How I was Cured of Chronic Cramps and Gas
At first, nobody seemed to have a solution. Well-meant comments like “You’re getting older” annoyed me. While many people develop digestive problems in middle age, many others do not. Natural remedies like fennel and oregano, and more expensive remedies like Imodium, brought only temporary relief. It seemed unfair that some of us should have to depend on “band-aid cures” for 20, 30, or 40 years.
The first clue came when my late husband took a taxicab. Along the way, the naturally blonde driver mentioned that she was lactose intolerant. Other family members had inherited other typical Cherokee traits, she said, but lactose intolerance was the only “non-White” gene she got.
Upon looking up the facts in the AMA Medical Encyclopedia, my husband quickly learned that lactose intolerance is not a problem only Black people have. Most of us have only heard of lactose intolerance in terms of a minority of infants, nearly all of whom are Black, who are born without the ability to digest cow’s milk. However, a majority of the world’s population begin to lose lactose tolerance as children. About three-quarters of all non-European people are lactose intolerant by age 20 or 25. So are ten to fifteen percent of all White people. When we realize that another good-sized minority of the White population lose lactose tolerance as adults, it makes more sense to speak of “lactase persistence,” a failure to develop ordinary human lactose intolerance, as the “abnormal” gene.
Awareness is growing, thank goodness. In the early 1990s it was still commonplace for White adults to report all the symptoms of lactose intolerance, only to suffer from years of expensive tests and unhelpful diagnoses before a doctor would finally admit that lactose intolerance might be the problem. By now most doctors are aware that lactose intolerance is a possibility, even if a patient has blond hair and blue eyes. While some doctors still encourage everyone over age 50 to have as many coloscopies as their insurance will cover, they will at least test for food intolerance.
My husband mentioned this to his doctor during his next visit. He learned that, although the main cause of his digestive problems was a side effect of necessary medication, he was also losing lactose tolerance.
When he shared this news with me, we discovered that I had become completely lactose intolerant. Although I was younger than my husband, it seemed, I was losing lactose tolerance faster because I was also intolerant of gluten and casein, and I had minor food allergies as well.
Gluten intolerance has recently been found to be much more common than we used to think. While the incidence of full-blown, unmistakable “celiac sprue” is about 1 in 1,000 in Ireland and 1 in 1,000,000 worldwide, some specialists in the field of food allergies and intolerance estimate that as many as one-third of the world’s population may have some degree of gluten intolerance. A great number of “unexplained” and “incurable” diseases have been shown to correlate with this inability to digest wheat. A few years ago, the Washington Post reported that although celiac sprue is unknown in Italy, masked forms of gluten intolerance may be more common in Italy than in Ireland.
Less suffering seems to have been blamed on casein intolerance, possibly because many people born with casein intolerance, like one of our children, simply refuse to eat cheese. Gluten and casein intolerance occur together in enough people that a support group regularly post “gluten-free-casein-free” recipes at www.gfcf.com.
There are other food intolerances about which even less is known. Generally, the foods that create most problems tend to be the foods people eat most. The worst offenders are wheat, milk, cheese, egg, corn, nuts, yeast, soy, and citrus fruit. For each of these trigger foods, there are some people who react only to some component of the food and may be able to use some forms of the food. Probably no person is completely intolerant of all nine of these foods, but people with candidiasis (yeast imbalance) may temporarily seem allergic to all nine foods and many other things.
When people have food intolerance, they simply cannot digest certain substances. The body uses enzymes to break down different types of food. A person with food intolerance does not produce the enzymes that digest certain proteins, sugars, or other components of food. Supplementing the body’s production of enzymes is a fairly new idea about which much remains to be learned. It’s now possible to buy several products that supplement the enzyme lactase, which helps people digest lactose. Unfrozen yogurt contains “cultures” of friendly bacteria that produce lactase and other useful substances in the body; lactase-enhanced milk and ice cream are becoming available in many supermarkets, and, when lactose intolerant people inadvertently eat something that contains lactose, they can even buy lactase pills. Reasoning from the fact that fermenting milk contains natural lactase supplements, experimenters developed a fungus-derived “culture” from fermenting beans that makes it easier for some people to eat beans. Other enzyme supplements are available in stores, but they are still in an experimental stage – though “safe” in the sense that they are nontoxic, nobody knows which supplements will work for any given patient.
Food allergies are often found as complications of food intolerance. The allergy patient’s immune system flares up and produces allergy symptoms even though the body may be able to digest the food. Food allergies can cause serious problems, but they tend to come and go depending on the patient’s overall condition.
An amazing range of symptoms can be cured by treating food allergies and intolerances. We usually think of skin rashes and sinus problems as allergy symptoms, but doctors have found correlations between food allergies and all kinds of other things, including reactions to medications and even complaints of pain caused by injuries. In the 1980s, an allergist told Prevention magazine staff that a majority of people with cerebral palsy have food allergies and/or intolerances, and the severity of cerebral palsy symptoms, for these patients, definitely correlates with food allergy symptoms. Fatigue and lethargy are often found as primary symptoms of food intolerance. Reactions to food allergies and intolerance have been shown to include impaired performance on tests, greater impairment of sight or hearing, depressed moods, violent outbursts in mental patients, muscle weakness, hair loss…reading the literature really is enough to make a person wonder whether any kind of health problem may NOT be a food allergy symptom.
Eliminating a trigger food from the diet takes some research at first, and often involves giving up some favorite food treats. The good news is that ingenious cooks and dietitians have worked out many ways for people to give up a trigger food and enjoy it too. It’s possible to buy a variety of wheat-free breads and cakes, bean-derived cheese substitutes, and “non-dairy milks” that really contain no dairy products, just as it’s possible to buy vegetarian “burgers” and turkey “bacon.” You can also find books that will inspire you to create your own non-allergenic food alternatives. Mary McDougall is probably the best known author of milk-free, cheese-free recipes, while Bette Hagman is known as “The Gluten-Free Gourmet.”
Learning to cook and eat without using wheat, milk, or cheese has been a challenge – especially since I’m a vegetarian – but when my credibility and employability are at stake, the benefits are obviously worth the cost. It’s nice to know that fast, temporary relief for occasional gas pains is on the market. If the problem becomes chronic, it’s even nicer to know that the prescription for a permanent cure may cost nothing.
