lactose intolerance - reversible either way?

Just after gluggling a milkshake I was wondering how fast one would become intolerant if one didn’t drink any more milk, or conversly how fast one could become tolerant if at all?

This is not an authoritative answer, but my wife is lactose intolerant so I have a layman’s knowledge of it.

Lactose intolerance is caused by the lack of enzymes that digest lactose. The undigested lactose moves farther down the digestive stream where it is then feasted on by bacteria that produce copius amounts of gas as a by-product of their own digestion. This gas causes a lot of discomfort.

Your description of developing or losing tolerance is reminiscent of allergy treatments or viral resistance. You don’t lose tolerance by not drinking milk, and you don’t gain it by drinking milk. It doesn’t work that way.

What I can’t say is if any environmental or other factors can cause the changes in body chemistry that start or stop this condition.

I had always assumed that as almost all babies tolerate lactose in their milk and that many soceities stop drinking any milk after weaning (and they tend to be those that have the worst lactose intolerance) that the ability to digest lactose was due to the enzymes not be made as there was no milk any more. Of course the other hypothesis is that the body is programmed to shut down enzyme synthesis after weaning no matter what. A quick google search was not terribly conclusive

found a good guide which suggests that it is indeed genetic and largely irreversible (although another site sugegsted some individuals can learn to tolerate lactose again). The lactose toleration of northern europeans probably arose due to their farming habits and genetic drift
http://www.pitt.edu/AFShome/s/u/super1/public/html/lecture/lec11981/index.htm

hey, that kinda sounds like me :slight_smile: my mother is lactose intolerant, as is my sister, and i was up until i was 12, give or take a year. One day I just got tired of not being able to eat cheese or chocolate so I began to eat and eat and then i didnt get sick anymore. I dont know whether this eating spree came as my body started to produce lactose or not, but 5 years later im still stuffin cheesy chocolate down my throat :smiley:

Purely anecdotal…

I drank huge amounts of milk (raw, from a dairy) when I was a kid. When I was in my teens, the dairy closed and I quit drinking milk because I couldn’t adjust to that nasty homogeneized, pasturized crap they sell in the stores. Used milk only rarely after that.

In my mid-twenties, I discovered cafe au lait and latte and started drinking lots of milk again (probably at least a quart a day). Sometime later, I started having lots of problems with my tummy.

Somewhere right around thirty, due to life circumstances, I went a couple weeks with no coffee, which meant no milk. When I got a chance to stop by the coffeeshop and have a latte, I almost immediately noticed that my indigestion was suddenly back. Aha! A while after that, I quit having coffee/milk except occasionally.

Over time, I continued to have increasing problems with indigestion and eventually ended up on medication for GERD. Originally I only had problems with straight milk, but none with processed dairy (ice cream, cheese, etc.), but my intolerence seemed to increase where even processed dairy products gave me problems. Oddly enough, I only occasionally had the infamous lactose-intolerance flatus.

A few years ago, I started drinking some milk again so I could have cereal (great Og, I’d missed cereal!). Tried LactAid but it was a pain, and ended up just using 2%, which didn’t seem to give me as much problem. I’m now back to consuming a goodly bit of milk (at least 1/2 qt per day), including whole milk, with no real problems. I’m still on GERD medication, though.

So my experience is that it can vary in an individual, in both directions.

Also anecdotal, but I was vegan for a few years in college, which made me (temporarily) lactose intolerant. A little cheese was ok, but lord help me if I drank some milk. When I stopped (which I actually had to do a couple of times for short periods before I gave it all up for good), it took a good month for my stomach to readjust. But I can now eat dairy and meat without any problems.

I can’t address the other part of the question exactly though, ie how long it takes to become intolerant. I know it took me at least about 6 months (since that was the time between going vegan and having to back off to vegetarian for the summer).

For what it’s worth. I am presently lactose intolerance. My childhood, teen and young adult years were filled with lots of dairy goodness. I drank milk with dinner, milk in my mochas, ice cream, cheese, anything. The start of this year I noticed feeling not so good by mid day (after my first 20oz mocha). There was a two week window from when I started feeling yucky and realized it was the milk. One day I stopped all dairy to see if milk was the source. Yup. Sure enough.

Today I can have very little milk products. Sometimes a small ice cream or a few pieces of pizza are ok. Other days one piece of pizza (without a lactaze type pill) with make me feel crappy. It’s hit and miss at the moment.

No one else in my family has this problem. My father drank 2 glasses of milk a day until the day he died. My mother has at least one glass a day.

I hope it stops. I miss dairy products. :frowning:

I am one of the few who was born lactose intolerant, so I never got in the habit of eating dairy. I have literally never gone out and bought a carton of milk. Despite rarely ingesting straight dairy except cheeses which have relatively little lactose, I’ve developed the ability to digest milk just fine (which is common among those born lactose intolerant…it usually only lasts through early childhood). I have no taste for drinking a straight cup of it and have never really done it, but cereal and the like gives me no problems. So it is certainly possible to develop the ability to digest milk in absense of milk itself.

True congenital lactose intolerance is so extremely rare that fewer than 100 cases have ever been reported worldwide.

Babies born without the ability to manufacture lactose can never do so at any time in their lives. They must stay off of all milk forever.

Milk protein allergy, on the other hand, is much more common in babies and does usually go away by the age of two or three. Many people mistake the two conditions, even though they have nothing whatsoever to do with one another, and I’m totally positive that you are among them even sven.

Thanks for the info. All my info comes from childhood memories, which are obviously pretty unreliable.