I used to be the lactose tolerant-est. I was raised to think there’s no point in eating a meal if you don’t follow it up with ice cream for dessert, that Dannon’s Fruit on the Bottom yogurt provided great surprises at every turn, and that chips simply don’t exist without nacho cheese. For the first 23 years of my life, I drank a glass of Nestle’s Quik for breakfast every morning, and to this day my dad still does, first stirring it loud enough to wake up everyone within a mile radius and then drinking it spoonful by spoonful.
During my last year of college, though, I cut out most of the ice cream so I could at least pretend to want to be healthy and started drinking soy milk because my family farm makes a pretty penny off soybean sales. And now I’m f-ig lactose intolerant. For a while I didn’t put two and two together, but now I recognise that the moment I put the smalled bite of /eks/ frozen yogurt in my mouth, I’m a burblinggurbling gas machine.
Sexy?
My co-worker who goes on week-long colon cleanses where she poos ten to twelve times per minute tells me that adults aren’t meant to process milk and that I should give it up, but I think that’s a load of horse hockey, and I’m now on a mission to make myself lactose tolerant again. I’ve been reading up on it, and apparently you can re-train your lower intestine to grow the right lactose-processing bacteria if you drink a little bit of milk several times a day. 1/4 cup at a time with food, they say.
I’m pretty pumped about the possibility of getting my life back, of not having to ask myself, Is this cup of dulce de leche Haagen-Dazs worth a day of nonstop flatulence? But while I’m working milk back into my diet little by little, I suggest that, um, you think twice about sniffing near my bum.
