On Wed, 15 Jul 1998, Don Wiss wrote:

> Todd Moody wrote:
>
> >This is not an all-beef diet.  It is a beef and *dairy* diet.
> >Since dairy is rejected on the Neanderthin program because it
> >promotes heart disease (Loren Cordain has posted research on
> >Paleodiet indicating that dairy consumption is the best predictor
> >of CHD rates worldwide), we have a dilemma here.  Either milk,
> >which the Samburu make extensive use of, is not so bad, or the
> >Samburu represent a local adaptation.  If the latter, then their
> >experience with milk *and* beef cannot be generalized to the rest
> >of us.
>
> But their dairy was raw. All of ours is pasteurized. I don't see how you
> make generalizations from one to the other. What you need is a study of
> Americans raised solely on raw dairy and no pasteurized. It isn't going to
> happen.

I'm not making a generalization; I'm *rejecting* the
generalization against dairy, because the experience of the
Samburu may contradict it.  If it's true that *only* pasteurized
milk is harmful, then that fact is highly significant in the
context of the Neanderthin hypothesis, according to which milk in
any form is too recent an addition to the human diet to be safe.
Does the experience of the Samburu refute that hypothesis?  On
the face of it, yes.  But it is possible that we cannot
generalize on the basis of the Samburu experience, because they
may be an isolated population with a unique adaptation to milk.
But if that is true, then we cannot generalize from their
experience with beef either, because we don't know what other
unique adaptations they may have acquired.  This also gives us
reason to pause before generalizing from the experiences of other
isolated breeding and feeding populations, such as the Inuit.

In short, there is something highly questionable about adducing
the Samburu as evidence of the safety of beef but not using them
as evidence of the safety of (raw) milk.  Or again, we cite the
Okinawans as evidence of the benefits of pork but neglect to cite
them as evidence of the safety of rice.

Todd Moody
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