Food Elimination Made Easy -Review-

With the recent food diets and crazes many people have started to realize that they may have allergies or sensitivities to foods.  The question of how to find out what you are allergic or sensitive too means that you are looking at doing a food elimination diet.  If this is the case you may wonder what is the best way to go about it.  Food Elimination Made easy offers programs to help you eliminate food from your diet. 

Lactose Intolerance and Me

After all the fighting and all of the trying to mitigate, after all the denial, I have ended up with lactose intolerance.  For some reason I can take butter, cheese, and milk baked into things, however milk and ice cream are forever off my list.  I am going to be looking into some of those pill treatments for those with lactose issues.  I cannot live a life without milk.  I am one of those people who never stopped drinking milk even long after I was a child.  I love it in every form.  My favorite form is still cheese, but there is no way I can give up drinking normal milk.  I am hoping that with the pills I will be able to consume as much  milk as I did previously.  One thing I didn't get is why I could still eat cheese and other milk products without being affected.  The answer is simple  lactose intolerance does not include the chemically altered form of lactose that occurs when the milk goes through some form of process. 

When Milk goes through the souring process to become cheese the lactose which is milk sugar gets turned into lactic acid.  I don't have an issue with lactic acid.  Also lactose can change when something when it is processed in other forms, for example baking.  I have true lactose intolerance, and not a milk allergy many people confuse the two.  Over the last month or so I started experimenting to see what made me sick and what didn't.  The reason that I can still eat butter is that it is milk fat and not the milk it's self.  That means that there is very little lactose in the butter.  This is great for me since I need to cholesterol.  (With my Celiacs I flushed it and didn't keep enough)  So while I am building backup my levels I will continue to eat butter and cheeses.  For those special days when I have to have milk or ice cream I will be taking those little magic pills Lactagen, Lactiad or one of the store brands.  There is no way I will be able to give up all the milk in my life.
I guess I will be trying the brands and finding the cheapest and best version of the pill, I will let everyone know which pill wins in a few months.

Also on a side note I decided as my last test to drink lactose free milk and see if I reacted.  I didn't react I was fine with the lactose free milk.  Normally I would just switch the type of milk I drink.  However, I discovered one very important thing about lactose free milk.  It tastes disgusting, it may be milk without the lactose but it is overly sweet and it has the flavor of warm sweetened skim milk.  Not that I mind Skim, I just cannot stand it warm.  Also the price is prohibitive for every day use.  Lactose free milk is more expensive since it has to be processed differently.   It is just not worth it in my mind. 

Celiac and Lactose intolerance

Celiac and Lactose intolerance

For those who have celiac disease you may have noticed an inability to deal with lactose in milk, butter, and ice cream.  Cheeses are fine but products that deal with lactose directly might start to make them sick after a few months of being gluten free.  For some this came before the Gluten allergy, this post is about those that had the issue digesting lactose after being gluten free. 

This is what happened to me.  I have spent my entire life drinking milk and consuming it in many forms.  Then I started to get sick when I ingested lactose.  Since I eat many lactose containing products this was worrisome.  I had a couple of choices, those would be to either cut direct sources of lactose from my diet and/ or deal with it, or I needed to find a way around the issue.  The first thing I did was find out what was going on. 

The reason I was now lactose intolerant is because of the damage that gluten had done to my microvilli.  That it was now just showing its self means that the damage done was starting to heal, it takes time for this to heal and since it was in no position to do its job means that I can't handle straight lactose.  However, with the help of pro-biotics often found in live culture yogurts (gluten free of course) I have been able to handle milk products. 

By eating one yogurt a day I can then eat gluten containing products.  However, if I miss my daily yogurt I feel it if I eat lactose.  Once I made sure that this was how it worked by testing on myself I had to share.  If you are gluten free and have discovered recently that lactose is starting to bother you.  Give eating a yogurt a day a chance.  If you can't handle the regular yogurt at first they do make lactose free yogurts with active cultures. I am not talking the fad use of yogurt; I am talking about helping those that would not otherwise have an issue with lactose.  Feel free to try for yourself and see if it works for you.