Milk can provide many of the calories children need
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Young children who retain the ability to digest milk benefit from a large increase in available calories, which may explain why mutations that allow this spread rapidly in some human populations several thousand years ago.
Those extra calories would dramatically increase children’s chances of surviving infections, as undernourished children are more likely to die if they become seriously ill, says Alexandre Fabre, a pediatrician at Timone Infant Hospital in Marseille, France, who led the study.
The milk is…