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LACTASE
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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