Monthly Archives: December 2012

Del.icio.us Links: November 19th – December 31st

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Let’s Call It Lactase Non-Persistence in 2013!

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Here at Chez Gique this topic comes up pretty often, because one of us can’t drink milk or eat soft cheese without experiencing Tummy Problems. The other one eats and drinks dairy products with impunity. It’s sometimes an issue when eating out or at family dinners, though.

Got milk? Ancient European farmers who made cheese thousands of years ago certainly had it. But at that time, they lacked a genetic mutation that would have allowed them to digest raw milk’s dominant sugar, lactose, after childhood.Today, however, 35 percent of the global population — mostly people with European ancestry — can digest lactose in adulthood without a hitch.So, how did we transition from milk-a-phobics to milk-a-holics? "The first and most correct answer is, we don’t know," says Mark Thomas, an evolutionary geneticist at University College London in the UK.Most babies can digest milk without getting an upset stomach thanks to an enzyme called lactase. Up until several thousand years ago, that enzyme turned off once a person grew into adulthood — meaning most adults were lactose intolerant or "lactase non-persistent" as scientists call it.But now that doesn’t happen for most people of Northern and Central European descent and in certain African and Middle Eastern populations. This development of lactose tolerance took only about 20,000 years – the evolutionary equivalent of a hot minute – but it would have required extremely strong selective pressure.

via An Evolutionary Whodunit: How Did Humans Develop Lactose Tolerance? : The Salt : NPR

Shopping Makes Me Cry, In Addition To Making Me Die A Little Inside

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According to online clothes retailer Marisota, fifteen percent have cried over being too fat, and ten from being too skinny. A large percentage of women often dwell on their own sizes while shopping and get upset when their “funny shape” direct quote prevents them from looking like Christina Hendricks in a pencil skirt.

via Shopping Makes Me Want to Die Inside | xoJane

I have a hate/hate/HATE relationship with shopping, clothes, and “fashion.” I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of times I’ve gone shopping with girlfriends; first of all, I don’t really have any local, close women friends since moving to Illinois outside of family. But even my close friends, who ironically are all in distant places, never went shopping with me, because I avoid shopping like the plague.

One of my guilty pleasures used to be watching “What Not To Wear,” because the 360-degree mirrored room absolutely horrified me. I used to wonder what it would be like to be subjected to that kind of “fashion emergency intervention,” and I imagine I’d probably have a shrieking, swearing meltdown on camera, refuse to consent to appear on the show, and refuse to speak to anyone involved in setting it up for the rest of my life. Yet secretly, I always enjoyed the episodes where someone with “potential” was freed from their self-limiting perceptions and transformed in a really organic and authentic way. I used to grumble, however, at how the only people with “potential” were always women with good bone structure, thick but manageable hair, and an hourglass shape.

I have none of these things – a bland, round and shapeless face, thin floppy hair, and a schlumpfy bottom-heavy pear shape that NOTHING, NOTHING, NOTHING flatters or improves, and I have thick legs and cankles, too. I just recently discovered that What Not To Wear returns January 3. I might secretly watch again… but if I do, I’d like to see more women with LITTLE to NO apparent potential – because that’s a more an interesting transformation.

Another thing – so often they pick women who’d recently lost weight. I’d like them to do more on women who’ve gained weight, or who’ve never been thin. I’d like them to do more on women who’ve never thought of themselves as pretty or attractive, or who’ve been told all their lives they’re ugly, or . From some of the more recent transformations on their website, maybe they’ve done that more since I last watched.

I’d like them to really take on a challenge – a plain, big-boned woman with irregular features, self-image issues, weird coloring, and absolutely no need for dressy clothes at all.

Not me, though. Some OTHER schlumph. I’d be much too angry and horrified to go on with it. I read once that there was at least one person who absolutely refused to participate; I’d definitely be inclined to refuse (with a side of screaming epithets) if it ever happened to me.