eli5: Why is milk so important to the standard nutritional diet

Question

I heard 2/3 of the world is lactose intolerant, is this new? Or is there another reason

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Answer 1

1. Nutritional guidelines like the food pyramid don’t explicitly say that “milk” is important, but “dairy”. Some dairy products are safe to eat for lactose-intolerant people.
2. Those guidelines were drawn up by people in countries where lactose tolerance is more widespread than in the rest of the world, and so dairy products, including milk, are part of most people’s diets. Had they looked to the diets of other countries they might have realized that there are also healthy diets that don’t include dairy products.