after infancy.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lactase_persistence

Not that I am completely against your point, but I think you need a little better reasoning. Humans are the only animals that do a lot of things after infancy.

Evolving to digest dairy is probably what saved the people who migrated into the colder climates of Northern Europe.

For those of us with the ability digest it, a moderate amount of dairy is probably a good thing.

http://www.nature.com/news/archaeology-the-milk-revolution-1...

> We are also the only animals that are influenced by advertising.

If that's true then what the hell are peacocks doing?

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