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!