Title: Can You Become Lactose Intolerant Later in Life? | Everyday Health
Headings: Can You Become Lactose Intolerant Later in Life?
Can You Become Lactose Intolerant Later in Life?
Digestive Problems Similar to Lactose Intolerance
How to Determine if You're Lactose Intolerant
How to Manage Different Degrees of Lactose Intolerance
Editorial Sources and Fact-Checking
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You might love milk, but as you age, sometimes milk stops loving you back. If you feel bloated and gassy or have cramps and nausea within a few hours of drinking milk or eating milk products, it could be lactose intolerance, says Ashkan Farhadi, MD, director of the Digestive Disease Center at MemorialCare Medical Group in Costa Mesa, California, and a gastroenterologist at Orange Coast Memorial Medical Center in Fountain Valley, California. Except for very rare instances, every newborn has the ability to make lactase, an enzyme that helps the small intestine digest lactose, the sugar found in milk, says Richard Grand, MD, professor of pediatrics at Harvard Medical School and a gastroenterologist at Boston Children’s Hospital in Massachusetts. But as you get older, your lactase levels can start to decline, which means there’s nothing stopping the lactose you consume from going to your colon undigested, where bacteria break the sugars down and create excess gas and fluid in the process. It’s common to develop a lactase deficiency in adulthood. In fact, about 65 percent of the global population has a reduced ability to digest lactose after infancy, according to the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Your genetic makeup has a lot to do with whether you'll experience lactose intolerance. The body creates lactase when it’s instructed to do so by the LCT gene, and over time that gene can become less active. The result is lactose intolerance, which can begin after age 2 but may not manifest itself until adolescence or even adulthood, Dr. Grand says. Some ethnic groups are more prone to developing lactose intolerance than others.