Remember when EVERYONE was Lactose Intolerant?

You probably don’t remember it, but there was a time when everyone was lactose intolerant – you just have to think back about 10,000 years.

First, let's start with a simple Latin and Chemistry lesson:
• ‘lacte’ is Latin for ‘milk'.
• in Latin, ‘ose’ means ‘sugar’.
• Lactose is a basic sugar, mostly found in milk. (lacte + ose. Get it?)
     o Glucose is the simplest sugar. It is the sugar your body uses for energy. (Maybe you’ve heard the term monosaccharide? That's usually a glucose.)
     o Sucrose (plain table sugar) is a Glucose hooked to a Fructose (Maybe you’ve heard the term disaccharide?)
     o Lactose is a Glucose hooked to a Galactose (Which makes lactose a disaccharide too.)
     o A lot of ‘ose’s’, but you get the idea.
• Milk can be up to 8% lactose. Egg whites are up to about 1% lactose.
• In making cheese, most of the lactose is in the whey - and cheese is made from the curd. (Little Miss Muffit-style.) As a result, cheese contains very little lactose.
• In ‘cultured’ dairy products, like Yogurt, the lactose gets used up as the culture (bacteria) grows. That’s why you’re supposed to look for lactobacillus on the label (milk + bacteria). As a result, yogurt contains very little lactose.
• In Latin, ‘ace’ means ‘cleave’ or ‘cut’.
• Lactase (milk + cut) is an enzyme excreted in your intestines that cuts lactose in half, turning it into glucose that your blood can deliver to the rest of your body for energy.

Once upon a time, only babies drank milk. The evolutionary process is a great economizer: Since adults didn’t need to digest lactose, those who didn’t spend resources making an enzyme (lactase) they didn’t need, reproduced more successfully. The result: EVERYONE before the Neolithic Period was Lactose Intolerant after infancy.

Once we migrated out of Africa, we began to concentrated more on agriculture, including the domestication of animals. Initially we used the milk from those animals to make cheese – it was easier to transport and store. (We can probably thank the Italians for figuring that one out.) As we progressed north, we became dairy farmers who used the milk as a primary food source. (The Germanic people figured out that you can extract a LOT more calories from an animal if you milk it for a while before you eat it.) Those whose intestines could excrete lactase (i.e. were lactose tollerant), had more food available (milk), reproduced more succesfully and became a bigger percentage of the population.

Today, the results of that evolutionary process are evident in how people from different geographic areas tolerate lactose:
• Nearly ALL Africans and Asians never had milk beyond infancy – and today nearly ALL (over 90%) are lactose intolerant.
• 70% of the people from near the Mediterranean (like Italians - the original cheese-heads) are still lactose intolerant.
• Those descendent from northern Europe have predominantly developed an ability to use milk into adulthood. Only 5% are lactose intolerant.

So, from a historical perspective, we didn’t develop an intolerance for lactose – we developed a tolerance.


(Claim on Technorati RF7S8X5PPN79 C75ZS8AQP6H9)