Assuming the person that drinks the milk is lactose intolerant?
So I drank a glass of milk this morning at breakfast (and had some milk on my cereal), and I’ve been farting ever since. I think I’ve broken the law of conservation of mass, I have to have farted a half a pound (or however much a glass of milk, and cereal milk weighs) over the whole day, and I’m still farting. It’s not funny anymore, any milk I’ve drank today has to have left my body no matter what form it decided to take (be it in gaseous form, diarrhea, burp form, or liquid form), so why am I still farting.
Considering the amount of time I’ve spent in the bathroom, there cannot be any milk or milk byproducts in my system, so why am I still farting? What mechanism is causing the gas? Suppose a typical person drank 100ml’s of milk how many ml’s of gas would be formed (ie what percentage of the actual milk goes to create gas?)?
What you’ve described is lactose intolerance. I’m not familar with the reasons why it develops.
I do know if you one of the products, like Lactaid®your symptoms will decrease or disappear.
I’m not sure on this, but I think milk with acidophilus added is an option too.
If your body doesn’t produce enough of the enzyme lactase (and the average human doesn’t), then the lactose in milk doesn’t get digested, and passes intact into your large bowel, where it is leapt upon by bacteria which love that stuff! They go into a metabolic frenzy eating the lactose, and producing gas as a byproduct. Which you get to dispel at your leisure. And the digestion of a little bit of lactose can make a large volume of gas.
That’s the qualitative explanation. I’ll leave the quantitative details to the biochemists here.
The answer’s been covered. I just wanted to note that there’s an entire chapter devoted to this in Marvin Harris’ book Good to Eat (aka The Sacred Cow and the Abominable Pig) People with Chionese, American, and many parts of African ancestry are lactose-intolerant, and prefer not to eat milk dishes (among other reasons) because of the unfortunate results. I once invited a Chinese grad student over for dinner, and he insisted on no dairy dishes as a condition of coming over. I thought it was just a personal problem of his, until I read Harris’ book, and had it pointede out to me that there aren’t any dairy dishes in Chinese Cuisine. Harris also notes that South American recipients of powdered milk from various charitites often sent the stuff back. The charities thought them ungrateful, and that they were preparing the stuff wrong, or using contaminated water, but the cause was inherited lactose intolerance. Fascinating reading, even if you disagree with Harris;’ interpretations.
Everybody gets this wrong. The food you had for breakfast certainly hasn’t left your system by now. And you only empty your rectum, not your whole colon, when you go to the bathroom. Most of the bacterial mass stays behind. That’s why the prep to clean out the colon for a colonoscopy is so severe.
Liquids can move through the body quite quickly. Solids move much more slowly. The average I’ve seen is about ten hours for food to move through the system. And it can take much longer. When people are told to go off of dairy as a test, they are usually told to wait two or three days to be sure all of it has left the system.
And one other property of undigested lactose is that it pulls water into the intestines. So the water makes it move through the system faster and promotes the diarrhea.
Our resident doctor quite correctly mentioned the bacteria that live in the colon. The gases produced are carbon dioxide and hydrogen. The fermenting of undigested lactose is essentially the only reaction that creates hydrogen, which is why the hydrogen breath test is the usual test for lactose intolerance in the U.S. Some people also have a type of bacteria that creates methane. (All these gases are odorless, BTW. The foul-smelling gas of lactose intolerance appears to be due to the fatty acids that are the other breakdown product of the fermentation.)
How much gas is entirely dependent on the number and type of bacteria that you individually have. There are dozens of known species of lactose-fermenting bacteria. No estimation of amount is possible.
That is the most beautiful thought that I have ever read…We are recycling milk farts!!!
It’s innocently disturbing to read, yet I can’t look away. On the other hand, where in the hell does these bacteria get off by “making” us refart their farts? What makes them so special? My own farts want to make their appearance too!!! Damn greedy bacteria!!! It’s 6am here and I can’t tell if I’m genuinely concerned about these greedy bacteria setting up shop in my intestines or if it is the sleep deprivation finally taking its toll. I’m leaning towards the latter!!! LMAO!!