Ep 206: National Dairy Month - Lactose Intolerance
National Dairy Month. What is Lactose and why does my Tummy Hurt?
Last time, we looked at the marketing and byproduct of the dairy industry. Namely, we looked at National Dairy month as a concept. Where it came from and why it exists. Its purpose is to sell milk and other dairy products. Those dairy products are made, literally by cows and other livestock. And in the process of producing all that sweet sweet dairy, there is another byproduct that we discussed. Cow poop. What did they do with it all in the past, and what sort of things do they do to get rid of it nowadays with farms and dairies with hundreds if not thousands of cows.
While many get psyched when we start talking about dairy, there are another group of people to whom the notion of snacking down a cheese stick or a large milkshake isn’t as appealing. These I have titled the dairy impaired, or as it is usually stated lactose intolerant.
That begs some specific questions. What the heck is even lactose..? And how did we get lactose in the butter?
In short, the easiest way to think of lactose is that it is milk sugar. Technically that is literally what the words translate to: “lac” deriving from the latin lactis and ose which is used to name sugar compounds. It is made up of two compounds or saccharides called galactose. It’s kind of like galaxy sugar based on the naming convention they used for lactose. That and glucose, which is like the most common sugar compound are what lactose is made of.
Lactose is almost always liquid as it comes usually dissolved in water in its natural state. That “water with lactose dissolved into it” is technically known as milk. While most mammals have lactose in the milk they produce, not all do. Notably, bear's milk contains no lactose, where the milk content of monkeys is almost double that of the average dairy cow. The normal concentration of lactose is about 5%. Lactose is one of the less sweet sugars with a sweetness of .2-.4 where sucrose is a 1.0. Fructose, of the high fructose corn syrup fame sits at a 1.3. So very sweet in comparison.
But… how did we learn all this, did we just wake up and start slurping on milk and start assigning these traits. How did we get here?
History of Lactose.
The history of lactose starts where most of my favorite cheesy things begin. In Italy. In 1576, in the city of Bologna, which I have a suspicion isn’t pronounced like the oversized sliced hot dog meats that are flowing around these united states. Bologna is a large town in the middle of Italy. An Italian anatomist, Fabrizio Bartoletti, was born there in 1576 and then went on to study philosophy and medicine at the university there. He earned his doctorate at the age of 27 from the university there and went on to be a professor of surgery and anatomy at the school. During his time working on his doctorate and teaching, he did the research and produced his main work which was titled "Antidotarium Chimico-Dogmaticum” In it, he examined ideals and concepts related to alchemy. In this, he sought to see how those ideas were related to the plants, much like Paracelsus did in his mercury salt theory. In these experiments and testing, he isolated lactose from milk in 1615 and called the compound” manna seu nitrum seri lactus” in his encyclopedia hermetico dogmatica. This latin phrase translates roughly into the “manna or salt of whey”.
Fabrizio moved to Mantua where consequently he contracted the plague and died when he left there for home. He never made it back. What Fabrizio isolated and started, others ran with. Lodovico Testi wrote a book of testimonials that shared the power of mild sugar. In these testimonials, milk sugar or lactose as we’ve discussed, is credited with curing or alieving arthritis. But lactose didn’t have its name all this time. It was isolated in 1617, but it wasn’t until 1843, over 200 years later that it was named by Jean Baptiste Andre Dumas, a French chemist. But he called it galactose. It was shortened in 1860 by Marcellin Berthelot where he transferred the name to the compound.
Lactose.
Lactose in the Bathroom
The troubles that lactose gives people in the bathroom is not the cause of lactose. Rather most of the time, it is the result of a problem related to lactase. Lactase is an enzyme produced within the body that is crucial and needed to break down milk and other dairy products, specifically to break lactose sugar down into its two component parts ( galactose and glucose). Those two sugar things can be absorbed easily into the blood stream through absorption in the animal’s intestines. That’s called digesting.
However, again you have to break that bad boy down in order for them to actually get absorbed into the system and be further processed. The enzyme our bodies makes to break it down is called lactase. And curiously it is the ONLY enzyme our bodies makes to break down lactose. And it turns out this digestive enzyme is coded as far down as our base DNA. In chromosome 2 it is coded whether or not or to what degree a person produces lactase.
Specifically lactase is located on the wall of the small intestine and to have it long term is actually technically a mutation. Originally and our genetic code is designed as such that we stop producing lactase after infancy. That is, once we stop nursing, our bodies sense that change in diet and with dwindling need for lactase to break down lactose compounds, comes dwindling production of the enzyme. When humans and other mammals are born, they have high levels of lactase production. Infants who cannot take milk often have a genetic mutation impacting their lactase which in turn cannot break down the lactose.
Lactase was first discovered by and written about by a British scientist named R H Aders Plimmer who wrote of his discovery a piece called “On the presence of lactase in the intestine of animals and on the adaptation of the intestine to lactose.” Lactase was found in 1906 in the intestines of young and infant dogs, pigs, and rats. He also discovered in his work that the amount of the enzyme diminished over time. This was the result of his finding. “Since, however, the pancreas never at any time in the life of an animal contains lactase (something they believed possible because the pancreas is credited with breaking down sugar and producing insulin), whereas the intestines of, at any rate, young animals contain this ferment, while those of adult animals in many cases have lost their power of hydrolysing lactose, adaptation of this organ might be reasonably expected to occur, when the animals are subjected to this stimulus by feeding.” Or to put it plainly, whatever is producing lactase didn’t come from the pancreas, and it seems to be caused by exposure.
A person who does not have this mutation, which is a striation I might add, is known colloquially as lactose intolerance, that is their body does not tolerate lactose. But more accurately, one would say that they actually do not produce lactase, or their bodies do not do it any more. You've heard people say that humans are the only mammals to drink milk past infancy, and they might very well be the only mammals who drink other mammals' milk. It’s wild, I think it’s also inaccurate, I know people put out saucers of milk for a cat or whatever.
But in the people who cannot tolerate it, it seems that their bodies didn’t mutate and went the natural course. Lactose intolerance, though written about as far back as Hippocrates about 500 BC, it wasn’t until the 1970s that they studied and understood human genes and gene mutations to be able to identify this mutation in people. In 1978, a breath hydrogen test was devised that supposedly could determine lactose intolerance.
It should be noted, a person can simply have low levels of lactase and be totally fine and not even notice trouble digesting lactose. Lactose intolerance only occurs when lactase levels get too low. When those milk sugars can’t be busted down, the colon and small intestine cannot absorb them, and in the presence of a closed track… those unabsorbed portions have to go somewhere. And usually they take the south bound train to porcelain town. In the worst cases, it goes reverso and comes on up. Common symptoms of lactose intolerance, often which keep you in the bathroom include diarrhea, nausea, vomiting, and gas.
All things which can keep you in the bathroom for the afternoon. I wonder if the National Dairy Association has any sort of statement or anything to say in regards to those who can’t eat or drink dairy for fear of pooping themselves royale. What’s worse is you are more likely to develop lactose intolerance as you get older. In other words when you get older and can make adult decisions related specifically to how much delicious cheese and dairy you can eat… that is when your body will start to fight you about the dairy you consume.
And while there are a number of products you can consume to help you both be able to consume the dairy, or treat the dangerous results of it… one thing which is challenging to say regarding lactose intolerance during national dairy month is this… You’re probably just better off avoiding it.
I think it works like this, your lactose intolerance is directly related to how willing you will be to give up dairy. If you poo yourself bad enough, you’ll give up milk and cheese. If you sling cookies hard enough, you’ll back off of ice cream. When you round off hour 2 of a bathroom trip, you’ll rethink the cheese pizza. Or, you’ll embrace the pain. You know you. But you have to be ready for age and other aspects to catch up to you… because it will.
