Are dairy products essential for our health?

Fresh dairy products

Milk and dairy products are one of the most consumed foods in the world. It has long been touted as an essential food for human health. However, nowadays there is a growing debate about whether people need dairy products in their diets.

Milk is a widespread food. We have known for a long time that it is essential for health as a source of calcium and protein.  Due to the dairy industry’s strong advertising presence today, a lot of people have come to believe that this idea was somehow imposed. Studies demonstrated that humans don’t strongly need to consume milk. There are many healthy alternatives to cow’s milk. In fact, many people in different parts of the world drink little or no cow’s milk.  Yet they still get the calcium and protein they need. Moreover, research assumed by a team of Swedish scientists find out a connection between milk consumption with bone fractures and osteoporosis. Yet it is unfair to label milk as the only culprit of bone weakening. Calcium loss in bones is related to high consumption of all animal protein.

Milk is an interesting food item and is mainly for feeding fast growing baby animals. No mammal species need the milk of another species. Each mammal species produces milk for a period of time to meet the needs of its own offspring. However, in the dairy industry, animals undergo many genetic mutations. Cows today can produce up to 12 times more milk than they produce enough to feed a calf naturally.

The sugar in milk is lactose, composed of the two simple sugars which are glucose and galactose. Lactose requires a special enzyme called lactase to let lactose to get through the intestinal walls into the bloodstream. As babies, we all produce the enzyme lactase so that our bodies can digest milk. Though, when humans weaned in early childhood, lactase production stops in most of them. Adults become unable to absorb the lactose in milk. We call it “lactose intolerance”. Still, humans can easily consume milk without any symptoms by processing it into cheese or yogurt, which removes some of the lactose. People with lactose intolerance may experience nausea, vomiting, diarrhea and other related digestive symptoms.

How did humans build up lactose tolerance?

Looking at the information given above, it may be difficult to understand how milk can be consumed so much today. With settled life, humans were starting to milk domesticated farm animals and consume their milk. Then, with evolution coming into play,  mutations in the gene that produces the enzyme lactase became more frequent. In conclusion, adult lactose tolerance developed. It is unclear that when, how and why people started consuming milk in the first place. Famine is probably the main reason that encouraged people to consume milk due to the lack of food choices. There are other assumptions that milk is a better choosing in comparison to polluted water sources in arid environments, or that drinking milk in ancient times could be associated with social prestige.

Today, most of the people have lactose tolerance in Europe and America. Drinking milk is common practice. Nevertheless, until the near history, in many African and Asian countries, people almost never consumed dairy products. Therefore, Africans or Asians have relatively less lactose tolerance. Then, in 2000, China launched a campaign to encourage people to consume more milk for health reasons. However, before that, they weren’t experiencing any major health problems  due to not consuming milk anyway. Even so, campaign worked, and now China is the world’s second largest consumer of dairy products and a great name in the dairy industry.

References;

https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2012/12/27/168144785/an-evolutionary-whodunit-how-did-humans-develop-lactose-tolerance#:~:text=But%20around%208%2C000%20years%20ago,time%2C%20adult%20lactose%20tolerance%20developed.

https://iphysio.io/osteoporosis/