So if you are not lactose intolerant and get off lactose for 6-9 months, don't expect that your belly will react well to a glass of milk in a year.
I'm all for _reducing_ X and Y. But completely going polar is trendy and extremely dangerous long term.
While diet can induce a shift in the gut microbiota, these changes appear to be temporary. Whether prolonged dietary changes can induce permanent alterations in the gut microbiota is unknown
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6950569/#:~:tex...
I am unaware of dietary induced lactose intolerance as a thing. I tried to google it and can't find support for the idea.
https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/lactose-intolerance-101
As far as I know, lactose tolerance is the exception for the human race and it is deemed to be genetic. Many humans are lactose intolerant by default.
According to the following source, 65 percent of humans are lactose intolerant and up to 100 percent of the population in some sub groups are lactose intolerant.
https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/lactose-i...
AIUI drinking whole milk is mostly a Hong Kong thing.
Chances are, you are lactose intolerant but you were adjusted to the side effects as being normal until you had a period of your life where you were not dealing with them.
For a lot of people, lactose intolerance makes them a little gassy, or changes their bowel habits. It's practically negligible until they get away from it for a while and experience relief from the symptoms.
If you are lactose intolerant, you should probably try to not trigger that response, or take lactaid supplements when you are going to knowingly eat lactose so that your body has something to digest those sugars. It's a minor adjustment that can make your daily life just a little more bearable.
quoted "gastrointestinal specialist Kim Barrett, a professor of medicine at the University of California, San Diego"
> “To some extent, our ability to handle lactose is a use-it-or-lose-it phenomenon,” Barrett says. The body digests lactose — a disaccharide — by using lactase, an enzyme in the small intestine, to break it down into the monosaccharides glucose and galactose, which can then be absorbed. “If you don’t have the [lactose] substrate in the diet, you start to reduce the synthesis of the lactase enzyme to digest it,” Barrett explains. “After a period of completely excluding lactose from the diet, you may not have any of those digestive enzymes present.”
Maybe unawareness here is a gender thing? I have heard this story too many times from women doing weird short-term restriction diets (or going vegan and trying to undo) to feel like I need "current science" to "support" the very fact that it happens. Many things can happen because of genes or other reasons.
If you are assuming I'm male, you are in error.
That's a good point to bring up, but I do wonder if this is splitting hairs just a little bit. A shift in your microbiome might be technically temporary while still making things feel very weird for that temporary period -- however long that takes to change.
Also keep in mind:
> Whether prolonged dietary changes can induce permanent alterations in the gut microbiota is unknown, mainly due to a lack of long-term human dietary interventions, or long-term follow-ups of short-term dietary interventions. > > [...] > > Our understanding of the duration required for a dietary intervention to have an enduring impact on the gut microbiota, and consequently health, is hampered by several limitations. Firstly, there is a lack of long-term human studies, or indeed follow-ups of short-term dietary interventions, that seek to establish if a diet-induced modulation of the gut microbiota endures, though the wash-out periods of cross-sectional studies provide some indirect insight.
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All that to say I actually kind of agree, and I also don't see super-strong scientific evidence of induced lactose intolerance, but I qualify that by saying that it might just be a lack of study. And again, could also be a difference in what people mean by "permanent". If something makes you lactose intolerant for a month, that's still interesting, even if that's not meeting GP's "in a year" claim.
I've been vegan for maybe a year and half at this point, and was vegetarian before that. I'm curious how my body would react to eating a meat/cheese/lactose heavy meal if I sprang one on it out of the blue (not curious enough to actually try it, but it would be an interesting experiment).
My anecdotal experience or understanding is that potato starch is generally good for gut health, that you can nearly live on potatoes alone which is why the Irish Potato Famine was such a big deal -- big families on small plots of land were keeping people alive by growing mostly potatoes and people died in droves when the potato crop was screwed up -- and if you include oils in your "potato only" diet like the instructions allow for, coconut oil is medically known for many decades to be good for gut health due to being high in medium chain triglycerides and a guy with a PhD told me it's specifically good for microbiota. Butter is also a decent source of medium chain triglycerides though not as high as coconut oil.
Whatever is or is not true generally about "eat ONLY this" diets, my suspicion is a potato only diet -- especially if you include the right oils/fats -- is probably not a big threat to your microbiota (though other sources here are saying that losing your lactose tolerance totally is a thing and that may well be something that can happen with this diet).
Which I didn't want to say and may yet regret saying, but in for a penny, in for a pound as they say.
Not sure if my phrasing got this across, but I didn't mean "splitting hairs" as an intentional act or in the sense of spreading division or prompting argument, and I didn't interpret your comment as making a really strong claim in either direction. I just interpreted your comment as public musing, same as what I was doing.
I only meant "splitting hairs" in the sense that a person who runs into temporary lactose-intolerance will still have trouble for the duration of that time period. For whatever it's worth, I didn't interpret your comment as trying to say that temporary changes couldn't exist, or that you were supporting a potato-only diet, or that the OP was lying, or anything like that.
At the end of the day I'm not a doctor, I've got no idea what a potato-only diet will do to someone's microbiome. I'm just posting stuff on the Internet.
I've tried it myself and try to stick to it. When strict on it my horrific whole body burning pain stopped.
Not everyone, but many people are either cured, show no symptoms, or have reduced symptoms.
I've also noticed a lot of people that have never heard of it eventually rediscover it via trial and error on how their body responds.
Funny enough in contrast to the article. Potatoes (nightshades) are not allowed. Sweet potatoes are.
On the idea that your microbiome can take a long time to recover from elimination diets: 1) From a gastrointestinal morphology perspective, we are opportunistic scavengers, so our whole biology is directed around sporadically eating just about anything. 2) I've seen several studies showing that, for the most part, our gut microbiome radically reshapes itself within a matter of days in response to major diet changes.
To clarify: modern science estimates 300–1000 species in gut microbiota, 99% by number of cells coming from 30-40 species. The total number of microbial and viral cells throughout a healthy adult body is estimated at over 100 trillion, or roughly 10x the number of one's own body cells.
I want to get beyond the boring "too much of anything is bad". Of course it is! That's what "too much" means!
Well, have fun!
https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2017/08/24/5456315...
https://www.wired.com/2014/04/hadza-hunter-gatherer-gut-micr...
Paleo goes a bit beyond that, to be fair.
Paleolithic archaeological sites are full of marrow-scraped bones and the stone tools used to kill and butcher. Paleolithic teeth have little of the damage associated with eating grit from ground grains. We have such remarkable discoveries as a building made entirely of mammoth skulls.
The Hadza are a modern people, and modern hunter-gatherers have been pushed to the fringes. Early English and French explorers documented the diets of the North American people they encountered: they ate a lot of meat, growing the Three Sisters as a supplement to a diet heavy in game and fish.
It was the Neolithic in which population pressure forced people to start eating grain, and eventually growing it. They immediately became shorter and their teeth started falling out.
> Paleolithic archaeological sites are full of marrow-scraped bones and the stone tools used to kill and butcher.
That's only because all the archaeologic evidence is preserved in bones and tools. All if not most of the plant based evidence has been reclaimed by nature. There are some new discoveries surrounding preserved pollens that are showing how early hominids had plants in their camps.
> We have such remarkable discoveries as a building made entirely of mammoth skulls.
That's because all the wooden based structures didn't survive. We should quit calling it the Stone Age and call it the Wood Age, because their stone tools were used to build wooden structures (along with butchering critters).
Maybe I should have worded it better... "realize that our Paleolithic friends ate more plants than we were lead to believe"
Obviously everyone will react differently.
My doctor put me on a "no milk products" diet years ago for a digestive ailment. I [too rigorously, perhaps] held to it for a year and a half. The diet solved my problems but at end left me lactose intolerant.
It didn't at first seem like much to live without milk products. But the ramifications of eating say, a banana pudding, which then turns one's intestines into a freestyle trumpet, cannot be ignored.
I've quit all dairy for years in the past and had no issues when chugging a glass of milk or having something with cheese in it later. It's very case by case
They promote it to people not in their situation, the other people adopt it and now they have to eat a specialized diet because they sensitized their body.
This is noted in, of all things, Adam Smiths the Wealth of Nations when he compares the diet of the poor in England (mostly wheat), in Scotland (Barley?) and, of course, Ireland (Potatoes). He notes that, of these groups, it is not the relatively well-of poor in England who are the healthiests, but the poorest of the all, the Irish. The poor in Ireland would not be able to afford more than the cheapest food, which would be whatever greens were in season and potatoes.