
Supplementing the diet
with Lactase Enzyme makes milk products more readily digestible, helping
to relieve discomfort caused by lactose intolerance.
Those who
are lactose intolerant must either not
consume any lactose (milk sugar), or artificially break it down in the
milk, ice cream or cheese before they eat those things. Do you know anyone
who is lactose intolerant?
Let's look at the human ingestion of lactose. Back in cave-days, the only
time a person would ever ingest lactose would be when they were infants
and getting milk from their mothers. Thereafter in their lives milk was
never consumed. Only with the invention of agriculture and animal
husbandry has milk become readily available to adults. Do you know of any
cultures that still rarely have milk products available to adults? Did you
ever get ice cream in a Chinese restaurant? Many people of Oriental or
African descent are extremely lactose intolerant as adults. They often get
violently nauseated upon eating a spoonful of lactose. As a matter of
fact, most of you would feel a bit strange after a tablespoon of lactose.
You probably aren't violently lactose intolerant, but actually lactose
tolerant, but still not lactose degraders. Babies are lactose degraders
because in that period of their development genes are turned on that lead
to the production of lactase - the enzyme that splits the disaccharide we
call lactose.
Lactose is a disaccharide with one glucose sugar molecule bound to one
galactose sugar molecule. Once lactose is split, our bodies readily
metabolize the glucose and galactose products. Now, can you think of any
other developmental stage in which a person produces lots of lactase? When
else in a human's lifetime is there lots of lactose in the body? The
nursing mother, of course, makes lactose to put into her milk to feed her
baby. She uses lactase to catalyze the reverse reaction: glc + gal ->
lactose. Later, the baby takes it in the opposite direction: splits the
lactose, and the glucose mostly is metabolized for energy, and some of the
galactose goes into making brain material. Hence, generally the more
intelligent the mammal, the more lactose in mother's milk.
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