Will you become lactose intolerant if you stop drinking milk?

[CandidGamera]

@Exapno_Mapcase

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.

Thanks, Exapno - this actually explains my current reaction to dairy products pretty well. I thought I had some mild form of intolerance, but as it turns out, I just need to drink milk more regularly. Or use the lactose free kind.

[Exapno_Mapcase]

You’re welcome. I’ve answered literally several thousand questions on this over 30 years of writing about the subject, so I’ve gotten good at short but comprehensive answers.

The change since 2004 is that I’m now directing people to my books. The definite book on the subject is Milk Is Not for Every Body: Living with Lactose Intolerance. Product information is obsolete but all the general info is still good. There’s also the more recent Planet Lactose: The Best of The Planet Lactose Blog. I’m no longer actively updating the Planet Lactose Blog or the original Planet Lactose website but there are tons of legacy information on those. (Probably why the idiot who gave me a one-star review because all the info was findable on the Internet could find the info on the Internet. :smack:)