I get cramps, bloating, and “rear-end unpleasantness”, fairly regularly. I used to think it was just an acquired irritable bowel symdrome. I’m 56, and haven’t had the healthiest of lifestyles in my mispent past!
I followed the steps suggested in the video and went to my GP with an informed question and set of proposals, to which she agreed.
Within a week we had worked out that I did indeed have an intolerance to lactose, and didn’t have IBS at all.
With some adjustments to my diet, I don’t get anything like the problems I had before.
So I offer thisd in case anyone else, like me, was labouring under the impression that they had IBS, when it could be an intolerance to lactose. The symptoms are very similar.
I developed lactose intolerance about eight years ago (I’m 58 now) which I self-diagnosed after noticing the correlation between indulging my addiction to cheese and the subsequent intestinal problems. Fortunately, taking lactaid helps, so I can still use dairy products in moderation. I’ve also found that I don’t need to take lactaid with my morning yogurt.
Welcome to the SDMB, Chou4555! Since you’re not asking a question, General Questions is probably not the best forum for this particular post. I’ve reported it to the moderators so that they can move it to where it will be most appropriate.
To turn this thread into a question for “General Questions”:
I’ve heard the comment that IBS is a term for a collection of symptoms that no known cause can be found. Derisively, I’ve heard it means the doctor is saying “I’ve been stumped”.
Is IBS really a diagnosis of anything? Is it really just an undiagnosed set of symptoms that could be caused by lactose, gluten, an allergy or some other yet-to-be-determined disease?
If you have a doctor that is diagnosing IBS by “what’s left”, pull up your pants and run to a competent gastroenterologist, who knows enough to evaluate you by the Rome II criteria.
Yes, these are still an abundance of symptoms rather than a distinctive diagnostic test. That’s pretty much implied by the word Syndrome in the name.
However, the parsing of complaints into IBS with diarrhea and IBS with constipation allows for two general sets of immediate symptom relief. And there are a variety of longer-term remedies that are associated with the unusual way the bowels function in IBS cases. These are still very individual, so a good gastroenterologist who deals with this all the time is required.
IBS with diarrhea can obviously be confused with lactose intolerance, especially since milk can be an IBS trigger. If you’re having milk at almost every meal, easy to do in western cultures, then it might be hard to tell them apart. Here’s the tricky part. LI is common. IBS is common. Many people therefore are likely to have both LI and IBS, which means that treating only one doesn’t cure the symptoms. I know. I’m one of them.
The video the OP linked to is generally an okay intro. (Lactofree, a UK brand, has a good website too.) I’m bothered by two items. First, LI produces gastrointestinal symptoms. The other symptoms he mentioned would be far more likely to come from a milk protein allergy. Since you can have both LI and an allergy, you might see both sets of symptoms but you shouldn’t with LI alone. Second, in the US, stool testing is only done on babies too young for a breath test. Babies are prone to temporarily losing their ability to digest lactose because of intestinal ailments. This goes away after a few weeks when the intestines heal, but the interim can be miserable for all concerned.
I have had very good luck with probiotics, although as I understand it, there are scant studies on their effectiveness. None-the-less, they are that expensive (well, they can be…) and won’t hurt you, so they might be worth trying.
Keep in mind, though, in some cases it might not be either so people need to examine their entire diets, not just dairy. Last month I had those symptoms for a couple of weeks, and they wouldn’t go away, even when I stopped eating dairy without taking lactate first (I intermittently suffer lactose intolerance symptoms, usually worst in the summer). This time, though, I didn’t feel better, even on a couple of days when I didn’t have any dairy at all.
So I thought and I thought, and I came up with the common food/drink that I’d had each day with the runs and other digestive ills: “plus” versions of Cranberry and Cranberry/Raspberry juices of a brand I hadn’t tried before. I needed to test the theory, though, so I had two big glasses of the latter, since that was the one I still had left. Oh boy, was I right.
Turns out that as part of the Plus being touted both contain big doses of ginkgo biloba, and that’sknown to cause nausea, and cramps, and diarhea.
To the OP: I had a similar set of problems a few years ago that seemed to defy diagnosis. I went on a long hunting trip with my Dad and Son that fall, and we all got our wires crossed on food packing. As a result we ended up spending over a week in the woods without milk or cheese. All my ailments improved dramatically, and I’m now on a different diet.
My significant (more than moderate, less than severe) lactose intolerance has been hugely helped by probiotics, specifically the Enzymatic Therapy pearl ones. Buy them on Amazon - they’re much cheaper than in any store.
Small but hugely important nitpick: you take lactase, not lactate. Lactase is the enzyme that digests lactose. Like most common enzymes its ending is -ase.