I found that I was lactose intolerant when I was seventeen years old—nearly two years ago. I’d eaten at least three slices of pizza, and my stomach began to hurt so badly that I could barely stand. My mom said I could be lactose intolerant, and took me to the grocery store to buy Lactaid pills. I starting taking them, and the symptoms I got whenever I ate food with dairy subsided slightly. My mom found out that she was allergic to milk when she was in her late twenties. Both of us avoid dairy products (or at least I try to). But whenever I have food with dairy in it, I don’t die. My mom can.
Lactose intolerance is when you cannot digest the sugars in milk because you lack the enzyme lactase. Sugars are digested by enzymes, and in the absence of those enzymes, uncomfortable symptoms can occur whenever you ingest dairy. For example, I can have a bowl of ice cream, but I’ll have to deal with being gassy, bloated and nauseous for hours after the fact.
However, if my mom ate that bowl of ice cream, she would go into anaphylaxis and die. People with a milk allergy can digest lactose just fine—they just cannot digest the proteins in the milk. Their bodies view the proteins in dairy as foreign and the immune system attacks the so-called “foreign” substance. And milk allergies aren’t always something that you’re born with—my mom didn’t find out until she was about 28, and she grew up drinking half a gallon of milk a day and putting cheese in everything. Sometimes, it just happens.
Unfortunately, there isn’t much that you can do if you have a milk allergy, other than to avoid dairy all together. But with lactose intolerance, there are little tablets (both chewable and in pill-form) of the enzyme lactase that you can take whenever you eat dairy products. They work in varying degrees for people, but they never completely take away the symptoms for anyone. For me, they don’t affect me all that much, so more often than not I forget to take them. But there are some people for whom taking one of the enzyme pills is the difference between a horribly bloated stomach and a mild, ignorable stomachache.
Whether you’re extremely lactose intolerant or slightly lactose intolerant, there’s still a major difference between that and being actually allergic. But both are health issues that affect millions of people in the world today.
