07.03.07
Lactose Intolerance
My daughter is majoring in community health. In one of her health classes she studied a section on lactose intolerance, and she began to wonder if she was lactose intolerant.
Wikepedia defines lactose intolerance as:
Lactose intolerance (or hypolactasia) is the condition in which lactase, an enzyme needed for proper metabolization of lactose (a sugar that is a constituent of milk and other dairy products), is not produced in adulthood.
Lactose intolerance can sometimes be confused with milk allergy. In reality, the former is a lack of the enzyme lactase, while the latter is an aberrant immune response (usually) to milk proteins.
With lactose intolerance, the result of consuming too much lactose is excess gas production, stomach aches and often diarrhea.
The majority of humans stop producing significant amounts of lactase sometime between the ages of two and five. A relatively recent genetic change caused some populations, including many northern Europeans, to continue producing lactase into adulthood. Lactose intolerance is an autosomal recessive trait, while lactase persistence is the dominant allele. The gene is expressed and the enzyme synthesized if at least one of the two genes are able to express properly. Only when both gene expressions are affected is lactase enzyme synthesis reduced, which in turn reduces lactose digestion.-Wikipedia
When I had a stomach ache when I was a kid, my mom would tell me to go get a glass of milk. So when my daughter would tell me that she had a stomach ache, I told her to go get a glass of milk. As I think back about the use of milk as a stomach ache remedy, I know it didn’t work. I remember that my daughter’s stomach ache did not go away until morning, after a night’s rest, or probably more likely, after a night’s digestion.
As an experiment, my daughter decided to cut milk from her diet to see if it would improve her overall health, and it did. She no longer had stomach aches, or sinus and ear infections. My daughter replaced milk with yogart, and some soy milk (although there seems to be controversy as to whether soy milk is an healthy product…… See “Scientists versus the soya industry”
Since my husband and son had similar symptoms, they decided to reduce their milk intake, and increase their consumption of yogart and soy milk. They also noticed overall improved health.