Diet worries: Abbie Wigley became lactose intolerant when she was nine
When Abbie Wigley and her friends came down with upset tummies after a barbecue, it was blamed on undercooked chicken.
Yet while the others had recovered within 48 hours, two weeks later she was stillsuffering with diarrhoea, bloating and crippling stomach cramps.
Abbie, then aged nine, was taken to the GP, whosuggested that what started as food poisoning had developed into something else, possibly an allergy.
Under the GP’s instruction she gave up wheat for a week, but her symptoms remained. Then she was asked to cut out milk.
‘As soon I stopped having any milk, my symptoms stopped really abruptly—within 24 hours. It was amazing,’ she says.
Abbie, who is now 24, had become lactose intolerant.
Many people presume this is just something you are born with and around 15 per cent of the population are lactose intolerant from birth, often due to their genes.
However, tens of thousands— possibly more (as often the condition is not diagnosed)— become lactose intolerant every year following an illness.
It can develop from a long-term gutcomplaint such as Crohn’s disease orcolitis or, as Abbie discovered, as a result of a simple stomach bug, explains Professor John Mayberry, a gastroenterologist at University Hospitals Of Leicester.
Lactose is the form of sugar found in milk. Normally it is broken down by the enzyme lactase, which is produced in the mucus lining of the small intestine.
However, during a stomach infection the bacteria making you sick attack the lining of the stomach and cause the villi— tiny finger-like projections which slow thepassage of food allowing nutrients to be absorbed— to wither, says Dr Trisha McNair, a community doctor who works at the Milford Hospital in Surrey.
‘This damage to the villi in the small intestine means the amount of lactase produced drops dramatically. Lactose is not broken down properly and goes into the large intestine (the colon), where itferments and produces a lot of gas which causes bloating, cramping and diarrhoea.
‘I work with the elderly and many of them become lactose intolerant after a stomach infection. They are especially vulnerable becausepeople tend to produce less lactase the older they get anyway.’
Many sufferers are likely to think their symptoms are the result of a chronic condition such as Crohn’s disease (inflammation of the bowel), coeliac disease (where the body’s own immune system attacks the gut lining) or ulcerative colitis (another form of inflammatory bowel disease).
‘It is hard to predict who will become lactose intolerant after a stomach bug— it is a bit of alottery,’ says Professor Mayberry.‘A group of friends or a family might go abroad, for example, and they might all get a stomach bug, but only one or maybe two will become lactose intolerant afterwards.
‘The problem is that in the vast majority of cases they won’t realise that their symptoms, such as bloating or wind or urgent diarrhoea, are due to lactose intolerance.
‘They might put it down to stress or something like irritable bowel syndrome. Actually, it is the milk in the tea and the cheese sandwich they ate at lunchtime.’
The amounts needed to trigger a reaction in a lactose intolerant person are tiny, so it can be hard for people to realise that it’slactose that’s making them ill.
‘The amount varies, but normally it’s around 5g— about the amount found in milk for two cups of tea,’ says Professor Mayberry.
‘However, around 50 per cent of the lactose in our diet comes from hidden sources— it’s commonly used as a whitener and a sweetener by the food industry.
‘So someone might have a cup of tea and a slice of shop-bought cake and then suffer from diarrhoea, but they won’t think to blame lactose.’
Комментариев нет:
Отправить комментарий