Milk, it does a body good. . . or not.
The ability of some, but not all, human populations to drink milk is supposedly only about 6,000 years old.
I am not a huge milk fan, frankly. Some people really are. There are adults who like milk so much that they'll buy it and regularly consume it, although people seem to mostly do that at home, and with adults it seems to really drop off.
It's not that I detest it either. I just quit drinking it pretty much as a teenager and I don't like it enough to resume drinking it. . . if I could. I don't recall the last time I simply drank a glass of milk, but it would be a long time ago. The last time I regularly did it, I"m pretty sure, was in basic training, as they served it in little pint cartons, just like schools used to do.
Milk has to be digested.
Our species is supposedly about 300,000 or so years old, which probably means its closure to 500,000 years old if not 600,000 or more. We only got around, they say, and as noted above, to drinking cows milk about 6,000 years ago, supposedly, which probably means its a little longer than that.
Now, if you are a mammal, you are evolved to drink milk. . . as a baby. Milk, all milk, contains lactose, a sort of sugar, and babies produce lactase in order to be able to digest it. But human adults, in our default state of nature, don't.
In fact, no adult mammal does. Not even cats, which will drink milk for the fat in it. Cats can't taste sweet, by the way, so they're not experiencing milk like you do when they drink it. It's more like gulping down a liquid bratwurst for them.
About 6,000 or so ago a mutation started showing up in European genetics for lactase persistence. In reality, lactose intolerance isn't so much a genetic deficiency as lactase persistence is a genetic advantage. What was pretty clearly going on is people were keeping cattle, so they didn't have to go out and hunt them (wild cattle in Europe still existed. . .indeed they existed on much of the globe) and at some point, either out of desperation or something, they started drinking their milk. That was probably a bold move, but we'd note that the only pastoral people on earth who remain lactose intolerant are African pastoralist, who will if things get desperate bleed cattle for protein, which is sort of similiar in a way.
According to the BBC, the first humans to take up drinking milk probably were rather flatulent, but if my own experience means anything, they probably felt a little sick to their stomach.
I.e., as an adult I've become somewhat lactose intolerant.
It's a bummer.
It just happened over the last couple of years, which surprises me. My lactase production as an adult must have always been somewhat weak, but only very recently has this become a problem. But it has now.
It's breakfast where the problem really shows up.
As best as I can determine, in my amateur but scientific fashion, I still produce some lactase. I can and do eat cheese, for example. And usually things cook with milk in them, which I frankly don't eat a lot of, don't bother me. I'll note that I'm also mildly allergic to eggs, and this is true of them as well.
But putting milk on cereal has become a sufficient enough problem that I have to use it very sparingly, and even then sometimes that's a problem. And there's one egg/milk casserole dish that my wife occasionally makes that is practically a no-go for me. Just too darned much.
Pass the cheese slathered leftovers please. . F=m(a).
I'm not much of a breakfast eater anyway now that I'm in my older years. I tend to eat it, as I don't eat lunch hardly at all, and that way I don't get too hungry during the day if I’m doing something, although truthfully if I don't eat at all, it usually doesn't matter.
That's probably because I have an office job most days, and sitting around on your butt isn't expending much in the way of calories.
That's self-evident, I think, but to a lot of people it doesn't seem to be, or it is in sort of a chasing the tail fashion.
I note that as it seems that about 100% of the European American population in the United States is on some sort of a "diet". I just commented on this. This affliction doesn't seem to wander into other ethnicities, in so far as I’m aware, but for European Americans, at least middle class and upper class Americans, this is true.
Americans have long had a problem with magical thinking about diet and medicine as it's earlier than actually accepting the science of things. I.e, rather than think "yikes, I'm getting sick and might need to see the doctor" it's easier to buy "essential oils" or some other crap off the Internet. If you don't die, you can proclaim it cured you, and if you die, you won't be around to make that point.
Diet works the same way.
The basic biology of diet is pretty simple. You expend so many calories just existing, and if you work beyond that, you'll expend more. Sitting around in an office doesn't expend many calories. So if you don't want to gain weight, the first principal would be not to eat too much.
The second one would be not to eat an unnatural diet. If it comes prepackaged in cardboard, it's probably unnatural.
Anyhow, that's simple enough, but that means you'd have to eat less, and for a lot of people, that's a real bummer. Most people like food, and most people like some food that is way high calorie.
The big problem is, however, that most people don't work for their food in the physical sense, the most class definition (but not the only one) being that W=m(a), that is work is equivalent to mass times acceleration. No, most people don't do that.
Take even the period just prior to World War One, which wasn't that long ago in real terms. There was some prepackaged food in the form of canned goods, and there was food that people canned themselves. And there were salted and brined meats as well. But by and large, what most married people experienced involved quite a bit of work.
If you lived where I do, for example, there's a strong chance that you walked to work, if you were a man or one of the minority of women who were employed outside the home. Some were driving by 1921, but a lot were still walking, and it was 1911, most were walking. That's work under the physics definition.
Married women, or women in a married household who were adults, typically went to the grocers and the meat market every day during the day. So that was more work.
In contrast, now most people simply drive to the grocery store and get what they need, which involves work for the car, but not for the eater.
Added to that, in addition, quite a few people worked to some degree, at least by having a garden, for their food.
Some of this still goes on, but by and large people are highly acclimated to doing very little physical work for their food.
This isn't really new. Since the mid 20th Century this has been an increasing trend, and by the late 20th Century, when it might be noted people really started putting on the weight, it was much like it is now. The odd thing is, however, that people have never really gotten away from large-scale food consumption.
Eating three full meals a day makes sense if you are a farm hand in 1910, but not much if you are an office worker in 2021. For that matter, even aboriginal people rarely eat that much, and that's what our bodies mostly think we are, with some regional evolutionary adaptations for agriculture. If you don't have those adaptations at all, what your body thinks is that you might not eat today. . . or tomorrow, but you'll be okay when you kill that deer the day after. But pass on that milk . . .
Or if your ancestors, let's say, lived in the Mediterranean, your body probably thinks you'll get three squares with lots of grains and cheese, but you're also going to be spending almost all day hiking around with your goats.
Your body never thinks that you are going to eat a hearty breakfast, drive to work, and eat a lunch as big as most people's dinners in prior eras, then drive home and eat an even bigger dinner.
That's what a lot of people actually do, but very few people are ready to admit it.
I'm 5'6" tall and I weight 165 lbs (normally).
I did a post on this quite a while back, from an historical prospective. That post is here:
Am I overweight? Well, that might depend on the century.
I realize now that I actually messed up on that post, as the linked in chart involved only women. In that my weight, 165, would have been overweight for a woman, barely, but my guess is that it wouldn't have been for a man. According to current figures, however, I'm overweight to the tune of 10 lbs.
Now, a lot goes into that, and I'll admit that I should lose some weight, even though I don't think I'm really all that much overweight. Be that as it may, if I ate breakfast every day, and then followed up with a full meal at noon, and went home to eat dinner, I'd be very much overweight. I'd guess at least another 20 lbs higher.
It's a matter of physics and metabolism.
On this, being overweight is not a sign of some moral failing. I'm continually surprised when people assume it is. Indeed, when Chesterton had a pending cause for canonization, there were some who noted that he was overweight.
Seriously? That's why he shouldn't be canonized?
Coffee, it does a mind good
Some recent reports hold that drinking coffee significantly reduces the risks of dementia later in life, by which they presumably mean drinking a caffeinated beverage. The headlines were on coffee, however. That's good news for me, as I drink a full post of coffee before I go to work.
I've witnessed dementia up close and personal as my mother acquired it. I'll be frank, it worries me, but then you have to play the cards you are dealt. It doesn't occur on my father's side of the family at all. Having said that, for the most part, most of the men in my family haven't tended to live much past. . . my current age. Once again, you play the cards you are dealt.
Having said that, it's probably the case that not too much can be drawn from the latter. My father acquired a persistent internal infection that we don't really know the origin of, but which was probably related to his gal bladder and some ineffective early medical treatment (he knew what he had, but his physician didn't seem to really grasp what was going on completely). He inherited late in life gall bladder problems, by all appearances, from his mother, who also had them, and died from them. However, they both had a bit of a fondness for certain foods that didn't help that, and I don't really have the same sort of sweet tooth they did. My father's father died in his late 40s, but he had high blood pressure, which I don't. My father's brother is in his late 80s and doing great, so hopefully. . .
Anyhow, I drink a lot of coffee and I'm glad for the news.
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