Nature also knows we shouldn't be traveling past 18 MPH or so. What of it?

Nature hasn't yet made a huge number of people get stomach cramps and bowel issues because they are "high-speed intolerant."

About two-thirds of North American Jews, about three-quarters of African-Americans are lactose intolerant, and about nine-tenths of Asian-Americans are lactose-intolerant. It also increases with age; we're more likely to have problems with dairy products as adults than children.

Maybe my point was stupid. I was just thinking that no one I know has really ever gotten ill from regular milk. I guess I should pay more attention to the stats and FoodReference.com. I mean, I'm not being snarky there, maybe I don't know enough. My only thought was that citing "nature knows" as a reason not to drink milk seemed - as Harvey implied earlier - just anti-science, or needlessly alarmist.

as for eating food "meant" for a baby cow
our species does all KINDS of stuff don't no other species do - like COOK our food
just for starters

And it causes all kinds of problems.

mccoy

you think we should be eating our food raw - ALL of it?

yes there prolly some small groups/tribes of people left who just gather stuff and eat it straight and kill some animal and eat it right away without cooking it, but i would bet that different groupls of people have gone through evolution/natural selection to tolerate different kinds of foods cooked different ways and making everyone eat exactly the same thing AND uncooked/unaltered is not real too good an idea

it is like all the people who say stuff like - well look at the poor rural chinese women, they eat all this soy and rice and no beef/milk and they don't get no breast cancer so EVERY SINGLE WOMAN everywhere should eat exactly that diet and then they won't get no breast cancer (like poor rural chinese women don't have no OTHER medical problems and live in perfectly perfect health until they are 100) and i say - like, do i look chinese to you? why do you think that i should eat the exact same thing that a different ethnic group in a different part of the world eats and that i won't have no problems with THEIR diet?

you think we should be eating our food raw - ALL of it?

No, I'm simply saying that our lifestyle causes problems. Any lifestyle has advantages and disadvantages. There is no one right way to do things. Just because we do drink milk doesn't mean it is the right thing to do or the wrong thing to do. It is a personal choice that comes with advantages and disadvantages. Just like living in home on land that doesn't produce our food causes advantages and disadvantages. Running around pretending there are no disadvantages to drinking milk is about as useful as running around pretending there are only disadvantages to drinking milk.

DC traffic is horrible and gonna get worse by next year but it is still nice to live in an area that has so much going on. I might have to give up my car next year if the traffic is going to be as bad as they say it will be

Hey McCoy, sorry for the reachback but I was wondering what you were referring to here? (I live in the DC area.) Do you live or work near Belvoir, or anywhere near where the Metro extension is going, or are you talking about some predicted general traffic-pocalypse?

Nature hasn't yet made a huge number of people get stomach cramps and bowel issues because they are "high-speed intolerant."

Nature does, however, make certain of these "high-speed intolerant" people yell at me needlessly when I'm trying to drive. Damned annoying, that.

When I was out in the barn the other day taking care of the horse after a morning ride there was a story on NPR on how scientists believed one of the big leaps forward in mankind's evolution was the decision to cook food. Cooking cost us some nutrients but was a net benefit because of the cost savings in terms of time, breaking down amino acids in meat and some other items I do not recall.

I thought that was interesting.

I read a counterpoint to that in The Third Chimpanzee. Apparently the hunter-gatherer diet was MUCH healthier than the new agriculture-based diet. The bones of cavemen in southern Europe show that current residents still have yet to reach the average height of the latest pre-farming societies, and that even their teeth were much healthier. Agriculture was able to win out because it could support larger populations, provide insurance against lean periods and famines, and also freed up some able-bodied men to become professional warriors, inventors, etc.

There was an article in the Times recently about the caveman lifestyle fad - obviously there have been "caveman diet" books for a while, but now there are weirdos that eat nothing but nuts, berries and roasted meat, only eat large meals every other day or so and usually after extremely strenuous exercise.

I'm talking about all the jobs coming to the Belvoir area and how they have done nothing to address the traffic increase and any solution to it are years away.

The bones of cavemen in southern Europe show that current residents still have yet to reach the average height of the latest pre-farming societies, and that even their teeth were much healthier.

if this is true, (and I have my doubts that it is) it's likely because shorter, weaker cavemen probably died before achieving adulthood, not because their diet was so much better.

dewey

selection of the biggest, strongest, disease-free???
what a concept
- and with no growing/preserving food in any way, i would bet most people didn't even survive very long

i also heard that those self same cave-women breast fed their children for FIVE years and only had children 5 years apart because apparently either they had no sex for 5 years or unlike every other kind of woman, they were not able to get pregnant while breast-feeding

and you talk about drinking milk meant for a different animal is weird

there isn't no other mammal that nurses babies until the first set of teeth ready to fall out - they START weaning when the first set of teeth coming IN

and with no growing/preserving food in any way, i would bet most people didn't even survive very long

Well, people didn't survive for very long for a whole host of reasons with one of the reasons being starvation.

if this is true, (and I have my doubts that it is) it's likely because shorter, weaker cavemen probably died before achieving adulthood, not because their diet was so much better.

Mayhaps. I'm not sure.

- and with no growing/preserving food in any way, i would bet most people didn't even survive very long

Meat is pretty easy to preserve when you have fire and salt. And nuts are even easier.

if this is true, (and I have my doubts that it is) it's likely because shorter, weaker cavemen probably died before achieving adulthood, not because their diet was so much better.

A diet that is largely protein will help growth a lot.

Meat is pretty easy to preserve when you have fire and salt. And nuts are even easier.

Tell that to John Kruk.

Milk would be one of the last beverages of choice for me. I wonder if it's a Jewish thing. I never lived in a kosher home, but the idea of eating meat and drinking a glass of milk just seems like a bizarre combination, like eating meatballs and spaghetti and drinking orange juice.

In my experience it is a quasi-Jewish thing, yes. It's just not something we grew up doing, either. You had milk with breakfast or with a PB&J, but having it with a meat meal, even if you didn't keep kosher, just wasn't done.

I have to plead with my wife to get 2% instead of the skim.

Skim is not milk. It is an abomination.

rLr

i hate skim milk too

NASTY stuff

When one's Jewish forebears abandoned Judaism in the 30s, milk became a common beverage at all times. It's nice to have some milk while eating bacon and eggs on a Sunday morning.

CHICK: you can have rice milk or coconut milk or almond milk

Compared with the $2.59/gallon I normally pay for non-fat cow milk for at Safeway, almond milk is pretty expensive. (Around $3.29/half gallon when not on sale.) However, almond milk is very good. It's much creamier and tastier than non-fat cow milk. (I never buy whole milk, which is probably a better comparison, so I can't say almond milk tastes better than that.) Fortunately, I can usually find a good coupon (around $1 off, sometimes more) for a brand of almond milk (called Silk), so I do buy it now and then, just because it tastes so good.

P.S. I'm an Ashkenzi Jew and have no problems digesting cow milk. No one in my family, AFAIK, has a problem with milk. The only two friends I have known* who could not drink milk were both of black-African heritage: a roommate of mine who was Jamaican; and my former boss (a Hollywood producer/screenwriter), who is African-American (mostly). What was notable about those two guys was not just that they could not digest milk, but that they were also the most health-conscious, picky eaters I have ever known. Thurmond, my old roommate, was a vegan (back in the mid-1980s). He was in great shape and built like a truck. As it happens, he was also a great surfer and a better surf-story teller, where every 2 foot wave off the coast of Isla Vista, where we lived, became a 20-foot monster by the third or fourth telling ... And Norman, my old boss, is also in remarkably good physical condition. (He has like 4 black-belts in various martial arts.) So I have gotten the feeling from those two that people who eschew milk for health reasons might in general just be health conscious people and more fit than most from it.

*I have a lot of East-Asian friends. I don't recall any of them having problems with milk. But maybe I just never asked.

Complete tangential note on the cost of nuts ... I live in walnut country*. You can go on a two hour bike ride through the farms from Davis (CA) to Woodland to Winters to Lake Berryessa to Dixon to UC Davis and back to Davis and a majority of the acreage you will pass by will be planted in walnuts. Old fields which for decades grew tomatoes I am seeing transformed into walnut orchards every year. Many almond orchards have switched over to walnuts.

I asked a friend who is an agricultural economist why walnuts have become such a dominant crop in the last 20 years. (We have had walnuts around here for more than 100 years, but they went from 10 percent of the acreage to over 50 percent in the northern Solano County-southern Yolo County region.) He said there were a number of factors (including the loss of tomato processing plants, labor costs, water costs, etc.), but none more important than China.

He told me that 20 years ago, all of the walnuts grown around here were sold domestically. But now, almost all of California's walnut crop is exported to China. The Chinese not only love fresh walnuts, but they use them in many confections and breads.

The Chinese demand for walnuts has greatly increased the global market price for the crop; and that has driven up profits and encouraged farmers near my home to become walnut growers.

--------

*This area used to call itself, from the late 1800s to the late 1940s, the world's almond capital. (California's original Almond Growers Association was founded in Davis a decade before the university farm, then part of UC Berkeley, was established in 1907.) Almonds are still big in the Central Valley from Redding down to Merced -- note that the Modesto A-ball team in the California League is called The Nuts and its logo depicts an almond and a walnut -- however almost all the almond orchards within 30-40 miles of my home are now either walnut orchards or they are dedicated to row crops (tomatoes, sunflowers and alfalfa being the most common).

In case anyone who lives in the Sacramento area does not know this, tomatoes were not common around here until the state water projects made vast quantities of irrigation water available for that crop. As tomato farming grew and grew, the high cost of labor became a serious problem. That motivated the industry to try to develop a mechanical tomato harvester. In the late 1950s, ag engineers at UC Davis built the first models. By the early 1960s, all tomato harvesting was done mechanically and new varieties of tomatoes were developed to suit the needs of the machines. The result for farm workers in this area was very high unemployment.

and crappy tomatoes for us.

No, they aren't crappy ... for the purpose they serve. They are grown for canning. It is normally too hot in the summer* in the Sacramento region to grow good fresh tomatoes on a commercial scale. Fresh tomato varieties generally don't like afternoon highs over 92 degrees F. It's not uncommon to have a few heat waves here over 100 degrees F. So this area has always (on a large, commercial basis) grown cannery tomatoes--used for ketchup, tomato paste, tomato juice, cooked canned tomatoes and tomato sauce--which do fine in the heat.

*Supposedly due to El Nino, we have had an unusually cool weather year. Our winter was longer and later than normal. In the spring it never really warmed up. And save a couple of days over 95, we have mostly had daytime highs in the 80s (with very low humidity, which is normal, here). We get a breeze off of the Pacific (called the Delta Breeze); and so at 85 degrees it is extremely pleasant weather. Really, anything under 95 is a nice summer day here.


In the meantime, Russia is on fire and is recording high summer temps never before seen.

Really, anything under 95 is a nice summer day here.

If you're a reptile.

That Central Valley heat just kills me. I'm good for about 10 minutes out in it before I need to get indoors.

90-94 degrees where I live -- no humidity* and a cool ocean breeze -- is more comfortable and really better weather than 80 degrees is on the East Coast, the Midwest or the South, where the humidity makes any hot weather insufferable. Florida and Louisiana and Texas should be reserved for prisoners with that gawdawful heat they have.

On a warn summer day, it does not stay hot here, all day. A "hot summer day" will start out a crispy 55-60 degrees (with no humidity). It won't reach 80 degrees until noon. From maybe 3pm to 6pm, it will be over 90 degrees, but still not sweaty like elsewhere in the country.

Also, my town (and most around here) is an urban forest. The mature street trees create a full canopy of shade, where the temps are at least 10 degrees cooler. In the typical evening, the breeze will blow stronger and it will cool off to around 70-75.

For an evening AAA baseball game, it's just perfect weather. It's usually nicer at night here in the summer than it is at AT&T in SF, where it can get very cold in the evenings in July and August.

But the truth is we do suffer heat waves. We have not had one this year. And last summer also was mild. But some summers we will get a few of them, and some last as long as a week. A heat wave here is a stretch where the daytime highs are (say) 98 degrees or more for 3 or more consecutive days. The worst is when it does not cool down at night and the breeze fails to cool us off. I don't know anyone who likes a week of days where it's 100 or more every afternoon.

Compared with the miserable weather all summer in places where it is humid and bug-filled, I would take our summers over them. The normal summer day here is quite pleasant. And we have very mild winters with no freezes and no snow. Compared to most of the Bay Area, I would take the Bay Area's weather. They have other problems--weather is not one of them.

*But for the water from the Sierra Nevada, this would be a desert. Most years, there is no rain--not a drop--in 8 or 9 out of the 12 months. We typically will get a 3 inches or so from Thanksgiving to New Years and another 9 inches from New Years to early March. Otherwise, no rain. Every drop of water is from irrigation the rest of the year.

90-94 degrees where I live -- no humidity* and a cool ocean breeze -- is more comfortable and really better weather than 80 degrees is on the East Coast, the Midwest or the South, where the humidity makes any hot weather insufferable.

Absolutely. Without humidity the heat only gets to you if you're working/exercising pretty hard in the sun. Otherwise, you duck into the shade (or into some AC) for a moment and it's just fine. And the summer evenings are (with a few exceptions) the best thing about the non-coastal parts of California.

Of course, to me, a beer just doesn't taste right until its about 108, so I might not be the best guy to ask on this one.

As long as we're playing My-Micro-Climate-Can-Beat-Up-Your-Micro-Climate, where I live in Alameda is summertime paradise, (and at these prices it better be):

Most mornings are foggy but late mornings & afternoons are just crystalline perfect: sunny, blue skies, high 60's or low 70's. Treasure Island blocks the afternoon fog from the Golden Gate. Shorts & tshirt and jeans & oxford are equally comfortable. Autumn is more sunny & warmer, too warm for me frankly but lesser beings seem happy with 80 degrees so I take it in stride. Winter is rainy, probably a touch more than what Rich describes, but it typically doesn't bother me. When East Coasters ask about the weather, I just say it's like an East Coast October all year round, and it is.

Nature does, however, make certain of these "high-speed intolerant" people yell at me needlessly when I'm trying to drive. Damned annoying, that.

I remember those people, although I don't drive anymore (no need in Manhattan). I do wish for them to have stomach cramps and bowel problems.

Almond milk folks... how long does almond milk last? It's much more expensive than regular milk but if it lasts a long time, with the amount I use, it might be worthwhile.

Plus I'm a huge fan of sweet.