Milk Relieves Exercise Pain

I have an old page on my website called Questions Even I Couldn't Answer.

One was on whether lactose intolerance (LI) could cause back pain. I've never seen any studies that would lead me to think that there could be any relationship. The only connection would be something tangentially mentioned by someone in an email, that intestinal pain might be felt in the back. That's not very scientific, though.

I was reminded of this only because I ran across a medical study that came to the reverse conclusion: Milk helps exercise recovery: researchers by Shane Sterling at NutraIngredients.com.

The study, "Acute milk-based protein–CHO supplementation attenuates exercise-induced muscle damage," by Emma Cockburn, Philip R Hayes, Duncan N French, Emma Stevenson, and Alan St Clair Gibson, appeared in Applied Physiology, Nutrition and Metabolism, volume 33(4): 775–783 (2008).

"At 48 hour post-EIMD [exercise-induced muscle damage], milk and milk-based protein–CHO supplementation resulted in the attenuation of decreases in isokinetic muscle performance and increases in creatine kinase and myoglobin," the researchers wrote.

"This study supports the growing volume of literature which suggests that milk is a powerful post exercise recovery aid," said Dr Judith Bryans, a registered nutritionist and director of The Dairy Council in the UK.

"Previous research has shown milk to be an effective rehydration solution, while this is the first study to suggest that drinking milk following muscle-damaging exercise may decrease muscle damage."

EIMD occurs when protein structures break down within the muscle, and reduces muscle performance.

"The results found that, when consumed immediately after resistance-based muscle damaging exercise, both semi-skimmed milk and milk-based CHO-P helped to preserve more muscle than either the sports drink or water," the Dairy Council said.

Sports drinks are mostly expensive sugar water, just like vitamin drinks, in my opinion, so there's little surprise in finding that other liquids are superior. But who would have thought milk would be best? Not PETA, I'm sure.

An Unanswered Question May Be Answered

Tucked away in a far back corner of my website, Steve Carper's Lactose Intolerance Clearinghouse is a page that I forgot I had. Well, we don't like to forget our failures, do we? It was called Questions Even I Couldn't Answer.

I'm not alone. Columnists from Dear Abby to Dan Savage pile up questions that are so off the wall that no good answer is possible. A fun column can always be had on a slow day by simply reprinting them.

Like I said, I had almost forgotten about the page until I came across a newspaper article that triggered an inch in my head. Wasn't I asked a question something like this once? Turns out I had. Here was the original question.

Q. I have noticed over the years that the severity of my LI waxes and wanes with the amount of physical activity I do. I recently started working out 4-5 days a week and noticed about a week or so afterward that the LI was "gone". I also noticed this several years ago when I was cycling about 20-25 miles a day for 4-5 days a week. Have there been any studies linking physical activity to a significant reduction in LI?

My original answer had to be, no. Nobody's ever done a study to see if anything outside normal digestion is implicated in LI.

Allergies may be a different story. An unsigned article in the Tamil Star, What is exercise-induced food allergy? starts with this tantalizing paragraph.

Exercise can induce an allergic reaction to food. The usual scenario is that of a person eating a specific food, and then exercising. As he exercises and his body temperature increases, he begins to itch, gets lightheaded, and soon develops the characteristic allergic reactions of hives, asthma, abdominal symptoms, and even anaphylaxis. The cure, actually a preventive measure, for exercise-induced food allergy is simple-not eating for at least two hours before exercising.

No cites, no studies, no doctors quoted.

Tantalizing, though. And unproven.