LACTOSE AND INTOLERANCE

Men are from Mars, Gas is from Venus

Milk. It does not do my body good.

Same goes for 50 million Americans, about 25% of the American population, who suffer from lactose intolerance.

When we lacto-haters drink milk or eat other dairy products, we suffer from symptoms which may include abdominal bloating, cramping, excessive intestinal gas, nausea, and explosive diarrhea, or what medical experts commonly refer to as an "ass attack."

But not all Americans suffer equally. Only 15% of white Americans are lactose intolerant.

Whereas,

• 70% of African Americans
• 75% of Jewish Americans
• 53% of Mexican Americans
• 74% of Native Americans
• and 90-100% of Asian American adults

are lactose intolerant. Arabs, Italians, and Greeks also have substantially reduced lactase activity. (Sources: here, here and here.)

What's the explanation?

The paranoid in me wonders whether milk is the latest plan in a genocidal conspiracy dating back to small pox-infested blankets and the Tuskegee Syphilis experiment.

But the explanation for the racial/ethnic disparity is rather innocuous: the longer a person's ancestors have been drinking milk, the more likely their bodies produce enough of the enzyme lactase.

So while bovines may be free of bigotry, the federal government, on the other hand, is udderly guilty of cultural bias.

Despite the decades-long presence of these undisputed statistics, the US Dept. of Agriculture's newly-released food pyramid scheme still recommends drinking three cups of milk a day. Indeed, the USDA requires every public school serve milk. Plus, millions of taxpayer dollars are used to promote and subsidize milk and other dairy products.

Why? The Department of Agriculture is basically Tom Green, shamelessly drinking from the teat of the dairy industry.

So the next time you see one of those "Got Milk?" ads, remember that those milk mustaches are about the same color as the population that can digest it without getting gassy.

Catch my drift?

--Junichi