Everyone loves a good poop story, don’t they? We certainly hope so, because our good friend Katie shares a fantastic one to kick off our episode on lactose intolerance. In this episode, we explore what lactose is and the symptoms that lactose non-digesters experience when they eat some sneaky cheese or ice cream. Then we explain that this episode is actually flipped – turns out that not being able to digest lactose is the normal state, and those of us who can are actually the mutants! We trace the origins of this mutant allele and how the persistence of pastoralism spread milk drinking far and wide. Where do we stand with lactose intolerance today? Tune in for that answer and for an abundance of milk facts to arm yourself with for the next pub trivia night.
| History | Biology |
| Cochran, Gregory, and Henry Harpending. The 10,000 year explosion: How civilization accelerated human evolution. Basic Books, 2009. | Swagerty Jr, Daniel L., Anne Walling, and Robert M. Klein. “Lactose intolerance.” American family physician 65.9 (2002): 1845. |
| Kurlansky, Mark. Milk!: A 10,000-year Food Fracas. Bloomsbury Publishing USA, 2018. | Ingram, Catherine JE, et al. “Lactose digestion and the evolutionary genetics of lactase persistence.” Human genetics 124.6 (2009): 579-591. |
| Gerbault, Pascale, et al. “Evolution of lactase persistence: an example of human niche construction.” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 366.1566 (2011): 863-877. | Szilagyi, Andrew, and Norma Ishayek. “Lactose intolerance, dairy avoidance, and treatment options.” Nutrients 10.12 (2018): 1994. |
| Holden, Clare, and Ruth Mace. “Phylogenetic analysis of the evolution of lactose digestion in adults.” Human biology (2009): 597-619. | Corgneau, M., et al. “Recent advances on lactose intolerance: Tolerance thresholds and currently available answers.” Critical reviews in food science and nutrition 57.15 (2017): 3344-3356. |
| Itan, Yuval, et al. “The origins of lactase persistence in Europe.” PLoS computational biology 5.8 (2009). | Storhaug, Christian Løvold, Svein Kjetil Fosse, and Lars T. Fadnes. “Country, regional, and global estimates for lactose malabsorption in adults: a systematic review and meta-analysis.” The Lancet Gastroenterology & Hepatology 2.10 (2017): 738-746. |
| McCracken, Robert D. “Lactase Deficiency: An Example of Dietary Evolution.” Current Anthropology, vol. 12, no. 4/5, 1971, pp. 479–517. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/2740932. | https://www.statista.com/statistics/272003/global-annual-consumption-of-milk-by-region/ |
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