Why do some countries drink milk yet others don’t?

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YOUR DNA and the Digestion of Milk…

Why do some countries drink milk yet others don’t? Why can some people digest cow’s milk with no problem yet others can’t? Estimates are around only 30% of adults worldwide can digest lactose, the main sugar in milk. In this video, I am going to look at how the Indo-European migrations from the Steppe region of Ukraine and Russia may have helped spread the ability to digest milk across Eurasia and the world.

Now I know a lot of people love a glass of milk, but drinking milk isn’t uniform across the globe. This table shows the Per capita milk consumption from 2020 for each country around the world, and also includes dairy products made from milk, apart from butter for some reason. As we can see, pretty much all of Europe consumes a lot of milk, with Finland particularly high, as well as Britain and Ireland. Russia is also relatively high, as well as the likes of Kazakhstan. India and Pakistan consume less milk products but still reasonable amounts. Contrast this with parts of Asia and Africa which basically consume little to no milk.

Now this is a map of lactose intolerance around the world. As you can see, the inability to digest milk is extremely low in Europe, most of north America and the likes of Russia, yet extremely high in East Asia, parts of Africa and South America.

Even for countries who drink a lot of milk today however, this wasn’t always the case. Just to clarify the terms quicky, lactase persistence is the continued activity of the lactase enzyme in adulthood, allowing the digestion of lactose in milk. In most mammals, the activity of the enzyme is dramatically reduced after weaning.

Sources:

Allentoft, M., Sikora, M., Sjögren, KG. et al. Population genomics of Bronze Age Eurasia. Nature 522, 167–172 (2015). https://www.researchgate.net/publicat...

Milk digestion's 'more recent rise' https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-en...

On the Evolution of Lactase Persistence in Humans https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/10....

Mathieson I, et al. Genome-wide patterns of selection in 230 ancient Eurasians. Nature. 2015 Dec 24;528(7583):499-503. doi: 10.1038/nature16152. Epub 2015 Nov 23. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/arti...

Neolithic and Bronze Age migration to Ireland and establishment of the insular Atlantic genome, Lara M. Cassidy, Rui Martiniano, Eileen M. Murphy, December 28, 2015, 113 (2) 368-373, GENETICS https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073...

Lactose intolerance https://www.britannica.com/science/la...

Per capita milk consumption, 2020 https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/pe...

#history #milk #ancientcivilizations