https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/20...000-years-fine/

The headline is a bit deceptive. They were fine, but uncomfortable, until they died from malnutrition.

I'm not convinced.


Just talked to a young woman yesterday with lactose intolerance. Confirmed when Lactaid milk saw better results. She cramps up and even throws up. Nothing minor there. And her room mate attested to the stink of abnormal flatulence . Both made faces! Lol

Traditionally milk was not just fresh but made into "yogurt" and cheeses and other aged and fermented foods. Those processes knock down lactose. I'm betting people who experienced lactose intolerance learned quickly to stick to fermented or aged dairy and avoid fresh milk.

In most of the world babies drink breast milk and adults don't drink milk at all. It is promotion by the Dairy Industry that got adults thinking that drinking milk was a normal thing to do. 200 yrs ago my ancestors had one cow for a family of 13. They took most of it to the "cheese factory" in their rural area of Ontario - basically a communal spring-cooled stone hut where the cheese could age without spoiling.

Definitely something happened to increase lactose tolerance in the population of at least Europeans.

I think it's as simple as people in temperate zones farmed and people nearer the poles or in the mountains herded. They had to work with their climate.

So, like everything else about our personal genomes, we are likely to digest most effectively if we eat the diet our ancestors adapted to. Just as our predecessors varied in the color of their skin according to how much sun protection they needed at their location.

I only eat fermented dairy and it agrees with me. I only eat pickled vegetables to avoid digestive issues... which turn into autoimmune issues.

That's the digestive enzyme hand I was dealt, and I think understanding what our bodies expect to eat should shape what we do eat

My lactose intolerant DD1 recently visited for a couple of weeks. We bought lactose free milk for her, and after getting over whatever exposure she had to too much lactose during her trip, she was doing much better.

Then she also spent a couple of days visiting in another state with DD2 - apparently the supposedly lactose-free milk she bought there was mislabeled (she also said that milk tasted sweeter than the usual lactose free milk), because she immediately started having digestive distress again.


__________



Having grown up on farms, I was always well aware that a milking cow produces far more milk than a family can use in it's fresh state- and this is with reliable refrigeration. However, most cows will also "go dry" at some point during the year.

As Deidre and Arielle pointed out, since a cow produces more milk than can be reasonably consumed fresh, most of the milk prior to reliable refrigeration was not consumed in a fresh state. It was made into yogurt, or various types of cheeses, the cream could be skimmed off and churned to make butter - all of those processes result in dairy products which contain little to no lactose at all. At least some of these processes also resulted in foods which could be preserved for use throughout the year, whether the cow was producing a lot of milk or not.

_________


Back to DD1 - Despite her lactose intolerance, she can eat cheese, cultured yogurt, cultured sour cream, fresh cream, real ice cream (not ice milk). What they all have in common is that most (if not all) of the lactose has been converted through culturing or removed in the process of making that product, so that the finished product has very little to no lactose at all.

__________

The claim that people were lactose intolerant for 9,000 years but were fine -

They weren't "fine". They were miserable.

If they figured out what was making them sick (fresh milk) they avoided it.

If they didn't, they died from the lactose intolerance, or lactose intolerance combined with a stomach virus, which would likely cause them to become severely dehydrated.

Not scientific, just a personal observation.

I was very lactose intolerant. I love cheese and would bring activated charcoal capsules to soothe my gut.

Then I went Keto (we called it Atkins induction then) and gave up wheat. That was back in the 1990s. When I quit eating wheat, the lactose intolerance went away. I still have a half bottle of charcoal caps in the cupboard, and haven't needed them.

I have dairy every day now, cream in my coffee, whey protein shakes and cheese at least 5 days per week. No problem at all.

So I wonder if there is a connection between wheat and dairy intolerance. Can the wheat suppress the body's creation of lactase or something like that? Was it really wheat intolerance that manifested itself when I consumed dairy?

I have no idea. I do know that without wheat, or with only occasional minor amounts of it, I no longer have the dairy problem that I had for the first 40 years of my life.

A few decades ago I had terrible gastritis and the doctor said I should try avoiding dairy. Which I did for over a decade, with okay results.

Then I started Atkins and found cheese, yogurt, even cream was okay. And I did cut down the grains radically.

Went gluten free and NOW I react to gluten.

I'm thinking allergen load...

Bob and WereBear - You may be on to something!


Please correct me if I'm wrong, but as far as I know, newborn babies don't ever seem to be intolerant to the lactose in mother's milk.



But then newborns don't eat wheat either - at least not until they're started on cereal (I don't know what the recommended age is right now - it was 4 months when my kids were little). Back then, they started on rice cereal, then moved on to oats, and finally wheat.



I wonder how long it takes after starting on that wheat cereal before signs of gluten intolerance or lactose intolerance starts to show up?

Apparently, there is science behind it. If gluten damages the intestines, they can't make the enzyme to digest lactose.



It's about the intestinal damage. And if a dairy food is fermented, the lactose feeds the fermentation process, leaving little work for the enzymes.

My dairy consumption is very low lactose, since I eat cheese, yogurt, sour cream, cream cheese, and heavy cream. I don't drink milk and my ice cream consumption is rare.

And of course, what if a lot of people's lactose intolerance is actually a marker for their intestinal damage?

Back to the ancestral pattern we inherited to make the enzymes for the food THEY ate. My genetic inheritance is 2/3 Northern European mountains. In such circumstances, they weren't farmers. They were herders.

At least in my experience, this put me on the back foot in a society which tilts heavily agrarian, and is getting pushed further in that direction by the food industry.

This contributes to so many people adopting the "Pritikin approach" to food, where it doesn't matter what you eat as long as you fill your stomach. This was Pritikin's rationale for his obsession with low fat... which worked out terribly but was still perpetuated until very recently.

It's a principle of Weston Price than a lot of traditional food prep was rooted in getting rid of plant toxins. All the step-skipping shortcuts for speed and profit are creating food that isn't what our ancestors ate. As as someone who is -- at least now -- super-sensitive to lectins, it makes my food choices look downright weird.

But perhaps it does explain my love of mountains Where I live now.

It is not always the lactose in milk that people have a problem with, but the protein (casein), and the proteins in wheat/grains (glutenin, gliadin). And the protein in mother's milk is different from that in cows milk. As a baby, cow's milk gave me colic, so I was fed a soy-based formula in the mid 1950s and then became "tolerant" of cows milk at ~2. I never could stand the smell or even the sound of it being poured into a glass.

Rice, oat & wheat pablum were pushed on mothers by Big Agra. Before that mothers pureed vegetables, meat & potatoes from a portion of the family meal (pre-seasoning), transitioning from breast milk to real meat, veg, potatoes at ~6 months. And by 2 they were eating with the family, not special foods for every whim - eat it or stay hungry. My grandfather was a pediatrician & when my sister was born in 1950 he was horrified by all the processed crap mothers were stuffing into their babies faces and marketing promoted doing it earlier & earlier. Then mothers would compete for whose baby ate it first, and chubby babies were marketed as healthier.

But post WWII, food was more available, as were antibiotics, antiparasitics, etc. so babies didn't need to be over-fattened to protect them from illness (which did help before the Depression & WWII). instead we fed animal-fattening fodder to kids and the majority of them developed the metabolic syndromes we see today.

Feeding milk to malnourished children did such wonders for them that it developed the reputation of a special health food. Which is why we all got free milk in one of my elementary schools. That's from the turn of last century, and it is far superior to soda, certainly.

I've also wondered the same thing about wheat and dairy. When I was an infant, I had a terrible time with cow's milk. My mother breast fed me for just a short time, and after going on formula I apparently cried all the time. She tried a lot of things, and finally discovered I did better with goat's milk. However, I hated milk my whole childhood. My mother was diagnosed with celiac disease when I was 16. They didn't know as much then as they do now about predisposing genes and all that. The doctors said her children had perhaps one chance in 10,000 that any of us would inherit the condition. Of course, they couldn't have really known that. In any case, I never got sick from wheat like my very reactive mother did, and never thought anything about it. I always had issues with dairy...I couldn't eat milk, ice cream, cheese etc. without getting stomach cramps and the runs. In 2003 I did Atkins for the first time, his original induction version which had no dairy, grains or cheese. I felt better than I ever had, no digestive issues at all. In 2009 I got gene testing and did some other testing, learned I had the celiac gene and another gene (from father) that predisposed to gluten sensitivity. I went off gluten and after about 9 months of that, tried limited dairy again. In limited amounts it doesn't bother me. I can get away with a cappuccino each day as the whipped half and half in it is a limited amount. If I eat more dairy than that, I get digestive woes again. Ice cream is hard to digest, although I actually did better with Lactaid ice cream. That's interesting because when I did the celiac stool testing, I also had them test for dairy, and they claimed I was also sensitive to the casein in milk. Perhaps I'm sensitive to both the casein as well as the lactose.

All said, I have long felt that not eating gluten allows me to tolerate limited dairy much better.