Lactose free yogurt?

Factual Questions
1

Just saw a big advertising poster with a picture of a smiling (female) child and the message “Now I can eat my yogurt”. Advertising “lactose free” yogurt.

WTF?

When I was young, dad made yogurt by allowing a culture to convert the lactose so something else. Around here, Greeks ate yogurt because drinking more than a small quantity of milk made them gassy and gave them stomach discomfort.

Is non-lactose free yogurt a thing? Was it ever a thing? Do commercial companies add lactose to their yogurt? Is this the difference between “Greek Yogurt” and non-greek “Yogurt”

2

The process of making yoghurt doesn’t necessarily convert all of the lactose - so people who are very sensitively intolerant to lactose may still be affected.

‘Lactose free’ yoghurt is made by first treating the milk, usually with lactase enzyme to break down the lactose into simpler sugars, then inoculating with the yoghurt culture and fermenting (the bacteria don’t care too much which kind of sugar they work on) - the result is a product that is yoghurt, but where any residual sugar is not lactose.

3

I’m pretty seriously lactose intolerant and I’ve never had trouble eating yogurt, so I share your skepticism.

What I would like to see is lactose free heavy cream for those recipes that call for it.

4

I am lactose intolerant and ordinary yogurt definitely triggers my symptoms. Yogurt is not ordinarily lactose-free.

5

To answer this bit: Greek yoghurt is strained through cheesecloth or similar - allowing some of the whey to drain and yielding a thicker, creamier product.
This may also incidentally reduce the lactose in the product, as lactose is water soluble and in general, the lactose travels with the liquid whey (so hard, pressed cheeses are apparently OK for a lot of ordinarily lactose intolerant folks).

6

You’re in the US. Some of the products sold as yoghurt there wouldn’t pass EU regulations, mainly for being pasteurized post-fermentation or for amounts of lactose which the EU considers insufficiently fermented.

7

I’m a lactose intolerant guy living in Finland and I can’t eat regular yoghurt here either. There’s plenty of lactose-free products in the local grocery stores though, been for years and years. Also yoghurt-like products made of oats and soy.

8

It is also possible to get completely dairy-free yoghurt

9

The symptoms of undigested lactose are produced in two different ways in the body.

Normally, the process of digestion removes water from foods and liquids. Lactose in the small intestine can interfere with this and in some cases actually draw water into the intestines. This contributes to watery diarrhea.

The large intestine can harbor many types of colonic bacteria. Some species themselves digest lactose. Others ferment lactose, producing gases.

Yogurt, like any other milk product, contains lactose. Unlike plain milk it also contains colonies of bacteria, the type that digest lactose.

So what happens when these two opposing forces hit the body? Almost anything.

For the vast majority of people, the number of live and active cultures in yogurt are sufficient to digest all the lactose naturally in the product, especially because yogurt is designed to be low-lactose in the first place. The tartness of yogurt is a sign that much of the lactose has been fermented to lactic acid.

But for years, American manufacturers moderated this tartness by adding back milk solids after fermentation. This extra lactose load was not balanced by extra bacteria. Instead of being “self-digesting” this yogurt led to symptoms. With the near takeover of the market by tarter Greek yogurt this may not be as big a problem today.

This all looks at yogurt in isolation. That’s not how the intestines see food. Estimates range from 12 to 48 hours for normal transit time of food from mouth to anus. All the other food you eat in that period matters to overall digestion. An extra lactose load in the small intestine may trigger symptoms even if that load would be taken care of if it were to hit the large intestine. It’s all in the balance of processes for a variety of food types and timing.

Moreover, this doesn’t even touch the reality that milk products can be digestive triggers for dozens of other ailments, syndromes, conditions, and diseases, all of which are independent of LI. LI is much better known than the rest and it’s easy to just assign symptoms to it, when really irritable bowel syndrome or something else unlikely to have been formally diagnosed is the true underlying source of problems.

Yeah, it’s complicated. You can try experimenting with different yogurts to see if they have different effects. Try the plainest possible variety with no flavorings. Try one made with lactose-free milk. Try a non-dairy “yogurt.” You should see very different responses if LI if really the trigger.

10

The above commentaries by various lactose intolerant folks show just how much variability there is in lactase deficiency. A surprising number of folks can tolerate a bit of lactose here and there; others are completely ruined by a trace of lactose in their food.

Even so, lactose intolerance is the default setting for the human race; 75% of the world population is intolerant to a large enough extent that they need to watch their consumption of dairy.

Here’s a nice map of worldwide lactose intolerance rates.

11

Is it possible to develop lactose intolerance if you weren’t born that way?

12

That’s actually what happens to nearly everyone - most people are born lactose tolerant (you need to be in order to drink your mother’s milk), and the ability to digest it turns off at some point in childhood, except for some people where it doesn’t turn off, and those people remain lactose tolerant into adulthood.

13

That’s in fact a very common way of developing lactose intolerance.

14

What I meant was, an adult who goes from lactose tolerant to intolerant, as an adult.

15

In my twenties I stopped consuming milk. Not cheese or ice cream, just milk. I developed lactose intolerance where even cream in my coffee produced significant digestive distress just an hour later. But note that there were milk products I could eat, and I saw an article that said that many sufferers of lactose intolerance could eat milk products if they were sweetened, like ice cream.

“Oh,” says I. “My innards obviously can digest some lactose without turning me into a fart machine. Maybe I can ease back into full lactose tolerance.” It took a year, starting with yogurt, but I got that gene expressing as if I were one.

YMMV

16

It’s not unusual to develop lactose intolerance if you stop eating any dairy products. That’s usually reversible however.

17

Yes, it was once called “adult-onset lactose intolerance” when that was thought to be a separate thing from the normal loss of tolerance after weaning. Nowadays it’s understood that time of loss is a continuum and can happen at any age.

It’s never the case that lactase production starts up again after having stopped, though. Not having dairy for a long time will change the flora in your colon, biasing it against the milk digesting variety and toward the milk-fermenting kind. The digesting bacteria can be regained - eating yogurt is in fact a good way to do so - thus reducing symptoms. But you were lactose tolerant the entire time.

Nor is there any medical basis for a statement that “many sufferers of lactose intolerance could eat milk products if they were sweetened.” Why some people can eat some milk products but not others is undetermined, mostly because almost nobody ever does formal challenge or elimination diet tests to really know.

18

So, all of the above :slight_smile:

I’ll add that when we made yogurt at home in the 70’s, it was very tart. And the whey separated out naturally. I doubt if there was very much lactose left in the yogurt at all.

(Since the characteristic of being lactose intolerant is that lactose is digested by your gut flora, instead of broken down by exposure to lactase, your actual reaction will be both dose-related and variable dependent on what your gut flora is like in any day/month/year.)