Disclaimer: I have not been tested for lactose intolerance; however, I do know that dairy messes with me and lactaid pills help so I’m assuming I have it.
I understand humans aren’t meant to drink milk forever, so I’m more curious about what happens after someone has dairy. For example, when I drink milk, the first thing I notice is that my stomach feels extremely full. Not quite gas bloating or carbonation from sodas, but just full. And there’s a pressure that makes it feel like my body is trying to compress it or push it back up. Then, later, I’ll get a lot of gas rumbling around in my stomach. Eventually it messes with bowel movements and is done.
Now, I don’t know if this is the same process for all lactose intolerant people, but what’s happening here? What creates that almost bloated feeling even though you’re not ingesting air/carbonation/etc? I’m assuming what comes after is all due to the gas I hear rumbling around, so what happens in the stomach that makes the gas and all of that happen?
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The issue comes down to Sugar. Sugar isn’t *one thing,* it’s a whole class of really similar chemicals. It’s kind of like Lego bricks, you have a half-dozen or so basic bricks and then tons of combinations of those bricks to make more and more complicated designs. That’s sugar. You have a half-dozen or so “simple” sugars and then you can combine and recombined those basic pieces into “complex” sugars and then combine those into “starch” or “carbohydrates” which can be tens/hundreds of thousands of sugar Lego long.
In the case of humans, we loooooove one specific sugar – glucose. The issue is when Glucose is combined with some other sugar Lego brick, say, Galactose. Glucose and Galactose combined into a 2-brick piece is what we call Lactose, a complex sugar. Lactose tastes sweet, is yummy, but needs to be digested back into it’s glucose and galactose pieces before it can be used by the body and that takes a special digestive chemical called an enzyme. Fun fact: Sugars end in -ose, the enzymes we use to digest them end in -ase. So the Lactose digesting enzyme is… Lactase. But let’s say you are Lactose intolerant, you’re body can’t produce Lactase. That means the sugar goes goes through you stomach and into your intestines whole and is useless the human body.
Guess who else likes Lactose? *Everybody*. All the bacteria in your stomach see lactose and freak the eff out. Party. Time. They can digest it happily and produce tons of burps and farts while they do. That feeling you get when you eat dairy? You’re having an all you can eat stomach fiesta and all the bacteria are invited. It’s nasty but they digest it and you’re just dealing with the results. If you’ve ever wondered what a Dartmouth frat-house looks like on the morning after Prom Night – that’s your intestines after drinking a glass of milk.
FYI- you can buy off-the-shelf lactase in pill form which you take while you consume dairy to prevent the… unpleasant side effects.
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