I recently heard a radio report on lactose intolerance. Now I know that a certain percentage of the population become lactose intolerant as they age. But according to this show, you can also become lactose intolerant if, as an adult, you stop drinking milk. The claim was that if you stop drinking milk, your small intestine will eventually stop producing lactase (IIRC) and that once it stops, it will never produce lactase again.
I’ve tried to research this on-line but I didn’t come up with anything useful. Is it true? If it is, how much and how often do you have to drink milk to maintain lactose production?
This sounds like b.s. to me. Frist of all, our bodies are very resilient and adaptive. I stopped eating meat for some years, and just started up again. The first few times there was some minor discomfort, but that quickly abaited. Our G.I. tract seems to start producing whatever enzymes are required pretty quickly. Did this information perhaps come from something associated with the dairy industry?
I’ve also read that food intolerances never change. They are based on a lacking of a particular enzyme or catalyst. I find that people can start to tell that they have an intolerance once they do cut out the food completely. Think of it this way, if you are ingesting a small amount of poison every day, you might not notice direct changes each day. You’ll have headaches, or be weak, or some other symptoms. Cut out the poison for an extended period, then try taking a little, and you react. The same goes for food intolerances. You might have some symptoms, though not necessarily G.I. related, that you don’t identify until you cut out the source of the problem.
I personally am dairy intolerant. The longer I go without eating dairy (and ‘cleaning out’) that more I can tell that a food is contaminated. Is my intolerance getting worse? No. I’ve just cleaned out and gotten healthier.
It’s hard to say whether your claim is bs but I’ll tell you what happened to me. I became lactose intolerant (well I discovered it) at age 22. I had been having a few problems for the past year or so but never chalked it up to dairy since I lived on coffee with lots of milk, ice cream, cheese, etc. I never had a problem as a child with dairy- that was my dad and my brother. I drank milk like a fiend, until I went to college. There I stopped drinking actual glasses of milk because I didn’t really trust it. I still consumed dairy in other forms.
One day, while making dinner, I decided to have a glass of milk. I haven’t had one in ages. I end up on the bathroom floor moaning and groaning and wanting the cramps and pain to just go away. It was awful. I then knew I was lactose intolerant, talked to my doctor who confirmed it, and talked to my dad who told me he developed it around the same age.
So it could be a hereditary thing or it could be because I stopped drinking milk. Or it could be because my body decided to stop producing lactase. Whatever it is, I’m still lactose intolerant.
Food intolerances absolutely change akrako1, ecpecially as we age. You are correct though that increasing the ingestion of lactose rich foods won’t help overcome intollerance. How do you when your food is contaminated, and how does your abstaining from dairy help you do this? Also, contaminated with what?
Nearly all Europeans and about a quarter of Asians have a weird gene that keeps producing lactase whenever needed. The rest of the world will stop producing lactase after weaning. Of course, there are exceptions.
I became lactose intolerant (or became aware of it) after avoiding dairy products for most of 2 years (while pumping milk for one of my twins). All I know is, I could eat it before, and when I resumed trying to eat it, I suffered typical lactose intolerance symptoms.
More interesting, this disappeared during my 3rd pregnancy. I could and did eat all the milk, yogurt, cheese etc I wanted to, without taking lactase pills. However, after the birth of the baby, symptoms returned.
Go figure.
(I’m of typical mixed-European genetic background)
I have some expertise in this subject, having been one of the earliest people diagnosed with lactose intolerance and being forced to do all my own research.
There’s a two-part answer to the OP.
First, your body either makes the lactase enzyme for life or it gradually diminishes production with age. Nothing you eat or don’t eat affects this in any known way. (Disease, drugs or damage to the small intestine can also stop production, either temporarily or permanently, but that’s a relatively tiny number of cases.)
Second, the symptoms of lactose intolerance come partly from whether lactose goes undigested - thereby drawing water into the intestines and helping to create diarrhea in many cases - and also partly from what happens to the lactose once it reaches the colon. Bacteria in the colon will either ferment the lactose - creating gas and all the ffects that gas can have - or digest it, which doesn’t create any symptoms. If you don’t have dairy (and therefore lactose) for a long period of time, the flora in the colon may switch over to the fermenting kind, and symptoms will result. You produce no more and no less lactase than you did before, but your symptoms may change.
And as Chotii mentions, many women say that they ability to tolerate dairy changes (in either direction) during pregnancy or lactation, but I haven’t found anything in the medical literature that would properly explain this.
Possibly a dumb question but,
Would it be possible to culture some of the lactose digesting veriety and put them in the colon of someone who is lactose intollerant as a cure for lactose intollerance?
Pretty much any brand of probiotic Acidophilus bacteria will do that. A couple of specialty companies offer products that they claim are specifically tweaked for the purpose: DairyCare and Digestive Advantage.
Glad to know I’m not the only one. After the birth of my first, dairy products (which I had not avoided in any way) were absolute murder on my system, and I love my dairy. I couldn’t tolerate any dairy whatsoever - a spoonful of freshly mixed pudding had me in agony for the rest of the day. When I got pregnant with my second, I could once again drink dairy. And when she was born, presto, no dairy tolerance at all.
Luckily, with my 3rd pregnancy, I could again drink dairy, and after she was born, I was still ok. Well, not entirely ok, I have to be careful and moderate, but nowhere to the extreme that it had been before.
That’s true. But my specific question is whether it is possible to “trigger” lactose intolerance by not drinking milk. In other words, is it true that in some people, the lactase-producing cells in the small intestine will “atrophy” if they are not regularly stimulated by the presence of lactose?
I appreciate the first-person experiences. Theywhich suggest that the situation is more complicated than it is typically described. I was hoping, however, that someone like Qadgop or KarlGauss might drop by with a definitive cite.
As I said before, the answer is a flat “no”. And also flatly: I’ve read far more of the medical literature on this subject than any of our attending doctors have.
I served overseas for a year without access to milk. When I returned I tried milk but lost the taste for it an became lactose intolerant to all dairy save for cream in my coffee an ice cream. That said I stopped eating ice cream but recently had some. Same results…I am more intolerant. I think that not only daiary cessation can impact intolerance but that it can happen in varying degrees with respect to specific foods.
Nothing in the medical literature can substantiate such a claim. You cannot be intolerant to a particular food.
All I can say is that the amount of lactose you eat makes a difference along with how you eat the lactose. Cream is used in very small amounts and normally wouldn’t trigger a reaction. I’m fairly sensitive to lactose, but I wouldn’t bother using lactase to counteract a mere dollop of cream in coffee.
Ice cream is normally eaten in larger portions and so would cause reactions. However, ice cream eaten as dessert after a large meal might result in fewer symptoms because the large mass of the meal would cause it to move more slowly through the intestines, giving the residual lactase more time to interact with the lactose.
These condition sensitive results make it difficult to self-diagnose what foods are causing problems. The varying nature of intestinal flora also makes for varying symptoms. Trying to determine one particular food is a dead-end proposition. If you are truly lactose intolerant, then either minimize lactose contact or use a lactase pill when you eat dairy. Both approaches are far more likely to work.
Anecdote: I stopped drinking milk and later became lactose intolerant. Cheese and yogurt, where the lactose had already been eaten; butter, where the lactose was mostly washed away in the buttermilk; and ice cream, where for some reason all the added sugar aids digestion, were the only dairy I could eat. A dollop of milk in my coffee would make me ill for hours.
I reckoned that I had the gene to produce lactase, but part of me that made it had been switched off. I very gradually started adding milk into my diet because I missed eating bowls of wet breakfast cereals. It took about a year, but I reactivated the gene and can now drink milk, which now makes my bowels very happy. So I am anecdotal proof that one can become lactose intolerant from lack of use, then lactose tolerant by regular use.
Ok, all of you that have a problem with lactose intolerance- listen up! It is now easily cured. I used to be moderately intolerant. About a year ago, I read about two strains of probiotic bacteria that are designed to alleviate lactose intolerance. They are Bacillus Coagulans and Lactobacillus Gasseri. I have been taking both of them, switching off, taking one on even days and the other on odd days. I no longer have ANY problem. Both products are available from swansonvitamins.com and are very moderately priced. Bacillus Coagulans presently lists for $2 for a bottle of 30, and Lactobacillus Gasseri is $6.97 for a bottle of 60. I gave a bottle of each to a neighbor and she also found them to be very effective.
I did not find yogurt to help much with lactose intolerance. And, if you are wondering, I do NOT work for Swanson and do not receive compensation from them. And a caution- taking a probiotic that is new to you may cause some digestive distress until your system adjusts.
What undoubtedly happened is that you changed your intestinal flora from the lactose-fermenting variety to the lactose-digesting variety. Adding dairy gradually into your diet is the classic way of introducing the change. There is no medical evidence of any kind that the gene on chromosome two can be switched on and off.
As I said above, ten years ago in post #9, a variety of probiotic bacteria are marketed to do this and they work well for most people. Not everyone, of course. But it is also true that many self-diagnosed people do not have lactose intolerance in the first place but any of a number of other ailments with similar triggers and symptoms.
