Talk:Lactose intolerance

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This Article Creates A Distorted View Of Lactose Intolerance -- What is the Truth?

I have noticed an abundance of statistics on the interenet related to lactose intolerance.

These statistics seem to fly in the face of experience.

1. How do you come up with 70-75% of the world population (4.5 billion people) being Lactose intolerant?

2. How accurate is this estimate? I have seen very little hard evidence except in major countries regarding Lactose Intolerance. This assumption seems to exclude Japanese from lactose tolerance, but Japanese stats show hugely increased milk consumption as do Australian dairy stats for exports to Japan. How is it the Japanese can NOW digest dairy products contrary to received scientific wisdom?

3. Indians are known to be lactose tolerant and we know of the sacred cows of India. Pakistan and Bangladesh are also of the same background. This is a huge part of the world population. Add North America and Europe. Add about half of South America.

4. China is now encouraging the consumption of milk and dairy products. So far, I have not heard of an epidemic of dead Chinese due to Lactose Intolerance.

5. Define Lactose Intolerance. The word intolerance is absolute. The implication is lactose intolerant people cannot eat and cannot digest dairy products. Obviously there are varying degrees of digestibility.

6. What are the true facts behind the statistics. What size are the samples? Where are the samples from? I have read at wrongdiagnosis.com that the stats on Lactose Intolerance are suspect and depend upon extrapolations of data from a very few western countries.

7. Many cultures which herded cattles and goats are able to digest lactose--this includes African and Mongolian herding cultures. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 142.106.169.166 (talk) 19:00, 2 July 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Re. Units... there is a comment that cheese might contain 10% of the lactose of milk. This is meaningless... is this per unit volume, per unit of dried milk solids, or something else? Meaningfull data would be helpful. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.150.112.2 (talk) 22:57, 15 July 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Proposed split.

I've been trying to get to grips with this article in my head for a couple of hours now. I'm confused by it. Judging by the talk page, so are a lot of people. They come to the article looking for information on a medical condition, and they're confused by all the talk of percentages and what's "normal"; or they come here looking for information on an evolutionary trait, and they find only jumbled lists of statistics using inconsistent terminology. I think the core problem is that this article conflates several concepts: lactose intolerance, lactose malabsorption, lactase deficiency and lactase persistence. Not without reason of course; they're all facets of the same phenomena. But because those facets fall into different areas of academic study there are wide discrepancies in approach and terminology, discrepancies which this article makes a bit of a mess of dealing with. My proposal is that this article will only see significant improvement if it is able to commit to one approach, one set of terminology, and therefore it must be split into two:

Lactose intolerance, the medical condition - with a brief summary of the prevalence of lactose intolerance around the world, but mainly focusing on the biological action, diagnosis, nutrition and treatment.
A new article, lactase persistence, dealing with the ability to digest milk in adulthood as an evolutionary novelty in some human populations. So to start with it would consist of the current second and fourth sections (there's a lot more I'd like to add to this though).

I think the result would be two much cleaner, much more coherent, and much more understandable articles. —Joseph Roe^Tk•Cb, 19:49, 26 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Wow

Now, I'm not a stupid person, and I only come to wikipedia to learn things, however, this article is horrific. I have one main concern. The rehabilitation section says something about "Secondary Lactose intolerance". I have no idea what this is, however, the primary and secondary sections don't even explain the difference between this. It ends up being extremely vague, and confusing as to why either sections exist, because they certainly don't seem to add much, or explain much, this page isn't a fucking statistic report on lactose intolerance, simply put, put statistics with other statitistics, and information with other information, and merge the two as rarely as possible, now I have to google search to find if I might be able to rehabilitate myself :(. Sad face. Anyways, this page is shocking, people have edited and added information without maintaining a structure. For the benefit of everyone who might actually *need* good information (Students, people trying to self diagnose, or learn more about this), please address these issues.