Somalia Lactose tolerance

How is Ethiopia more lactose tolerant than Somalia when Somalis were mainly pastoral nomads all their lives?

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I've read the limited literature on Somali LP. It's around 24%. The difference was that although they recognized Somalis that barely 1/4 had the specific alleles for consuming milk, the actual milk consumption without adverse problems was 3/4 - around 71% (drank a cup of milk a day). They concluded that there are either genes not recognized that regulate consumption other than the specific ones screened yet, as the research is very unproductive on a global stage, or there are other digestive gut functions that check the imbalance where it can somehow break down the lactose.

Lactase persistence allele frequency does not align with the digestion of milk among us.

The same was said for Nilotics, who have 0% checked for the genes while all of them consumed milk.

The Nilotic populations of current-day South Sudan are dairy-consuming pastoralists, which have been shown to be lactase persistent in low frequencies (Bayoumi et al. 1981, 1982; Tishkoff et al. 2007), but no alleles associated with LP have this far been found (Tishkoff et al. 2007; Hassan et al. 2016). (Hollfelder et al. 2021)

To keep it short, the research is very Eurasian-centric. The statistic you showed is not even based on anything real. I have read two studies that showed it was around the 1/4 range for the specific known alleles that signify LP for Somali. They could not even get that correct. It is misleading since the milk consumers among Somalis are more like 71% of those that drink milk every day based on the research done.

Here is an older post I made about the matter:

 
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