Adaptations to certain foods? Good or Bad?

[AnopsStudier]

It is said that 95-100 percent of Native and Asian Americans are Lactose intolerant.  While only 2-15 percent of European Americans are.  This is most likely due to the years and years of evolution and adaptations.

Now.. Are these adaptations good?   Are we becoming super humans?  So my thought process right now is...... 

Are these adaptations good or bad for Humans?  Are they making us more intelligent?

[eveheart]

It is said that 95-100 percent of Native and Asian Americans are Lactose intolerant.

Mother's milk contains plenty of lactose. How could the people you mentioned survive infancy if they had an intolerance to their mothers' milk?

Of course, lactase, the enzyme that digests lactose, dwindles away in the absence of milk, which I think explains why non-milk consuming peoples show lactose intolerance as adults.

BTW, structural changes in milk components due to pasteurization present another set of milk-digesting issues, and fermentation presents another digestion profile, but you didn't ask about that here.

[Iguana]

Genuine adaptation (genetic) and habituation (immune system having become tolerant) should be differentiated. It’s possible that some populations or/and individuals are partly adapted to animal milk.

Habituation means that the body has stopped all efforts to sort out and expel antigenic dangerous molecules as it became a hopeless task since they have been constantly coming in large amount. Thus the body has accepted to be gradually and slowly poisoned.

[TylerDurden]

Adapting, however minimally, to a toxin, does not make one a superhuman!  Certainly, dairy does not give us bigger brains as our average brain-size has  actually declined by  c.8% since the start of the Neolithic c,10,000 years ago when grains and raw dairy were introduced into the human diet.

[Projectile Vomit]

Geoff (TylerDurden) and Francois both point to the huge underlying issue in the 'adaptation' debate. There's a difference between tolerance and adaptation. A lineage of people can develop tolerance to a food, such as consuming the milk of other animals into adulthood, that allows them to use that food without keeling over or suffering acute distress. This doesn't mean that milk is 'good' for them, it just means their bodies have adjusted so that milk isn't overtly 'bad' for them, at least not over the short term.

I'm of the opinion that we should be eating foods that are good for us, that are healing, that are nourishing. We should certainly avoid foods that are bad for us, foods that cause inflammation, digestive distress, or other problems. I also think that we should avoid foods we can merely tolerate if we can. Relying heavily on foods we can merely tolerate doesn't sound, to me, like a very wise strategy to live long and prosper.