We have all grown up watching advertisements of chocolate powders that, when consumed with milk, promise to make us ‘taller, stronger and sharper’. We gulped these promises down happily as kids, and only after maturing did we realise that milk itself is enough to boost our health.
Now, a new study has found that milk consumption has had a much bigger impact on not just our health, but also physiology — it has literally made human beings bigger!
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This study, led by a western biological anthropology professor named Jay Stock, suggests milk consumption in some parts of the world between 7,000 and 2,000 years ago led to an increase in human body mass and stature.
It’s a well-established fact that the human body size declined as humans started transitioning from hunting-gathering to agriculture. Even after this switch, however, a significant regional variation has been apparent.
Keeping this in mind, the research team began by creating a large comparative data set, based mainly on European samples owing to the historically high frequency of archaeological exploration on the continent. This allowed them to compare the body mass and stature of 3,507 skeletons from 366 different archaeological sites, ranging across 25,000 years.
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Upon examining the body variation over time and geographic location, the size increase became particularly evident in regions like central and northern Europe. At one point in history, the humans that had settled in these parts of the world had to rely more on eating dairy products, after the crops brought to them by migrating farmers from Asia and Africa failed to thrive in their region.
The end result was a dietary shift from low-proportion lactose sugar foods like cheese and yoghurt, to the direct consumption of lactose-heavy food such as raw milk.
This development caused these population groups to evolve and possess more enzyme-producing genes that facilitate milk digestion in adulthood — a process called lactase persistence.
Interestingly, this process of evolution is also why lactose tolerance is more prevalent in northern European populations as compared to their southern counterparts.
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“What we can see from these results is that there are variable outcomes of the adoption of agriculture in different parts of the world that led to different impacts on our health and our biology. Global variations in body size are partly reflective of these impacts,” said lead author Jay Stock.
The study findings are published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and can be accessed here.
NOTE – This article was originally published in weather and can be viewed here
Tags: #agriculture, #bodysize, #boosting, #farmers, #food, #getgreengetgrowing, #gngagritech, #greenstories, #health, #humans, #kids, #milk, #milkchocolate
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