"LactoseIntolerance" news and stories

If you're lactose intolerant, you know all about nausea, bloating, gas, and diarrhea. So while you might stay away from dairy products, you can still get calcium and vitamins from fish, dark green, leafy vegetables, and tofu. But you're an adult. As pediatrician Dr. Ari Brown asks, "How many kids, especially toddlers, eat broccoli, green leafy vegetables, rhubarb or tofu?"

According to the American Academy of Pediatrics, even lactose-intolerant children should eat some dairy every day to help maintain daily recommended levels of calcium and vitamin D. Aside from the fact that it might be difficult to get lactose-intolerant kids to eat canned anchovies, dairy products are a more adequate source of the nutrients needed bone growth and development.

The AAP recommends that children drink about 4 to 8 oz. of milk with meals or other foods throughout the day. As children get older, aged cheeses and yogurt can be added to the diet because these foods lack the sugar that can make milk hard to digest.

Milk, as it turns out, is evil, a mucous-coated pacifier we were meant to discard decades ago. I figured one day (it only took me six years after I went back on coffee) that maybe it’s the MILK I need to quit, not the five cups a day of delicious, acrid, steamy java –  maybe what's causing me all that gastric discomfort is lactose intolerance.

How did I discover the problem? What made me think that milk – innocuous staple of everyone's daily diet, the very symbol of health – was the culprit? The girl I was seeing this summer kept human breast milk in her freezer. Not hers, and not for her consumption, but for a friend's adopted baby. You may know this already, but apparently a woman won't lactate if she didn't actually birth the baby, so they get a lactating woman to donate breast milk, and then they need to keep it in a freezer. There's too much for just one freezer, so my now ex-girlfriend donated her entire freezer to it (which meant I couldn't have ice cubes when I came to visit).

Is this too much information for you? No, they wouldn’t let me taste it. I was pissed about that too, and felt weird for the baby -- here this kid is with a woman, not his real mother, nursing him with yet another woman's breast milk (which she feeds the child via a small tube placed next to her nipple) which is kept in yet another woman's freezer. It really does take a huge amount of sleight of hand to be "organic."

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