Can you learn to become lactose tolerant if you were intolerant before?

[her209]

About a year ago, I started eating cereal (with milk) for breakfast almost every morning. When I first started, after eating, I would get really bad stomach aches and have a bad case of the shits. No bleeding though. This usually came immediately after finishing the bowl. Same sort of reaction to eating ice cream as well. Now, I have no such reactions.

Did my body become lactose tolerant over time? Maybe I was never lactose intolerant, but I did drink malk everyday at elementary and middle school.

 

[techs]

IIRC if you stop eating dairy for a long enough period of time, at any age, your body stops producing the necessary enzyme to break down the milk sugars.

 

[sdifox]

definitely a training thing

 

[Ninjahedge]

Yes, but not a training thing.

I was always allergic (different than intolerant), so my consumption tapered once I found out about it.

Now I can't have more than a small pyrex dish (about a scoop and a half to two scoops) of ice cream before getting the tummy grumbles.

Adults lose the ability to digest milk and milk products.


Interestingly enough, they found some cultures constant ingestion of it precludes this (Norway? Sweeden? I forget which).

 

[sactoking]

It just so happens that I sell a program that will help you out. It's a comprehensive self-study course designed to take 18-24 months. There are 6 classes. Books for each class cost $150. The test for each class costs $200. They are 30 questions, short answer/essay. If you successfully complete all six courses you get a diploma and the ability to join the CMD (Certified Milk Digester) professional group. Dues are $50/year, you have to take 6 CE credits in ethics every 3 years, and you get to add the CMD designation to your business cards and signature.

 

[zanejohnson]

mine has just gotten worse and worse.. i remember when i could eat cereal, with a little milk and be fine, nowdays, anything dairy, even a freakin slice of cheese on a burger and i'm peeing out my bum..

 

[CZroe]

IIRC if you stop eating dairy for a long enough period of time, at any age, your body stops producing the necessary enzyme to break down the milk sugars.

I read that you can reduce the gas from beans/legumes and lactose by eating more of it but it never made sense to me. If you lack the enzyme, how does eating it more often help? Triggering your body to resume production makes sense, so that explanation works for lactose, but I still wonder why they say it about whatever carbohydrate it is in beans that we can't naturally digest at any point in our lives.

 

[zerocool84]

Many people get lactose intolerant the older they get. I used to handle dairy products fine as a kid but the older I got, I got more and more intolerant.

Lactose intolerance is the inability to metabolize lactose, because of a lack of the required enzyme lactase in the digestive system. It is estimated that 75% of adults worldwide show some decrease in lactase activity during adulthood. The frequency of decreased lactase activity ranges from as little as 5% in northern Europe, up to 71% for Sicily, to more than 90% in some African and Asian countries.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lactose_intolerance

 

[Lifted]

I was lactose intolerant for a while, but it seems to have subsided a bit. I hadn't eaten much dairy for a few years, and now that I am eating it again, I'm finding it's not as bad as it was before I stopped. I can actually eat pizza, ice cream, etc., without getting horrible stomach pains.

 

[PopCulture]

Yeah, things like that can creep up on you. Our bodies can start to respond differently to food as time passes.

 

[destrekor]

:hmm: no shit... the adult human body starts to cut down production of lactase as one ages.

Who would have thought, eh? Adults no longer producing an enzyme to digest the favorite nutritional beverage of infants across the entire mammalian kingdom. Shocking.

Of course, we have bred ourselves completely out of tune with nature, filled with all sorts of genetic variants and errors.

Half of us white folk have little to no problem with milk, even into our senior years. Of course, since it's simply a freak genetic variant/adaptation (versus regular code), not everyone will maintain that status past the weening years.

We of European lineage have the highest chance of being able to rob cows of their sweet sweet baby juice, since we enjoyed doing so for countless generations and simply adapted.

I love milk in my cereal though. It's so wrong, when thinking like an animal, but so right.

 

[zinfamous]

sure, you just need to study about 1 hour a day.

 

[TheNinja]

You need to become more tolerant of many things like milk, butter, cheese, etc. Being intolerant of things is very bad for your image now days.

 

[zinfamous]

You need to become more tolerant of many things like milk, butter, cheese, etc. Being intolerant of things is very bad for your image now days.

yes, there's far too many dairists as it is.

 

[kinev]

About a year ago, I started eating cereal (with milk) for breakfast almost every morning. When I first started, after eating, I would get really bad stomach aches and have a bad case of the shits. No bleeding though. This usually came immediately after finishing the bowl. Same sort of reaction to eating ice cream as well. Now, I have no such reactions.

Did my body become lactose tolerant over time? Maybe I was never lactose intolerant, but I did drink malk everyday at elementary and middle school.

You went to Springfield Elementary?!?!?

 

[Jeff7]

Of course, we have bred ourselves completely out of tune with nature, filled with all sorts of genetic variants and errors.

"If suckin' cow titty is wrong, hey I don't wanna be right."



For me, sometime in college, lactose intolerance started to hit. Loads of fun. Heavily pressurized, unpleasant loads of intestinal fun. Bleh.
I used lactase tablets, but they were kind of hit-or-miss. I couldn't really have milk and cereal before having to leave for work or class because I couldn't risk the unwanted production of a few cubic meters of gas in a most inconvenient location, at a most inconvenient time. (It's the sort where there's an abrupt gurgling, and then a sudden feeling of "Uh oh!" not too long afterward.)


The oddest solution...and it likely will sound damn weird: Unpasteurized, unhomogenized milk. Interestingly enough, if you go about the process carefully, and keep everything properly sanitized, it's not dangerous. (Your mother's breast milk probably wasn't pasteurized before you drank it, fresh from the tap.)

There are absolutely no problems with it. It's as benign to my guts as plain water. I think they say it's because the heat of pasteurization or something about the whole industrial milk processing thing damages or destroys some enzyme or bacterial component, which makes processed milk difficult to digest. Something like that.

All I know is, raw milk causes me no problems. Regular store-bought milk leads to an eruption of Old Fecal.

 

[Ninjahedge]

As was pointed out in many a pun, you forget how to produce the enzyme that digests milk.

You do not "learn" anything.


Vitamin R FTW!

 

[thedarkwolf]

I started using soy milk. I'm not lactose intolerant but I like the soy milk anyway and it is the same price around here.

 

[AbAbber2k]

...

This.

I use to drink up to 3 gallons of 2% a week... now I can't even drink a glass. Funny thing is though, for a while after my intolerance to milk hit me, I could still handle the local, organic whole milk (chocolate!!!). But now that even seems to bother me. Maybe I'll have to go full on raw and see how that works out. I miss my milk (I still eat cheese and icecream and stuff fine).

 

[Kaido]

You went to Springfield Elementary?!?!?

You're going to shoot me if I shoot myself?!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ty62YzGryU4

:awe:

 

[Kaido]

About a year ago, I started eating cereal (with milk) for breakfast almost every morning. When I first started, after eating, I would get really bad stomach aches and have a bad case of the. No bleeding though. This usually came immediately after finishing the bowl. Same sort of reaction to eating ice cream as well. Now, I have no such reactions.

Did my body become lactose tolerant over time? Maybe I was never lactose intolerant, but I did drink malk everyday at elementary and middle school.

Everyone is lactose intolerant. What's unique is how sensitive you are to it. If you go off it, you lose the goop in your stomach that absorbs it, but you can build up a tolerance again over time. Some people become lactose intolerant randomly, and some people become lactose intolerant after trauma, such as surgery. A lot of times kids are lactose intolerant, but grow out of it. Other times you're fine your whole life and gradually become intolerant as you get older.

They have pills you can take that lets you absorb lactose. Doesn't work if you're dairy allergic like me tho (lactose, casein, whey) :\

 

[silverpig]

AFAIK it's like a breastfeeding woman. She can keep lactating so long as she nurses, but after a while, if she doesn't nurse, she stops producing milk.

All mammals are born lactose tolerant, and so long as they keep drinking milk, they keep that state up. If they stop drinking milk, they lose the ability to process lactose and become intolerant.

 

[Jeff7]

AFAIK it's like a breastfeeding woman. She can keep lactating so long as she nurses, but after a while, if she doesn't nurse, she stops producing milk.

All mammals are born lactose tolerant, and so long as they keep drinking milk, they keep that state up. If they stop drinking milk, they lose the ability to process lactose and become intolerant.

Or in some cases, your digestive tract just seems to say, "Screw you." As I discovered, I incorporated a lot of dairy into my regular diet, including cereal+milk almost every morning. The lactose intolerance set in over the span of about two weeks. I thought it was some kind of infection or food poisoning, but thought of the lactose intolerance thing because my mom had problems with milk too. (She's the one who introduced a very skeptical me to the benefits of raw milk.)

There's one thing that sucks about drinking milk: Every time I have any, the thought arises that, "You're drinking a secretion from an evolution-modified sweat gland on a cow."

 

[JohnOfSheffield]

If you are lactose intolerant (not allergic) then ingestion of lactase (the enzyme that breaks down lactose) with it will work for you.

One cap when you eat something with milk in it...

 

[JohnOfSheffield]

Or in some cases, your digestive tract just seems to say, "Screw you." As I discovered, I incorporated a lot of dairy into my regular diet, including cereal+milk almost every morning. The lactose intolerance set in over the span of about two weeks. I thought it was some kind of infection or food poisoning, but thought of the lactose intolerance thing because my mom had problems with milk too. (She's the one who introduced a very skeptical me to the benefits of raw milk.)

There's one thing that sucks about drinking milk: Every time I have any, the thought arises that, "You're drinking a secretion from an evolution-modified sweat gland on a cow."

Imagine the first guy who drank milk... "hey Pete, you see that white stuff that comes out of that cows teats, i'm going to drink that"...

Well, it could be worse, it could have been a bull..