Lactose Intolerance "shock to the system" cure?

In My Humble Opinion
1

Being lactose intolerant is a drag. My particular intolerance is not 100%. I can have all the hard cheeses I want, down to say Brie. No milk, ice cream, yogurt, sour cream, ricotta, cottage cheese, etc. The usual symptoms emerge if I do- bloating, gas, upset tummy. Most clearly NOT a real allergy.

Google gives me nothing but avoidance or Lactaid ® pills.

I’ve heard from more than one person that the way to lick this for some folks is to do a massive exposure to lactase enzyme. Basically endure a steady diet of the very things I react to. After a week or two, my intestinal flora will have readjusted and I will be cured.

Brilliance or bullshit? Anyone ever tried this?

Standard disclaimers, yes I should consult a doctor, no I am not seeking final medical advice on the Internet, MMMV, etc.

Cartooniverse

2

I am not an expert here, but the little I do know of how lactose is digested suggests to me that this is NOT the way to go.

Lactase (the enzyme that we use to digest lactose) is not produced by intestinal flora (or fauna, for that matter), but by the intestinal villi themselves. Any undigested lactose, in fact, *feeds *your intestinal bacteria, causing all those symptoms you mention when they burp out a bunch of gas after digesting the lactose for their own energy use. Eating more lactose which can’t be digested by you will just encourage those lactose eating, symptom producing bacteria to grow more.

In fact, there’s a condition in infants called lactose overload, caused by too much lowfat breastmilk going through the system at once, at it produces symptoms pretty much identical to lactose intolerance. http://www.breastfeeding.asn.au/bfinfo/lactose.html It doesn’t seem like mimicking this disorder is really a great idea.

Now, is it possible that this “shock treatment” could encourage the growth of the cells in your intestinal villi which produce lactase? Again, I don’t think so, because as far as I know, it’s a gene (two actually) which is either present or not, and it either switches on the enzyme production or not. It’s not that your small intestine is damaged and needs a “reset” or repair, it’s that you don’t carry the gene allowing for lactose digestion past childhood. You might as well try to change the color of your eyes.

Ultimately, I’d be wary of taking advice which A) sounds counter intuitive and B) cannot be corroborated even on the internet (really, EVERYTHING can be corroborated on the internet - how far out does this theory have to be not to have a single website screaming about it and willing to sell you something to aid your quest?) and C) is touted by someone who doesn’t know their gut bacteria from their intestinal villi.

Screams of “truthiness” to me. And I’m afraid screaming is what you’ll have in store if you try it.

3

Personal experience says that yeah, it does sort of work. I’m more tolerant than you are - yogurt’s fine. And I don’t like sour cream or cottage cheese enough to eat more than a miniscule amount.

But milk and ice cream are unpleasant. However, if I have cereal every morning for a couple of weeks, milk becomes less unpleasant until I have nearly no issues at all. Of course, that involves several weeks of unpleasantness - and you may not find that worth it.

Also, if I stop - and go back to a milk free existence (I only really like milk on cereal or in lattes. I can do without both), I start over from ground zero.

Apparently, there was a study about 10 years ago that had similar results.

4

There are two sources of the symptoms associated with lactose intolerance.

Undigested lactose changes the molality of the intestines, which means in English that instead of water being absorbed into the body from the intestines, water is actually drawn into the intestines. This naturally helps create diarrhea.

And undigested lactose can also be fermented by certain types of bacteria that naturally live in the colon. The fermenting creates gases and fatty acids. These produce the bloating, cramps, and flatulence that are associated with LI. Which sounds like what the OP suffers from.

Different people are affected by these pathways in different ways. There’s nothing you can do about molality except to remember to take lactase pills with dairy products.

You can change the composition of the intestinal flora, however, to a variety of “good” bacteria that will themselves digest lactose. This is an example of probiotics.

Yogurt with live and active cultures have exactly these good bacteria. You can, therefore, try to eat yogurt regularly to see if you can use the good to drive out the bad. Massive quantities are not called for or even desirable. (You are not exposing yourself to the lactase enzyme, but to the lactose itself.) Start with a cup of plain yogurt (as little extra sugar and junk in it as you can stand) a day.

You can also buy probiotic pills that claim to do the same thing. Major brands advertised to the LI community are Digestive Advantage and Lactagen. I’ve never tried either, so I can’t recommend one.

Although Lactagen especially likes to tout itself as a “cure,” this treatment will only work as long as nothing upsets the compositon of the bacteria in your colon. A dose of antibiotics will kill them all off, good and bad. Mild food poisoning can be a problem. Travel oftens upsets the balance by introducing new species in. Even drinking new sources of water can do it. Your insides are delicate.

Personally, I think lactase pills are fantastic. I never leave the house without some in my pocket. However, if you don’t want to have to remember them this is something that is proven to work for the majority of people with LI.

5

Hi. Thanks for the posts so far. Just so we are clear, I’m not jumping in with this blindly, I just wanted to know if anyone had done such a radical thing.

My mother and father are/were both lactose intolerant. I went from being zero intolerant to, over the space of perhaps 10-12 years, being utterly intolerant to the foods in my OP post.

Used to be that I could chew one Lactaid and have an ice cream cone or some fettucine alfredo. ( a fave food ). Then, an Extra strength. Then two.

The last time I tried this evil little experiement, I chewed three Extra strength Lactaid pills and ate an ice cream cone and was, shall we say discretely, flatulently miserable for almost a day. Upset tummy, etc. I also felt quite funky. Bad descriptive term… I felt off. I felt a bit unfocused. Not nice.

Would that I could use those little pills. But I cannot.

6

Um, I am also LI.
I can eat yogurt too like another poster mentioned but otherwise basically the same stuff as the OP. Talk about bad cramps and gas, sheesh.

Experience tells me that you will not be able reverse the symptoms by overexposing yourself to lactose. I did not know that I was LI (late onset, 20 ish) until several months after symptoms started. I distinctly remember trying to sit through “The Nutcracker” with my GF while my intestines continued to bloat. Having ingested dairy what-have-you for dinner gurgling and cramping continued for hours without a suitable release (suitable being relative to one’s environment and this was NOT the environment suitable for release, let me tell you - formal attire affair with new GF on my right and elderly couple to my left) until I would have bet that I was housing the fuckin Hindenburg in my gut.

Well during that time I was eating everything I always ate - Milk, ice-cream, cheese, yogurt…any and all dairy, without regard. This did not seem to have an effect on the strength or duration of episodes.

7

I’ve tried it. It doesn’t work, just makes you god-awfully miserable.

I have, however, had at least one seemingly-random period of drastically increased tolerance. In my late teens, unless I ate nothing but ice cream all day, I’d be pretty much fine. In the past year, things have been getting worse - a bit of melted mozzarella on my pasta is fine, but if I have any more than that without taking a Lactaid tablet first, things get pretty lousy. I’d give anything to figure out what caused that increase in tolerance when I was younger.

8

Huh…so since I suffer from the “molarity” version of LI (I rarely get gassy or bloated, but a big ice cream cone will have me on the can for a while the next day.) I can basically do nothing except take pills? Damn…it’s at the point where a glass of milk and three lactase pills will still cause problems. I’ve started buying lactose-free milk because I love eating cereal and it never tasted quite right with soy milk (though I do like drinking a big glass of chocolate soy milk, I find the soy and chocolate flavors mix well.)

I can do hard cheeses, thank God, but even yogurt can sometimes have too much lactose if I don’t take some pills. Sucks ass. And it’s only been a recent development. It didn’t seem to start till my early twenties (in my mind-twenties now, and I don’t recall any incidences in college.)

9

I use the Digestive Advantage pills Exapno Mapcase mentioned. They’re awesome. I just take one in the morning with my other vitamins, and I can eat dairy for the next 24+ hours. They’re also cheaper than Lactaid. The only things I can’t have are regular milk and sometimes cream cheese, although Neufchatel cheese doesn’t bother me at all. Anyway, I recommend Digestive Advantage to everyone I know who is LI. It’s so nice not to have to remember to bring Lactaid pills everywhere.

10

Hrmm. Well, I always sort of thought that it worked, as I kind of thought that it was what happened to me.

I was diagnosed as lactose intolerant when I was about five years old, but I kept on sneaking whatever dairy I could get my hands on (chocolate milk at Kindergarten, ice cream at parties), and by the time I was seven or eight, it wasn’t really a problem. Hasn’t been one since.

So, if I didn’t train myself out of lactose intolerance, what DID happen?

Whatever it is, I’m glad it happened. I’m a Wisconsin girl: I need my cheese.

11

You probably had a case of temporary lactose intolerance. Any number of intestinal ailments (including the badly misnamed “stomach flu”) knock out the lactase-making machinery in kids temporarily. The problem goes away after the intestines fully heal.

I know of no such thing as “training oneself” out of lactose intolerance and I’ve read the medical literature until it pours out my ears.

12

Read anything about having a case of cryptosporidium and then becoming LI?

That’s when mine happened. Severe crypto episode followed by LI.

13

Not specifically, but reading about its effects it seems like a classic vector.