Lactose intolerance is the norm for almost all adult mammals. There is no "cure", because there's really nothing wrong with you to begin with. Lactose intolerance is the inability to cleave a lactose molecule into galactose and glucose. This causes all sorts of problems, from getting diarrhea to extreme bloating and abdominal pain after drinking milk or eating dairy products containing lactose. This is because when the sugar lactose is not digested properly, it lines the colon and ferments via all your little large intestine bacteria buddies. The assertation stated a few writeups below that the initial discomfort experienced after lactose ingestion is due to the displacement of water into your gut would account for diarrhea, but not the massive amounts of gas I seem to get about 20 minutes after eating anything with cream or butter in it.

Mammals usually begin losing their ability to process lactose at or near puberty. OR EARLIER! Baby mammals do need the ability to process lactose when they are young and breast-feeding. Personally I didn't feel the effects of being lactose intolerant til around age 13-14. It's not a big deal in my culture to be lactose intolerant because adults don't usually drink milk, eat cheese (our mice don't even eat cheese :P), cream or yogurt. But here in America, cheese and friends are everywhere.

Some people adjust to this inability to produce lactase, the enzyme that cleaves lactose, by taking lactase pills. From personal experience, this didn't work very well. I spent Christmas over at my very mid-western American in-laws place... and I had massive gas attacks from their food day and night for my entire stay. I was chewing those lactase pills maybe 6-8 pills (that's over a gram's worth of pills) per meal. Maybe there's something else in the food that I couldn't digest either... or I hadn't taken the stoichiometric equivilent of the lactose I was ingesting.

Others opt for drinking soymilk rather than regular ole cow milk. (I am not insinuating that soymilk is milk. Soymilk is pressed/ground soaked soy bean liquid, and if you actually thought soymilk is milk from soy cows, you oughtta go whack yourself good on the head. I suggest soymilk as a substitute because I for one don't enjoy eating cereal with water, prune juice, punch, etc. It's just not the same to dip my cookies in something like, say, lemonade rather than milk. Soymilk at least *looks* somewhat like milk and does contain some calcium (~10mg/cup).) Cow milk, after all, is for baby cows, is it not? On the other hand, yogurt is safe because it comes predigested. The bacteria in yogurt take over for the missing enzyme and digest much of the milk sugar for you. The yogurt has to have live bacterial cultures; killed bacteria do not work. Buttermilk, although fermented, still cause as much distress in most people as plain milk. Also beware of frozen yogurt. When yogurt is commercially frozen, it is sometimes re-pasteurized, and this kills the bacteria that are helping you digest lactose.

With this in mind, it’s probably not a good idea to feed your pet cat any more milk unless you want to stink up the house!