Lactose intolerance is a fairly common digestive problem – between thirty and fifty million Americans may suffer from lactose intolerance! If you are lactose intolerant, it means you have trouble digesting lactose, a sugar that is present in milk and other dairy products. Your body may lack the enzyme lactase, which breaks down these milk sugars.
Your body will complain pretty loudly if you are lactose intolerant. Some symptoms:
- Nausea
- Cramps
- Bloating
- Gas
- Diarrhea
The symptoms may appear as little as 30 minutes after eating or drinking foods that contain lactose, which is the predominant sugar in milk and many dairy products. The severity of the symptoms depends on how sensitive to lactose you are.
There are several tests that can help determine whether or not you are lactose intolerant. Your doctor can perform all of these on an outpatient basis.
Lactose Tolerance Test
Basically, you fast for a predetermined period of time, then under the doctor’s supervision, drink something with lactose. The doctor will check your blood sugar periodically over the next few hours – if you aren’t digesting the lactose, your blood sugar won’t change.
Hydrogen Breath Test
Undigested lactose can make the levels of hydrogen in your breath go up. So measuring the amount of hydrogen in your exhalations over a two hour period after drinking a lactose-laden liquid can reveal lactose intolerance.
Stool Acidity Test
This one is usually done on infants and young children, to measure the amount of undigested lactose in a stool sample.
Lactose intolerance is controlled by diet. There are lots of lactose-free substitutes for milk and ice cream. And you can get your calcium from lots of other sources.
Personally, I’m only occasionally lactose intolerant. I find I have problems if I eat more than one type of dairy product at a time – like two different cheeses at the same meal. When I feel a “dairy attack” coming on, I take a supplement called acidophilus. This is the same good bacteria you find in yogurt, and it helps me out when I’m in dairy distress. You may want to give it a try if you only experience problems occasionally.