Ramon wrote:Excuse me if I'm completely off base, but isn't Lactaid just milk with added lactase enzyme, and the "lactose free" Bryers just ice cream with lactase? Could not the same thing be accomplished by eating regular ice cream and taking lactase pills?
That's exactly right - they're just regular milk products with lactase added to split the disaccharide lactose into two monosaccharides - glucose and galactose (as I think someone mentioned further upthread). Babies produce lactase naturally in their bodies, but in many people, the ability to produce lactase declines young (i.e. by 5 or 6 years). In general, with many exceptions, the closer your ancestors' origins were to Northern Europe, the more likely you are to produce lactase throughout your lifetime. Many with lactose intolerance can consume dairy products easily by taking lactase tablets - available at virtually any drug store.
Two caveats:
1) A small number of people are allergic to the proteins in milk. But it's a very small number, and symptoms tend to be different than the gastrointestinal distress that people with true lactose intolerance suffer.
2) To quote Jeffery Steingarten in "It Must've Been Something I Ate,"
Fear of lactose seems to be the fashionable phobia of the 1990s.
<snip>
Many people who believe they are lactose intolerant really aren't, and most people can easily tolerate the amount of lactose in a glass of milk before they get sick."
He goes on to describe a study published in the New England Journal of Medicine, in which people who self-identified as lactose intolerant drank a glass of milk with breakfast every day for a week. Over the two weeks of the study, each participant got regular milk one week, lactose-reduced the other, and were asked to rate their discomfort. Both types of milk were rated very low on discomfort, and there was no significant difference between the milks re: discomfort.
Further comment on this one: if there's true lactose intolerance, it'll be far less likely to show up if the milk is consumed with meals, if the milk has higher fat content (e.g. whole milk), or if the milk is cultured. With the relatively high fat content of ice cream, which is frequently consumed after a meal, it would be extremely rare to have a reaction that could be specifically traced to the lactose.