By the way ... Avoiding dairy CAN be dangerous

A TEENAGER at our house for the weekend told us her stepmother does not allow her to drink milk because ‘human beings were not designed to drink it’.

It’s true that homo sapiens evolved more than two million years ago with no access to milk apart from breast milk.

It was only late in our evolution, 10,000 years ago, that man stopped living as a hunter-gatherer and the farming revolution began, enabling us to domesticate animals such as sheep, chickens, and cows.

But by that token you could say that man was not designed to eat wheat, rice and potatoes either, as these can’t be digested in their raw form and only entered the diet when we learned how to cook. We do know that not everyone can digest milk — some people lack the enzyme necessary to break it down into its two constituent sugars, glucose and galactose.

It’s thought the ability to digest lactose only developed — by a spontaneous genetic mutation — during the agricultural era of the past few thousand years. But that doesn’t mean it’s not good for us. And the discussion over the dinner table reminded me of one of my patients who, aged 27 and working as a fitness trainer, fractured her leg while jogging with her obese middle-aged client.

The fracture occurred because, unknown to her, she had grown up with severe osteoporosis as a result of not having any dairy products since the age of seven — a decision made by her naturopathic mother in the illinformed hope of helping her childhood eczema. This lack of calcium while she was still growing meant she never reached what we call ‘peak bone mass’ during her teenage years, a critical period of development — a situation that cannot be remedied.

The moral of the story? If dairy products (our main source of calcium) are avoided — for whatever reason, rational or misguided — then other calcium sources must be eaten instead, such as sardines, pilchards, or tinned salmon with the bones.

A little ignorance goes a long way — and the consequence is inadvertently actually doing harm to your child.