Are you lactose intolerant?

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I just want to see if there's any correlation.

I used to eat cheddar cheese, but have switched to Jarlsburg cheese due to a lactose intolerance.

Yep, it was a late development in life...drank plenty of milk and ate plenty of dairy as a kid but once I went away to college and came back, I suddenly couldn't process it anymore. It really sucks because I'm a terrifically picky eater and it knocks a lot off my list but oh well.

Most of the world is lactose intolerant, especially those who are not descended from Northwest Europe, or Northwest India, or a small section of Africa. The ability to digest lactose is the minority, and the mutant gene. All in all, approximately 75% of the human population cannot digest lactose past infancy. In African, Asian, Native American populations (everywhere but Europe) almost 90% of adults no longer produce the enzyme to break down lactose into glucose and galactose.

Yes. I used to have a severe milk allergy and while I have outgrown it, I cannot have more than a small amount of dairy products without major problems. I have also noticed similar difficulties that I suspect are from Gluten as well.

I can eat dairy products well. I can physically tolerate anything, except sugar free mints.

No, I'm not.

Nope, only food intolerance is stuff that isn't real food (artificial sweetners).

(I am descended from northwest Europeans - Finland and Germany are the biggest two countries of influence in my ancestry)

I don't really know, I've never been able to work this out.

As a child I had regular stomach upsets especially at times of stress & change. Then as a teen I was diagnosed with IBS and around 15-16 I went through a year of hell with it. Constant pain and anything I ate reappeared within minutes.

Around this time I gave up milk in tea & coffee. I'd never been massively keen on it and I think I just took it because that's what everyone else did, and I noticed I was getting a bit better, so I stopped having milk on cereal as well, again I'd often had phases of preferring dry cereal, and my stomach got better instantly.

But the weird thing is I can eat cheese in vast quantities (I had a whole baked Camember to myself on Monday night! ) and the occasional ice-cream, and milk cooked in things doesn't affect me, so I have no idea why fresh bottled milk would be any different? Unless something else was making me ill, but I've never been able to name anything else it could have been.

No I'm not, to my knowledge. I've had stomach upsets from drinking milk though at times.

Cheese has significantly less lactose than other milk derivatives. This is because when cheese is made the curds that become cheese are removed from the whey, and most of the lactose is in the whey. Also the bacteria that turn the curds into cheese process most of the remaining lactose in the curds.

had a milk allergy as a kid. it gradually decreased in severity the older I got. i can eat dairy products without problem now, although I hate the taste of cow's milk.

That's very interesting. I realized I had become lactose intolerant about a year ago and while I can still take milk in small amounts, cheese really messes my stomach up.

I have also noticed an interesting phenomenon: dairy products from the local area (Czech Republic) tend to give me really big problems, while cheese from England or Italy seem to be digested fine. A friend of mine has the same issue. Neither of us are natives of this area - I'm from the USA (where I never ate any cheese other than Cheddar) and he's from England. Both of us are fine with real Italian mozzarella on pizza, but if a local place makes it with locally-produced mozzarella, we both get massive problems. Anyone know anything about that? Is there just more lactose in the local milk for some reason?

Anyway I don't think it's related to being on the spectrum. About half the people I know are lactose intolerant to some degree, and almost all of them are NT.

I've had it 4 times; but haven't had any problems now for 5 years.

Yes, I am.

Severely and can't ingest anything cherry "fake or real" without breaking into hives.