Quotes About Lactase

Thirteen thousand nucleotides upstream of the beginning of the lactase gene is a region that controls its activity, and a mutation in that distant control center accounts for the vast majority of milk drinkers.

Except if you're of European descent. Your lactase continues to work throughout your life. This unusual phenomenon is called lactase persistence, and although a splash of milk in tea is the English way, and even a mug of hot chocolate might seem very normal to us, we are the weird ones.

Geneticists have confirmed that milk-drinking adults are the exception to the norm, identifying a deviant gene on the second chromo-some that causes lactase persistence. (The gene is SNP C/T13910, if you care.)