Anyone ever reversed lactose intolerance?

[KMFJD]

Kefir does wonders for me

 

[William Gaatjes]

I don't know about genetics, but I've read that lactose intolerance often happens in conjunction with illness. I'm pretty sure that's what happened to me. A couple of years ago I got the flu (or something) pretty badly and after a week out of work it took me a good month to kick it completely. Nasty stuff in my chest and spent a lot of time in the bathroom. After I had kicked the chest stuff, I noticed that it seemed that I was still spending more time than normal on the can. It took a little while for me to put 2 and 2 together, but I finally realized the dairy connection. After a bit of experimentation and reading, I confirmed that it was indeed lactose intolerance, and it seems that it's quite common to get an illness that damages your ability to produce lactase.

That is interesting. Maybe it was molecular mimicry.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molecular_mimicry

Perhaps the illness you got caused the cells that produce lactase to be attacked ? And that your body can no longer produce lactase.

Or you have a different darm flora and fauna now.
Maybe humans produce lactase in combination with a certain gut bacteria. If that bacteria dies off because of some newly introduced bacteria or phage ?
Or that a phage infection forced those bacteria to mutate losing the ability to trigger lactase production ?
Could be some form of symbiosis.

So many possible options. But fascinating.

 

[Gibsons]

broad spectrum antibiotics can cause problems. Spungo was exaggerating to some extent.

Exaggerating to the point of being wrong, yes. Yes, antibiotics (not just broad spectrum) can cause side effects. Everyone knows this.

 

[Gibsons]

All medicine is chemotherapy. And certain antibiotics can be quite devastating to your normal flora, although penicillin isn't one of them, at least the original version. It was actually quite narrow spectrum and targeted something found only in bacteria, so it didn't kill much and wasn't that toxic to humans.

Hence why I was careful to specify cancer chemotherapy, and gave an example.

All (?) penicillins target something found only in bacteria (transpeptidases, aka PBPs). Most of the time penicillins have very low toxicity in humans.

This goes for most antibacterials in general. Chloramphenicols an occasional exception (they aren't used much anyway), and allergies excepted. The side effects due to perturbation of normal flora are pretty easily avoided and not too hard to remedy. Trivial stuff compared to a lot of cancer drugs.

 

[fuzzybabybunny]

Bump for update!