This site is to serve as my note-book and to effectively communicate with my students and collaborators. Every now and then, a blog may be of interest to other researchers or teachers. Views in this blog are my own. All rights of research results and findings on this blog are reserved. See also http://youtube.com/c/hongqin @hongqin
Monday, April 1, 2013
Is milk really good for our health? An evolutionary arugment on the opposite.
Lactose persistence is one the well document example of selective sweep in human evolution. People who have the mutation to digest milk as adult tend to have more offspring, and lead to population expansion. If we believe this scenario, then it would suggest that milk-consumption should lead to health problem in late life. In other words, early advantage should be paid by health cost later, a typical trade-off phenomenon during evolution.
To elaborate this even further, this is similar to steroid usage in some way. Steroid usage will boost performance in young adult, but this performance advantage will be paid in late life.
This is of course is just a logical reasoning from my perspective or speculation in many other's view.
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