Tag: milk

i feel like this blog (ergo, me) is in need of a swift kick in the butt, to set it back straight. there’s so much to tell you… let’s just get to it!

friends who stay with us often seem surprised to discover that i, miss meiadeleite, cannot stomach milk. it wasn’t always this way. i used to love drinking milk with everything, up until about 3 years ago.

but then, in early 2011 i stopped drinking milk, as part of our diet experiment. i didn’t really miss it, so i skipped it for months and promptly forgot about it. later that year, i received my 23andme dna test results and was a bit intrigued to see this:

“who, me? lactose intolerant? nonsense!”, i thought – i drank milk my whole life!

but then i started to think about it… and some things started making sense. in the last few years, every time we went back to portugal, we ate whatever our parents put in front of us – not wanting to burden them with too many rules and restrictions on our short time there. so we drank meiadeleites for breakfast and ate leite creme to our little heart’s content… and invariably, while we were there, i’d get stomach problems. i would write it off as the consequences of general unhealthy eating… but then it got me thinking… could it be that when i stopped drinking milk every day, my body just gave up on dealing with the lactose? (i imagine it doing it in a overly dramatic fashion, with a big sigh of relief…)

this was a valid hypothesis, so, as scientists that we are, we experimented. the results were quite… striking. a glass of milk? immediate disaster. a tiny yoghurt cup? disaster. cheese was ok in small doses, as was butter, but all the rest was off the table.

and this is how i found that i’ve made myself lactose intolerant. the name of this blog hasn’t made sense for quite a while now, but i don’t mind. i know i could probably re-introduce it in the diet if i wanted, but truth is, i just don’t miss it all that much – and when in doubt, there are usually lactase pills nearby! :)