LACTASE

Supplementing the diet with Lactase Enzyme makes milk products more readily digestible, helping to relieve discomfort caused by lactose intolerance.

You have heard about lactose intolerance. Such people 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.