At 09:27 2001-04-13 -0400, Todd wrote:

>The only other argument I know of is that we
>should avoid milk protein because our paleolithic ancestors had
>no access to it.  But I simply can't believe that.  Those lions
>that I watched clearly had access to milk protein, as they ripped
>open the calf's abdomen.  Human hunters had the same sort of
>access.

I do not think that neither lions nor our hunting/gathering ancestors
eat/ate only food that are/where 100% safe for them to eat.
The expression "foreign protein" has to go together with a context.
All proteins that are not ourselves are foreign inside the bloodstream
(I think), but as long they are in the digestive system they
are foreign if they are not "known" to the digestive system. An animal
also has a selection system (mainly smell) to determine what is edible
and what is not. Things unknown to this system could by mistake be
taken as edible (bread for example) by the selecting system. There
is no guarantee that an animal eats only what it is "designed" to eat.
Then there is the question of availability and amount. The milk in a
calves stomach can never be anything but a small part of a carnivores
food, unless there is one that specializes on this and throws away the
rest. I think that generally for an animal it could be a good idea to
also eat small quantities of something that could be unhealthy in larger
amounts, rather than avoiding it completely. The problem with today's
human foods is that most people eat lots of things that originally
was available only in small amounts and perhaps also seasonally. Both
milk and grains belong to this group.

- Hans