8 ms·

Summary: East asians are partially adapted against alcohol because they invented it first and alcohol reduces fitness. No evidence presented but it sounds cute.

• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• caymanjim 5y ago
  I think it's the other way around with milk. Almost all mammals lose the ability to digest lactose in adulthood. Europeans slowly evolved to tolerate it, presumably because of widespread reliance on cows, sheep, and goats. It's a beneficial adaptation; milk is super-nutritious, and those animals convert indigestible grasses into digestible milk in environments where crops only grow for half the year.
  • sumedh 5y ago
    Milk is pretty big in India but I have read that majority of Indians are lactose intolerant. So its a bit weird that lactose intolerant population uses milk heavily in its diet.
    • edwcross 5y ago
      I can't speak for milk itself, but ghee (which is often used in India), for instance, is virtually lactose-free, so even lactose intolerant people can eat it. That also happens with cheese and other dairy products; so they are not entirely incompatible.
    • thaumasiotes 5y ago
      Milk is available and regularly purchased in every Chinese store. More than 90% of them are lactose intolerant. It's not entirely clear to me why they drink so much of it, but I believe they consider it health food. It probably comes from copying Europeans. (Do note that milk is quite nutritious even when you can't digest the lactose. The problem isn't that the milk isn't nutritious -- the problem is that the lactose will cause you various problems, most notably diarrhea.)
      • eloisius 5y ago
        I've wondered about this to. Milk seems more widely consumed here in Taiwan than in the US. Milk tea, milk/fruit smoothies, cream-filled pastries everywhere, cheese is a very popular fusion with local specialties like danbing. If Asian people are so lactose intolerant, is everyone secretly walking around battling diarrhea?
        • thaumasiotes 5y ago
          Cheese is not popular, as far as I'm aware, on the mainland. But even if it was, it contains almost no lactose. Milk is different. I know the Chinese consume milk, but I don't think any individual person consumes very much. Some anecdotes: - A coworker revealed to me once that he was buying milk to feed to his baby. The baby, of course, would be able to digest lactose in pretty much any quantity. - I shocked a tutor of mine once by having a carton of milk for lunch. She told me it was very important not to drink milk on an empty stomach, or else "it will be diarrhea!" She didn't quite know what to make of my response that that wouldn't happen to me because I'm white. - A friend of mine told me that her parents made her drink one glass of milk per day, which practice she still continues (into her 30s). This tends to imply that it's seen as a healthful practice. - Another friend of mine, younger, spoke of milk explicitly in terms of its healthfulness, and when I asked if she drank a lot of milk herself, responded "maybe not a lot, but at least every 2-3 days".
        • gilrain 5y ago
          > is everyone secretly walking around battling diarrhea? That's my secret. I'm always clenching.
        • sct202 5y ago
          I think people have different tolerances, my siblings and parents all eat some yogurt and milk with no symptoms unless they eat a lot. I on the other hand have a much lower tolerance and carry lactaid pills wherever I go.
          • thaumasiotes 5y ago
    • raducu 5y ago
      I am lactose intolerant just like my father and usually avoid milk, but traditionally my family did not avoid it. I can increase my tolerance to milk gradually, but I find no benefit in doing so, because I can drink up to 200 ml of milk without major issues, I can eat cookies, icecream and so on without major problems. The only time I had major problems was when I used milk protein powder, but I switched to whey protein at that time and learnt that I was lactose intolerant. My point is lactose intolerance doesn't have to be all or nothing.
  • michael1999 5y ago
    It’s so beneficial for pastoral populations, it arose several times in distant populations. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lactase_persistence https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lactase_persistence
• wisty 5y ago
  I think it's a bit different, as people adapted to milk which is usually been beneficial (if it's available).
  • raducu 5y ago
    I come from Eastern Europe from a mountain village where cattle/sheep raising used to be a big thing and I'm lactose intolerant but not completely intolerant, I can gradually increase my tolerance. People in my village didn't just drink a lot milk like town folks do today, they'd use mostly fermented milk, and a lot of cheese -- their favorite drink is wine.
• drewcoo 5y ago
  I would have summarized as "attempt to justify authoritarianism via pseudoscientific just so stories."
• Sophistifunk 5y ago
  They're "adapted against milk" because their ancestors left Africa, and milk-drinking developed either in European humans, or we got it from Neanderthals.
  • thaumasiotes 5y ago
    They're adapted against milk for the same reason everything else is: producing lactase has a cost, and it makes no sense to pay that cost when there is no lactose in your diet.
    • folli 5y ago
      I think the common theory is that lactase production is stopped during early adolescence in mammals as a sort of safeguard to not compete with younger siblings for milk (when you're old enough you can get other food, while your younger siblings depend on milk). Some human subgroups (e.g. Europeans) are different, as they mutated to produce lactase even in adulthood (an evolutionary advantage in farming societies).
• refurb 5y ago
  Your characterization of the theory as “cute” is spot on. There should be a name for this type of theory - puts a nice tidy bow on an observation but isn’t based on science and falls apart upon inspection. And in terms of lactose intolerance, I lived in Asia and milk is amazingly popular with young kids. And I’ve almost never heard of much lactose intolerance beyond what you’d hear in the west.
  • hackeraccount 5y ago
    I've heard that type of thing referred to as "just so" stories. Typically they sound like something that Rudyard Kipling would have written but with a warm cloak of Science wrapped around them.
• lgvln 5y ago
  You got it there other way around. It was Europeans who evolved for the consumption of milk (likely due to the environment/diet) while the rest of the world didn't, like other mammals. The production of lactase to digest lactose drops as adolescence approaches. I guess you could flip the hypothesis and suggest maybe East Asians didn't (have the time to) evolve to digest alcohol sufficiently and hence the Asian flush. /joke
• VoodooJuJu 5y ago
  No one invented alcohol. Drinking "alcohol" (wine, beer) in sub-drunken quantities carries no systemic risk, i.e. it doesn't reduce fitness by any meaningful amount (if you can even quantify "fitness"). This is evidenced by thousands of years of wine-drinking civilizations and cultures that still exist to this day. The cause for Asians "adapting against" alcohol is probably just randomness. A random mutation.
• bsder 5y ago
  > Summary: East asians are partially adapted against alcohol because they invented it first and alcohol reduces fitness. This seems super unlikely. It is at least as likely that the mutation which causes the "Asian flush" is protective against something else while losing the ability to consume whopping quantities of alcohol is simply a side effect.
  • nl 5y ago
    You are precisely right. It seems to have been protective against a disease found from mouldy rice: Mycotoxins, from toxin-producing fungi found in moldy rice, can be converted by the host ALDH enzymes from protoxin to toxin, and the effects of mycotoxins can be further potentiated by ethanol. If the incidence of hepatic disease found in many East Asians, especially JPN, is related to the consumption of mycotoxins, then individuals carrying the deficient ALDH22 variant with lowered alcohol consumption would be selectively favored.* https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1821113/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1821113/