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A friend pointed to this article in The Economist, China’s dairy industry, which chronicles the recent problem of oversupply. Apparently, due to a recent fad amongst the urban middle class to drink milk & milk products many Chinese farmers began to buy cows to produce milk. The problem is that supply quickly outstripped the demand, which you can see is leveling off.
Does this surprise? It shouldn’t. The Chinese are notoriously lactose intolerant. This doesn’t mean that they explode when drinking milk, rather, large quantities of lactose in the digestive systems of those without the functioning lactose enzyme are undigested, and, can result in the emergence of a set of intestinal flora which result in gas, irritable bowel syndrome and at the extreme, diarrhea. Though none of these are life threatening in a modern context, they are not the recipe which suggests possible repeat customers. I was especially struck by this statement: “Officials are not giving up. To the industry’s delight, the prime minister, Wen Jiabao, visited a dairy farm last year and said his dream was that all Chinese drink half a litre of milk a day, especially schoolchildren.” Now, one study reported that 20% of Japanese adults exhibited physiological response of lactose intolerance when about 7 ounces of milk were ingested. Half a liter is closer to 17 ounces (yes, I know that Japanese and Chinese are different, but not on this phenotype).
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1.5 billion people producing 1 cubic foot of methane a day. I wonder how much beachfront property in La Mesa CA will be going for?
Interesting. My wife is of Shanghainese descent and her family can consume milk products without problems. I guess the Mongols may have been swallowed up by the Chinese, but some of their genes remain.
1. Children can digest lactose.
2. Everybody can digest fermented milk products – yoghurt, etc.
3. Chinese love chocolate.
Razib, what makes you think you know better Chinese tastes than Prime Minister Wen Jibao?
Razib, what makes you think you know better Chinese tastes than Prime Minister Wen Jibao?
did you see the graph to the left of the comment which suggests that the chinese really don’t like milk that much??? you sound like a communist, “we know what you really like….” perhaps we should go back to 5 year plans in milk? (east asian children exhibit lactose intolerance in a rolling manner, a significant number exhibit response by the age of 10(.
I was thinking (hoping?) j’s comment was satire, but one never knows these days. Hang around political blogs with bad things to say about the Chinese government, and it’ll quickly become obvious that the PRC has a special subdepartment somewhere consisting of a bunch of English-proficient propagandists whose job it is to spend their day scouring the internets and leaving up-is-down reponses to the comments of any PRC-critical posts. It gets kinda hilarious.
BTW, hilarious post title.
I believe that although lactose tolerance has a genetic component, diet also has an influence. I suspect that kids (e.g., Asian kids) who continue to drink milk while growing up are more likely to retain their lactose tolerance than those that don’t. Milk, cheese, yogurt, etc. are largely absent from the traditional Asian diet after infancy, and I suspect this contributes a lot to adult lactose intolerance. I think that adult lactose tolerance is fairly common among Asians who grew up in the U.S.
steve,
this is a complicated issue. we know that east asian adults don’t have lactase persistence. but, they may develop gut “flora” which does the trick. but, this gut flora is the source of “intolerance”, so it all depends on the nature of the bacterial response. i can imagine for example that gut flora in a society which doesn’t have lactase persistence but ingests a lot of lactose containing products would spread from person to person (don’t ask how 😉 that allowed for better response to consuming these products. by this, i mean that societies without lactase persistence and little mass milk consumption will have the worst immediate responses because no gut flora exists. over time gut flora might emerge that allow the population to handle lactose products and extract digestive value.
Razib,
Thanks for clarifying. BTW, I shoud have written “E. Asian” instead of “Asian” in my comment 🙂
It does seem to me that a lot of Americans of E. Asian descent (people I know) have no trouble drinking milk in reasonable quantities — in fact I only know a few people who have severe intolerance, and some of those are caucasians. It might be the gut flora doing the trick, though!
Well, it’s actually hard to tell what the graph is showing, since the two scales are not related and I can’t access the original article. Primary producers spotting a market and a chance to make a buck, over-producing and supply outstripping demand would not be unknown in China, though. Probably not unknown in the USA either, and I seem to recall something about over-production of vin ordinaire in Europe, not to mention numerous other commodities. Sound familiar?
Governments encouraging kids to drink milk sounds fairly familiar too. I know numerous small Chinese children who can drink gallons of the stuff without exploding. And yes, it does seem to make them grow taller than their parents. I suspect, but don’t know, that you could probably plot a north-south cline in lactose intolerance in adults in China. I seem to recall something similar in the Indian sub-continent. And Europe.
j’s site suggests he is an Israeli water engineer – the idea that he is a propaganda cell for the Chinese government is probably something he finds as amusing as I do.
I do have to take issue with j on one thing though – not all of the world’s 1.3 billion Chinese love chocolate. I know some who don’t. But a hell of a lot of them do, along with Ben & Jerry’s icecream, which they seem to be able to consume without farting any more copiously than the average group of obese over-consuming Americans – possibly even somewhat less.
I accept Razib’s observation that the Chinese demand for milk and milk products seems rather weak, which certainly has genetic basis, but it is going too far to propose that I am in pay of the Chinese government to defend it on Gene Expression. I am not. I am not even Chinese, and now it appears that their genetic distance from us is greater than thought before (they appear to carry genes from a non-modern African hominid – Razib surely will be now motivated to explain how I am wrong – please do it!). Razib is right in a way – I do have a positive attitude toward the Chinese regime – China is a very poor country and they are working very hard to improve themselves. The Chinese government is promoting milk, as many other governments do. Even the American government has nutritional advise to give to the population, and the advice they had been giving (the food pyramid) was wrong. The French have gastronomy classes in elementary school, the Government wants them eat healthy and French food. Therefore, it seems to me legitimate and normative that the Chinese Prime Minister promotes milk for schoolchildren. Is he wrong in pushing a Western food that is not appropriate for his people? Chinese will never consume milk like say the Dutch or Danes, but you have to agree with me that the almost zero consumption a few years ago was not good and there is a lot to go and the Chinese Government, on this point, has excellent intentions and may even be right.
j – Well, genetic and cultural, at least some of both and always difficult for me to tell how much of each.
Maybe the Dutch and Danes have overdone it though – the Dutch are growing too big and the Danes are reportedly getting dumber. Perhaps moderation is the key. I’m joking about dairy food making the Danes dumber of course, but they are not small either. With the Dutch, I am told that excessive height is becoming a problem for them – spinal problems etc. I guess that is what happens when you combine a high dairy intake with the highest lactose tolerance in the world, I don’t know.
But nutrition is only one factor, they cannot exceed their genetic potential, or so I understand.
No, I don’t see anything wrong with a government trying to give the citizenry good advice about nutrition, as long as it is good advice and not just something inappropriate aimed at propping up the dairy industry. The question is, how can you tell when they are acting in the best interests of the whole population? I think there is something of a point – if all Chinese adults drank as much milk as Mr Wen suggests, a lot of them would get very sick.
But the idea that China is a giant police state where everyone does what the central government tells them is pretty funny – in reality, it’s much more chaotic than that. My worry is that corruption is chronic at all levels of government and getting worse. That’s not to say that corruption is not alive and well in Western democracies, it certainly is. Telling when any government has the best of intentions is not easy, it seems to me, but at least Western democracies leak like sieves.
Being apolitical (or so I claim) my problem is I see all governments doing this kind of stuff. Maybe I am political after all – a raving anarchist. But I’m getting too far from the topic.
I bookmarked your Blog by the way – the investment stuff is beyond me, but as a fellow engineer I am interested in the engineering.
Thank you, John. Governments certainly should avoid telling people what to eat, and that includes Mr Wen.