Speaking of milk,
It's funny these days the milk they sell is so homogenized and treated down to nanoparticle level really, that it has become problematic. They basically strip it down so much it's just white water with nothing in it but a little calcium, and then they put _back_ a certain amount of vitamins and fat, according to brand. But then any milk purchased anywhere is 100% the same with zero taste and nutrient etc. differences.
I, like most Finns, have always drank lots of milk. In my teens I'd drink even close to a gallon a day of regular, fatty milk. Our family of four today consumes a gallon a day even now.
I never had issues when younger, drinking fresh milk straight from the farm or bought from the store...but in the 90's I lived in the U.S. for a while (drank milk there too) but when I got back from there, I could no longer drink Finnish milk at all without having problems. Something was different about milk over there, and I lost the ability to process the milk/lactose here after a while.
These days, I only drink lactose-free milk and/or consume low-lactose or lactose-free milk products only. Just one ice-cream of regular messes up my stomach now.
For that reason, for several years, I didn't drink any milk at all almost, because the only lactose-free milk they sold was this sweet-tasting super-homogenized and pasteurized stuff that keeps for months (in unopened containers) even in warm places...yecch. Good for coffee and baking at best, not drinkable.
But then they came up with this new, entirely lactose-free milk type that still tastes completely like normal milk, and I drink it again quite a lot.
I think it may be partially natural - you know how animals drink mother's milk when they're young, but when they get weaned, the bacteria in their intestines required to chop up lactose dies of starvation, and when they're adults, they no longer can drink milk in larger quantities at all or they get the runs. That's the reason you should not give (normal) milk to hedgehogs etc. or even cats, some wild animals may get bad enough runs from it they may even die. Lactose-free milk is safe to give to animals too. If a human keeps drinking milk all his life, the same bacteria keeps on thriving, and he'll be able to consume milk on and on.
The whole drinking of milk is quite a recent development in human evolution; only some thousands of years ago have people started drinking milk for sustenance. Cheeses etc. products that naturally have next to no lactose are much older. But especially in the north, being able to drink milk was an important key to being able to survive the long winters as it provided people with much needed proteins and nutrition. As a result Nordic countries still drink the most milk in the world, and if you go down to, say, Germany, basically nobody drinks any milk at all except maybe kids. But to have milk at dinner, unheard of in continental Europe. It's just wine or water or maybe beer or juice, always. Never milk.
But also in the Nordic countries a LOT of people are lactose-intolerant, and in many cases it only appears later in life that one cannot any longer consume milk. I think this also coincides often with spending time abroad, after which you suddenly cannot process your local milk at all.
I have discussed this a lot with doctors and scientists, and it seems nobody has really much looked into it in any significant detail...some even feel the milk industry is such a large portion of the food industry, they might even not want to study anything like that, potentially dangerous to their business, but instead can make a bundle of money with like 20% of the population having to buy lactose-free milk and products that cost twice the normal milk does.
I dunno what milk costs over there, but a gallon of lactose-free here costs like $10 bucks almost. Counting in yogurts and all, we spend something like $200 a month for milk and milk products alone in my family. It'd be much cheaper to drink beer or probably even cheap dinner wines :-)
Dee
"When life's a biatch, be a horny dog"
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