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Old 16-September-2007, 11:26 PM
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Delvo View Post
This is not accurate. Lactose tolerance is much more common in human lineages with a long history of dairy animal use, such as white people (although not exclusively them) but that has nothing to do with vitamin D, sunlight, or even skin color. Human skin produces vitamin D upon exposure to sunlight, and lighter skin is better at it, but that has nothing to do with milk consumption. (You might be thinking of the label on some milk containers, "vitamin D milk", but what that means is that vitamin D has been added to it as a dietary supplement... an ironic choice of food to put it in, because the people who need such supplements the most are also the least likely to consume milk, but that's what's being done. Natural milk is not a significant source of vitamin D.)
There was a recent study that claimed that the appearance of lighter skin of Europeans might have been related to the domestication of cattle. I was misleading, I didn't mean that lactose tolerance was necessarily related in any way. It was just another example of an adaptive process.

Right, dietary products don't themselves include much vitamin D but they do have the chemical compound necessary for skin to produce it.
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