When I say that I’m lactose intolerant … it doesn’t mean that I can’t drink milk or eat milk products. It just makes it uncomfortable, it just makes me pass gas a lot more than others. Us native people get a big laugh out of it … as a kid, we used to have a contest as to who could produce the longest, loudest, smelliest farts (my brother won by a large margin with this and he was quite proud of it … sometimes we wondered if he was healthy or not judging by the gas he produced).

But on the other side of that, I can build a tolerance to lactose if I drink it enough and often. If I drink some milk every day, over time, I built a tolerance to it but if I stop for a while and then go back, then I’ll get lots of gas and then I have to build a tolerance again. In my 20s and 30s, I used to get it to the point where I could eat cheesecake, milk shakes, milk in my cereal and ice cream on a regular basis and never had a problem. Now I count my calories and watch my heart so I tend to stay away from milk and milk products for other reasons.