World of Milk

The wonderful world of milk.

To cite Alton Brown:

"I love milk.Can't get enough of it."

I can have all the milk i want. Unfortunately some people cannot. I was just talking to a friend. She just had Muesli. She poured a good batch of milk. Had her Muesli. Delicious, she was happy. But then things started to go downhill...

As you all know milk is an emulation of butterfat globules in water, there's also proteins keeping the water and the fat phase apart from each other. That probably sounds a little disgusting but not to dangerous. But then, there's also the lactose...

Lactose is a disaccharide. That means that there are 2 Sugars combined. Glucose and Galactose. We can easily digest both of them. But to get to them, you need to break up the bond between them.

Since babies are fed on milk and the digestive track of the baby knows that it produces lactase. It's an enzyme that breaks up the bond. Then the Glucose and the Galactose are digested.

Apparently most species on the planet including humans stop producing lactase when maturing, because they will not be fed by their mother's milk, anymore. Some humans do still possess the gene to produce lactase. According to Wikipedia: "many people with ancestry in Europe, the Middle East, India, and the Maasai of East Afric" have that gene. I am one of them. So i can digest the lactose, yay  yay...

Unfortunately my friend isn't. She's lactose intolerant. She does not have the enzyme(s) to break up the bond. Whenever lactose enters her body, it passes straight through her body and while having this interesting voyage something happens. That something is neither pretty nor a nice thing to happen to you. There's some bacteria inside your intestines that like to munch on that lactose. They feed on it. When feeding on it they produce a lot of CO2.

So what do you get out of this? Pain, gas more pain.

However, the interesting question is: Why do some of us have that gene? Did we just change our diet some tenthousand years back? Continued drinking milk, then our bodies adapted? Or did some crazy gene-mutation hit us and made our lactase production continue? Our ancestors noticed and started milking cows, sheep and the occasional mammoth?

I think at least for us europeans this is an interesting point. Europe was covered by a large forest back then. There's this analogy that a squirrel could hop from the atlantic coast in spain to today's moscow without his feet touching the ground. There's vitamin D in milk. The other way to get to vitamin-D is via the skin. When light hit's your skin you produce Vitamin D. You need Vitamin-D. Where does that lead us?

We needed the Vitamin D. Milk gave us Vitamin D. There was not much light, because Europe was a huge forrest. So our ancestors lived in the shadows. They didn't get their Vitamin-D via Sunlight. They needed another source. Milk was the answer ,)

How convenient that the genes changed.

I would like to close by giving props to Old Homie Darwin ,)