Better Tasting Lactose-Free Milk Coming?

"The future's so bright, I gotta wear shades."*

More news about better products maybe possibly hopefully some day coming to a supermarket near you.

To talk about the future, you know I'm going to start with the past and work my way there slowly. Feel free to skip a few paragraphs.

Lactase supplements were invented in 1964 by a Dutch company then known as Gist-Brocades. Happy 50th lactase! I don't know what market they were aiming for, since hardly anybody outside of a tiny community of researchers knew about the existence of lactose intolerance, but with high hopes and no fanfare whatsoever the company put out a product called Maxilact. The first Maxilact was a powder that could be added to fresh milk to break down the lactose into glucose and galactose, both simple sugars that the body can easily digest. America got introduced to lactase in the 1970s, when Alan Kligerman bought the rights and started a company now known as Lactaid. Lactase pills are now so common in every supermarket, pharmacy, and discount store that they don't really need much in the way of advertising. Same with lactose-free milks, which use a liquid solution of lactase to break down the lactose before it reaches your body. They can be found everywhere, too, with most major supermarket chains having their own house brand alongside of regional and national lactose-free milk brands.

Today lactose-free worlds is super-shiny indeed compared to the world of 1978, when I learned I was lactose intolerant. I didn't even hear about Lactaid pills until 1984. Milks arrived later, and they started as 80% or 90% lactose-reduced. True 100% lactose-free milks are newer still.

So what can be greater than 100% lactose-free milk in a dozen different varieties? How does better-tasting 100% lactose-free milk sound?

Milk that's had lactase added to it apparently has a problem, a problem named arylsulfatase. Don't feel bad if you've never heard of it. I never heard of it either and I've been studying the field for 36 years. But there it is in Elsevier's Encyclopedia of Dairy Sciences (Second Edition) from 2011. I'm sure it's a steal at $1136 for the ebook edition but fortunately this particular page is available at Google Books. Here's the science:

[T]he development of off-flavor in lactase-treated UHT (Ultra High Temperature pasteurized) milk is related to the accumulation of ρ-cresol - which when present in minute quantities leads to a severe "medical" or "animal" off-flavor. It was discovered that ther accumulation of ρ-cresol in UHT milk was due to the hydrolysis of sulfanated cresol, which is naturally present in milk, by the enzyme arylsuflanase. Arylsulfanase was introduced in the milk as a side activity in the lactase enzyme preparation, and was found to be present in all commercial neutral lactases. DSM Food-Specialties has recently selected a K. lactis strain [of the yeast used to manufacture lactase] that is devoid of arylsulfanase activity.

Who is DSM Food-Specialties? None other than the current parent company of Maxilact. It's taken a while, but Maxilact just put out a press release announcing that a European patent for this new strain of lactase has been granted.

The patent relates to a lactase enzyme, which is free from arylsulfatase. Arylsulfatase is an impurity found in lactase that converts components naturally present in milk to cause off-flavor in lactose-free dairy products, resulting in a limited shelf life. Adding arylsulfatase-free Maxilact® to a dairy formulation ensures that off-flavor development is no longer an issue and the shelf life can be extended.

Only one tiny detail remains open: This new better-tasting milk doesn't appear to exist commercially right now. Certainly not in America. Maxilact is a major player in the small community of lactase so I'm confident that somebody will start using this. Maybe we'll even see a major ad campaign about lactose-free milk, something that hasn't happened in several years.

The future: you gotta love it.

*Yeah, that was supposed to be ironic but nobody had the patience for irony in the 1980s. Besides misreading Timbuk3's catchy ditty about nuclear destruction, we also managed to hear only the first line in REM's "The One I Love" (This one goes out to the one I love/This one goes out to the one I've left behind/A simple prop to occupy my time) and make a wedding song of Sting's ode to stalkers "Every Breath You Take" ("I'll be watching you"). Seriously, an entire decade in which nobody bothered to listen to all the lyrics in a rock song. What's really ironic is that the older I get the less nostalgia I have.

Lactase Powder Can Replace Lactase Drops

Hard to believe, but I started this blog seven years ago. That means I've watched entire generations of products come onto the market, leave, and come back again. It's like watching a time lapse movie of glaciers advancing and retreating.

The glaciers are back. Or let me set the scene for the new news.

Everybody who is lactose intolerant should know all about lactase. Lactase is the enzyme that digests lactose, the sugar found in dairy products. Digesting means breaking a complex chemical down to its simplest components: amino acids for proteins, fatty acids for fats, and simple sugars for carbohydrates. Lactose is a sugar, which is a carbohydrate. More importantly, it is a complex sugar, a disaccharide, composed of two simple sugars, glucose and galactose. Lactose is too big to be absorbed into the body through the small intestine, but the glucose and galactose that result when lactase splits it go through easily. Virtually every human - and every mammal - is born with the ability to manufacture enough lactase to digest the lactose int their mother's milk. And most humans - and virtually all mammals - lose that ability as they age. Result: lactose intolerance, defined here as the symptoms produced by the presence of undigested lactose in the intestines.

Until the 1970s there was absolutely nothing that could be done about this. Then Gist-Brocades, a Dutch pharmaceutical firm, discovered a way to get yeast to produce their own version of lactase, which could be harvested. This wasn't artificial lactase, but the real stuff. Or at least a variant.

Quick sidenote about enzymes. An enzyme is a catalyst, a chemical that speeds up other chemical reactions without being affected itself. Left alone lactose would still break down to its simple sugars. It might take longer than your lifetime for this to happen, but chemically it must happen. Nothing stays inside your intestines for more than a few days so waiting a lifetime is out of the question. Lactase, though, speeds up the process to near instantaneously. That ability makes enzymes vital to life. The body manufactures some 500,000 of them. Without them your chemistry would simply stall to a stop. And so would you.

All the enzymes are very complex proteins. And like all very complex proteins lactase can be put together in a multitude of ways. All the lactases work at the primary task of digesting lactose but they can be engineered to work best - i.e., split lactose fastest - under different conditions. Some lactases work best at body temperature and in high acidity. These are used to make the classic lactase pills, capsules, and tablets that you chew or swallow with food. Your stomach is notoriously acidic and always at body temperature.

That wasn't the first lactase that Gist-Brocades found. That lactase worked best in cool temperature with low acidity. Those happen to be conditions found in a container of milk sitting in a refrigerator. So they marketed the lactase as a powder to be added to fresh milk or other liquid dairy products. Once mixed in, the lactase worked over a day or so inside the milk and could be drunk the next day as lactose-reduced and symptom-free milk.

Remember, you can't substitute one for the other and expect it to work very well. Don't try to mix regular lactase pills into liquid dairy. There's no harm to doing so, but you aren't going to have low-lactose milk in the end.

Powders have some disadvantages. The main one that bothered people at the time was that they sometimes didn't dissolve completely, especially if the stirring in wasn't thorough. Powders were on the market for a few years even so. The first version of what then was called "Lact-Aid" was a powder. After a few years, a liquid version was developed. A few drops of liquid dissolved much more quickly and easily than the powders.

Fast forward to 2008. (Look at that glacier melt!) Lactase drops never were a huge seller and for a time every firm in America stopped making them. Customers had to write away to Canadian firms like Lacteeze to get a supply. I called it Huge News! when a firm called Pharmax started making lactase drops available in the U.S. again, saving huge amounts on postage. As I could have told them, the market for lactase drops hadn't increased. They stopped making the drops in 2010.

Lacteeze made them available the whole time, to be sure, and other U.S. firms now also sell liquid lactase. To my surprise, Pharmax is back in business. Making lactase powder.

Product Description

Lactase Powder 1.6oz Supplement

Serving Size: 1 scoop
Servings Per Container: 75
Amount Per Serving: Lactase enzyme 12.6 mg(providing 615 LAU lactase units
Other Ingredients: Maltodextrin.
Recommended intake: Add one scoop of Lactase Powder to water or juice prior to consumption of dairy products or as professionally directed.

I'm assuming this means they've developed ways of increasing the dissolvability of the powder. The reviews on Amazon are positive. You can find Pharmax Lactase Powder on many health sites, so no need to go to Amazon. I found the image of the bottle on the PureFormulas.com site.

If you want to make low-lactose dairy products at home, probably more cheaply than the fairly expensive store brands, you should give this a try.

Low-Lactose Milk Straight From the Source

"Scientists at a north China university say they have bred the world's first genetically-modified calf that will produce low-lactose milk in two years."

That ought to make you bolt upright in your seats, and your eyeballs pop out of your head.

Imagine. Low-lactose milk, low-lactose dairy products, low-lactose everything. That's a dream come true for those of us who are lactose intolerant. (Sorry, allergy sufferers and vegans. You can stop reading now. I'll get to articles for you pretty soon, though.)

I haven't seen anything about this breakthrough in the U.S. media, but it's big news all over Asia. That first paragraph is taken from Xinhaunet.com, a Chinese English-news website, under the title of "Genetically engineered, low-lactose dairy calf bred in China."

A more detailed article can be found on Pakistan's national newspaper's site, The Nation.

The technique is similar to the one that created Dolly, the closed sheep, back in 1996. Instead of making an exact duplicate, though, one gene is changed so that the cow will produce a "lactose dissolution enzyme" that will break down the milk's lactose into glucose and galactose, exactly as the lactase in a pill does.

We're still very much in the experimental stage, so don't expect natural Chinese low-lactose milk to show up on your grocery shelves very soon. Only one of the 14 modified embryos made it to calfhood. She has to grow up and start producing milk before we know for sure that the technique is viable and that's a minimum of two years. A herd of low-lactose cows is farther out on the horizon and the generally availability of the milk is in Jetsons territory.

I'm encouraged by the news, nevertheless. It means that some scientists are actually thinking about the problem of lactose intolerance. Few if any do in the U.S. Here it's a settled issue for a tiny minority and shows no signs of ever growing in interest. Not so in Asia, where several billion LI consumers are becoming a viable market.

The path won't be easy even in Asia. Any gene changes, even for something as absolutely benign as manufacturing lactase, is like waving red flags at a segment of the population. Genetically modified (GM) foods are going to be a stormy issue all over the world. The discussion of it won't be rational, because it touches on primal feelings on what people fell is "right". And it's absolutely true that GM techniques can result - inadvertently or deliberately - in horrible harm. I know that's true because everything, every single thing, every change, every advance, every invention, every policy, every law, every idea can result - inadvertently or deliberately - in horrible harm. Banning all GM because it can result in harm deprives us of all the amazingly huge piles of good that the technique is also capable of. That's bad science and bad logic. We need to examine issues one by one to determine whether their possible value outweighs the possible ills. Low-lactose cows seem to fall squarely on the side of value. We won't know for sure for many years, but I find this good news to read.

81-Year-Old Founder of Lactaid Still a Dynamo

I finally met Alan Kligerman two years at the NIH State of the Science Conference on Lactose Intolerance. Kligerman is the founder of Lactaid and the man responsible for the current public awareness of lactose intolerance. (Almost to a fault. The other day I saw yet another supposedly authoritative source recommend that people get Lactaid pills rather than lactase pills to alieve the symptoms of lactose intolerance. If they're not careful, Lactaid will lose its trademark.) I called him a ball of fire in that earlier post and I meant it: he exuded more energy during that half-hour sitdown lunch than I do all day.

Kligerman sold Lactaid many years ago and his big second product, Beano, in 2001, but still runs his pharmaceutical firm AkPharma, and is committed to introducing new products to the market even after 61 years in the business. An article in the pressofAtlanticCity website, Made in South Jersey: Developer of Beano testing product to heal wounds faster by Kevin Post, gave some details.

Today AkPharma is focused on research and development, but still manufactures one product — Prelief, which when added to coffee takes the acid out of it and provides calcium, a nutrient coffee drinkers lose. ...

Kligerman, 81, sees the company’s future in potential medical uses for the active ingredient of Prelief. ... he suspected that the active ingredient — calcium glycerophosphate, or CGP — was doing more than just removing food acid.

Preliminary studies suggested it was having an effect on the bladder cell walls, he said, so he commissioned studies confirming the bladder effects and also showing promising benefits of applying the compound to skin. ...

The study was conducted on 20 patients who were getting both knees replaced, with the CGP preparation applied to the surgical incision on one knee and a preparation without CGP to the other. ...

A report on the trial, published this month in the Journal of Wound Care, said the treated knees showed less swelling and inflammation, particularly in the first two weeks when the incisions were closing. The overall assessment of CGP-treated wounds was significantly better.

“The results of this study demonstrate that topical CGP application might speed wound healing,” the report said. ...

Such product development is a long way from the original Kligerman Dairy founded in 1918 in Atlantic City.

“This is thrilling to a kid who would go into a store and if they put two quarts of Kligerman milk in the dairy case they were doing him the biggest favor in the world,” he said.

The company today also has a pet milk called CatSip, produced and packaged in a Western dairy and distributed from there and from the Egg Harbor Township plant. CatSip is a fortified milk that is digestible by adult cats and dogs, which can be lactose intolerant, he said.

Even after working for 61 years, Kligerman said he’s still fired up by the creative potential of what has become a research and development firm.

“I’m probably the only member of the family who had fun in the dairy business,” he said.

I'm thrilled that's he still part of the business and still striving to do good. I hope that both of us get to have fun doing this for another 61 years.

ConsumerLab Accuses Lacteeze of Lacking Lactase

ConsumerLab is a rival of the more famous Consumer Reports. It concentrates more on pills, powders, supplements, and remedies, though, a field that is rife with quacks and where even the legitimate products may not do what they claim.

Lactase is hardly in that class. It's easy to make, can be measured with proper federally-approved units, and does exactly what it's supposed to do. Like anything that is sold over-the-counter, though, some products have to be better than others. So when ConsumerLab did a report on lactase I didn't expect any surprises.

Wrong.

Can lactose-free foods -- like like lactose-free milk -- and lactase enzyme supplements really help people with lactose intolerance? They may -- but it depends on how much enzyme activity is in the supplement and how much lactose has been removed from the food.

ConsumerLab.com selected and tested ten different lactase supplements and three popular brands of lactose-free milk. The testing showed one lactase supplement to be ineffective and another with so little activity as to be of questionable value. But ConsumerLab.com also found many supplements that met their claims and may be helpful. The three lactose-free milks had no detectable lactose but only two provided a significant amount of vitamin D.

ConsumerLab.com found that an equal amount of lactase enzyme (enough to help with a high lactose meal) cost as little as 8 cents to as much as $6.79 depending on the brand of lactase supplement.

That's from the public page. You have to be a member to get the full report. Luckily, I am. Here's the full story.

The following lactase enzymes pills were tested (amount of lactase units):

CVS Pharmacy Dairy Relief Fast Acting (9,000 - 27,000)
Enzymedica Lacto (9,500)
Equate (Wal-Mart) Fast Acting Dairy Digestive Supplement (9,000 - 27,000)
Garden of Life Raw Enzymes (1,890 - 5,670)
KAL Lactase Enzyme (250)
Kirkland (Costco) Signature Fast Acting Lactase (9,000 - 27,000)
Lactaid Fast Act (9,000 - 27,000)
Natural Factors Lactase Enzyme 9,000
Nature’s Plus Say Yes to Dairy (3,000)
Puritan’s Pride Lactase Enzyme (1,750 - 5,250)
Solgar Lactase 3500 (3,500)
Source Naturals Lactase Digest (3,000 - 9,000)
Zygest Lactase Enzyme (1,750 - 5,250)


One liquid lactase:

Lacteeze

The three lactose-free milks:

Lactaid Fat-Free Milk,
Land O Lakes Dairy Ease
Organic Valley Lactose-Free Organic Fat Free Milk


All the lactase pills made their approved list, which as far as I can tell means only that they contain the amount of lactase that the manufacturers claimed.

There are other factors just as important. Tops on that list is whether the amount of lactase is sufficient for your needs. That's a touchy subject. Although the report cites a few studies, the truth is that nobody really knows what amount of lactase to recommend for the simple reason that each person is different. Some people seem to need only a basic minimum amount of lactase; others report requiring multiple pills. How your system reacts to the lactose in food varies with every mouthful. It's a frustratingly impossible subject to research. Over the years, however, the standard in the marketplace has been that a basic pill contains 3,000 units and an "extra-strength" pill contains 9,000. You might be able to get by with a smaller quantity, but I have always stated that anything below 1,000 units is a worthless waste of money. The KAL pill wouldn't make my approved list. In addition, the lactase in it is just one of a mixture of other digestive enzymes and I don't know if any of them are useful or in the right quantities. I never recommend any pills that contain such a mix. Garden of Life Raw Enzymes and Enzymedica Lacto also are mixes and not recommended by me. ConsumerLab noted that they are also the most expensive products per unit. As you would expect, the Costco and Walmart brand products were the cheapest at 8 and 12 cents per 9,000 units. Chewable tablets were slightly more expensive, Lactaid Fast Acting Vanilla Twist Flavor at 20 cents and CVS Pharmacy Dairy Relief Fast Acting Vanilla Twist Flavor at 21 cents, but some people - kids especially - may prefer them. The health food store brands were consistently more expensive.

So what about Lacteeze? Well, lactase pills are meant to be taken along with food to counteract the lactose in them. They work in your digestive tract. Lactase liquid, on the other hand, is a completely different type of lactase that is designed to be added to milk or other liquid dairy products and "digest" the lactase before it reaches your mouth. That's what Lacteeze liquid is. (Lacteeze, which is a Canadian product, also makes pills, which evidently were not tested.) I've recommended Lacteeze for years, because they came to our rescue when all the American brands of liquid lactase went off the market. I've never heard any complaints about them, although I always warn people that nothing works for everybody. I simply can't imagine why ConsumerLab couldn't find lactase in the Lacteeze bottle. Could their tests simply not be designed to find that variety of lactase? It's a mystery. I'm very hesitant to steer people away from a product that been a major company for decades on the basis of this odd finding.

Lactose-free milk, of course, is made by adding liquid lactase to regular milk. The process is similar to what you can do at home, although it is scaled up to industrial levels. All three milks in the test had lactose levels below what their test labs could detect. That doesn't necessarily mean absolutely zero, but so close that any difference is meaningless. All were about the same price, although the organic milk was a bit higher. The claim that one milk - Dairy Ease - didn't provide "a significant amount of vitamin D" is bizarre and possibly spurious. In reality, that meant that the carton didn't say how much much vitamin D was present and so they read that as zero even though Dairy Ease stated that vitamin D was added. That's shoddy work at best.

Overall, the report yields results pretty much exactly what I would expect. Store brands are cheaper than name brands, and mainstream brands more expensive than natural food items. Buy pills either as cheap as you can find, in whatever form you like, or pay a little more for the convenience of buying them where you usually shop. Lactase is lactase, as long as you buy sufficient quantities of it and that's all you're buying.

I'll try to investigate the strange finding about Lacteeze.

You Aren't Spending Enough Money

Digestive Advantage sent out a press release to announce that their trademark combination of probiotics and lactase is now protected by patent as well. So don't even think of copying it.

This isn't really news for anybody outside the company, but what caught my eye was a filler paragraph later on in the release.

"The lactase enzyme market is rather stagnant, with the leading brands declining in sales. We believe this is because it's not the ideal solution to lactose intolerance -- it's not always easy to take a lactase pill before eating dairy, especially if you don't know that the food you're about to eat contains dairy," said Marshall Fong, who heads the marketing team at Ganeden. "Our Digestive Advantage Lactose Intolerance combines lactase enzyme plus probiotics to increase lactose digestion throughout the digestive tract. People love our product because it works, and because they don't need to take it with every meal."

Yes, that's mostly marketing speech. But that first line jumps out. It may even be true. (Oh, I'll hear from them tomorrow.)

The lactase enzyme market is pretty much down to Lactaid, some natural foods brands, and lots of cheap house brand imitations of Lactaid. No new national brands have entered the market for years. The amount of shelf space given to them in stores - always the best indicator of how well something is selling - hasn't grown in many years.

Yet awareness of lactose intolerance is as high as its ever been.

So you aren't doing your part.

Go out and spend some money.

Here's the weird part. Digestive Advantage Lactose Intolerance Lactase Plus Formula and Lactaid and its imitators usually aren't shelved together in the store. How that helps us I can't imagine. Stores need to get their acts together. Tell your store managers.

Lactase Drops vs. Lactase Pills

Buying a lactase pill is easy. Go into any supermarket, or pharmacy, or discount store, or even most convenience stores and you'll find them in all sizes, shapes, spending ranges, and states of chewability. You can slip them into your pocket and have them available at any moment to pop into your mouth with food.

So wouldn't it be great if you could just crumble them up and put them in your milk for later use?

But you can't.

The reason is that lactase is not as simple as lactose. All lactose is exactly the same. It's a disaccharide, a combination of two simple sugars, with only a couple of dozen atoms and a single arrangement.

Lactase is an enzyme, which means it's a protein. Proteins are huge and complex. The lactase protein can be found in nature in hundreds of forms and hundreds more can be made in a lab or can be created by using yeasts to form them in cultures. Each individual form of lactase will work to split - or digest - the lactose disaccharide into its simpler component parts. But each works best at a different temperature and different acidity and other variables.

Food scientists use these variables to make lactase for commercial use. Specifically, the lactase that is used in lactase pills is designed to stay stable in the heat and high acidity of a human stomach, where the pH is around 2 (range: 1 to 3.5).

The lactase that is used in lactase drops, on the other hand, is designed to be used when added to refrigerated milk and in almost neutral acidity. The acidity of milk is around 6.7. That's a bigger difference than it might seem at first. Each point on the pH scale is ten times more acid than the next. That means that the stomach is around 100,000 times as acid as milk.

One type of lactase just can't be substituted for the other. They will work poorly if at all.

At least we have both.

Or do we? That's tomorrow's topic.

Report from the LI Conference, part 3

So where do you start a state of the science conference on lactose intolerance. At the beginning. Rimshot. But where's the beginning? Birth? Not early enough. How about with the fetus?

After the usual opening remarks, the conference began with an overview. Appropriately enough, the first presentation started with the basics.

Early Feeding, Human Milk, and the Transition
Josef Neu, M.D.
Professor of Pediatrics
Director of Neonatology Fellowship Training Program
Department of Pediatrics
Division of Neonatology
University of Florida College of Medicine

We're all designed to be introduced to lactose through mother's milk. That introduction happens shortly after birth. And that creates an unexpected dilemma. Since a fetus will never be exposed to lactose, there's no real reason for one to make any lactase. Yet that lactase has to be there and available when the mother's milk comes flowing in.

The body's response is to gradually ramp up lactase availability. Scientists first detect lactase at about 8 weeks of development. Even at 34 weeks, lactase is only at 30% of what will be needed.

That leaves about six weeks for it to reach the needed 100%. (Actually a tiny bit longer. Mothers make what is known as colostrum for the first couple of days of feeding, a special type of milk designed to add to and stimulate the infant's immune system. Colostrum is especially low in lactose.)

What about premature infants? They face a double whammy. Not only are they not fully developed but they are lacking in a critical enzyme to help digest the one food they can eat. No wonder that premature babies faced such long odds in the days before modern science.

Here's where the science gets weird. Despite all this, studies have shown that feeding lactose to premature infants will help them increase lactase levels faster. It's better to give them mother's milk than lactose-free formulas. (After a month or so, the difference disappears as the lactase-making ability increases naturally.)

Even weirder, the partial lactose intolerance that ensues is itself helpful. Some of the lactose reaches the colon, because there's not enough lactase to digest it all. Babies are born with sterile guts: no bacteria. The bacteria enter after birth because bacteria are everywhere and the world is far from sterile. Which bacteria are in the colon make all the difference. The presence of lactose selects for bacteria that are more beneficial. In other words, lactose acts as a prebiotic. "Prebiotics are non-digestible food ingredients that stimulate the growth and/or activity of bacteria in the digestive system which are beneficial to the health of the body."

Think about that. Food companies are spending millions to create prebiotics to add to foods to make them healthier. Humans do it naturally to help premature babies drink their mother's milk. Mind-boggling.

Lactose Intolerance and 2010

Happy New Year, Everyone.

Today is January 1, 2010. Somewhere in the United States, some cable station is playing the movie 2010 right now. I know because I bumped into it while flipping channels a while ago. That movie was made back in 1984, when 2010 seemed like a future so distant that space travel seemed like the easiest prediction to make.

Nobody's that sure about the future today. (I mean, 2009? Even looking backward that year isn't the least bit plausible.) We can't even agree whether we're starting a new decade or not. (Yes, 2009 meant the end of the Aughts. But 2010 will be the end of the first decade of the 21st century. And every year is the end of some decade. Every minute. Every second. Of course, when something happens 31,536,000 times a calendar year, people get bored and latch on to fun stuff with more meaning, like having a zero at the end. You have to be very bored to read meaning into that, but it's all reruns on television this week, isn't it?)

So here's what I know for sure.

Lactose intolerance. It's a simple thing that we make very complicated. All mammals are genetically programmed to produce milk to feed their live young. And all mammals manufacture a unique sugar, lactose, to use as one of the energy sources in that milk. (Except for the monotremes, the most primitive mammals that evolved before lactose did, and the pinnipedia, sea mammals that use extra fat rather than lactose.) To digest lactose, that is, to break it down into simpler sugars so that it can be absorbed into the small intestine, all the lactose-producing mammals also manufacture an enzyme called lactase. Nobody really understands why the mammals went to the trouble of having to build up a complex sugar found nowhere else in nature just so that they would also have to make a special enzyme just to break it down. Somewhere along the line evolution thought this was a good idea. It works. Mammals are extremely successful animals.

It works, but it takes effort, in the form of extra energy to do this double manufacturing process. Mammals only do it for as long as is absolutely necessary, for the length of time they would normally be dependent on their mother's milk. At about the time of weaning, all mammals lose the ability to manufacture lactase. After that age, all mammals are lactose intolerant.

Humans are mammals. Humans have lactose in mother's milk, the most lactose of any species, about seven percent worth. All humans manufacture lactase, except for the tiniest handful who never do. These babies, who have what is called congenital lactose intolerance, used to die of starvation within a week of birth. They couldn't survive until nondairy milk substitutes were found early last century.

And all humans naturally stop manufacturing lactase at about the age of weaning, which is around three years. That means we are all naturally lactose intolerant.

Except some are not. Some humans are mutants. Well, all humans are mutants. Every single one of us have some mutations on some genes, which is why every one of us is different from all the others. One particular mutation, found on chromosome 2, either never sends out the signal that turns off lactase production or doesn't send it out until after the normal age of weaning. Around 30% of humanity has this mutation.

That's where it gets complicated. How do we define lactose intolerance? Is it by the form of the gene we have? Some people use this definition. That's how scientists estimate numbers and percentages like "Around 30% of humanity has this mutation."

The problem with that definition is that some people who currently manufacture lactase and who can drink milk just fine get classified as lactose intolerant. This confuses everyone. Wouldn't it be better to define lactose intolerance as those people who get symptoms from drinking milk (even if they don't have another disease or genetic condition)? That is better, and it's the definition that most researchers writing about the subject use. Unless they're genetic researchers who care more about genes than about symptoms.

I care about symptoms. That's because I'm lactose intolerant either way you define it. I'm pretty sure that most of you reading this care about symptoms too. Whatever's happening on my chromosome 2 is less interesting to me than what happens in my large intestine after drinking milk.

I can predict one piece of the future, therefore. For the rest of 2010 I'll be spending a lot of time writing about nondairy products, lactase pills, lactose-free cookbooks, and anything else that might help people who want to avoid the lactose in milk. I'll also write regularly about ways of avoiding milk altogether for those of you with dairy allergies or dietary needs that make you want to cut milk either temporarily or permanently out of your diet. And I'll spend the rest of my time correcting the misinformation on these subjects I find on the great unwashed intrawebs out there. It's all good.

Thank you for reading. Now, and in the future.

Good Afternoon, Calgary

A little late, unless they do reruns or repeats, but I did a live interview with Canadian radio station CHQR today. Mike Blanchard interviewed me to get my reactions on an article that had appeared in the Toronto Globe and Mail called "Is milk good for your kids?"

Hey, you know me. Try to pin me down on a complicated, contentious subject and I strike back with a forthright "Yes. And No." Which I believe strongly.

The article is mostly one sided, with eminent doctors citing studies that have shown some negative effect of milk. These articles are true but the kind of truth that results from not mentioning any studies on the other side, like those that show that low-fat milk can help control, even lower, high blood pressure and so lower hypertension. The alternative view is given by representatives of farmers groups, who unfairly are not given a chance to cite particular studies.

If you read carefully you see that even the nay-sayers are reluctant to remove milk from children's diet. They do question whether the Canadian government guidelines should proclaim it to be "essential".

I agree that milk is definitely not essential for those children and adults who are allergic to milk. A great many alternatives now can be found in stores, "milk" substitutes made from soy, rice, nuts, hemp, and coconuts. Parents need to compare the nutritional labeling to regular milk to ensure that the nutrients these "milks" contains are close to the original. With dozens of different brands and styles and market segments aimed for, ingredients often vary widely.

Those of us who are lactose intolerant can use these products as well, but we can also find ready-made lactose-free milk and other diary products or use lactase pills - several brands of which are made by Canadian companies - to reduce symptoms if you're having regular dairy products.

Dairy is well known for high calcium content in a palatable form. There is calcium in cheese and pizza and ice cream and custards and all the other delicious dairy products that are omnipresent in western food cultures. You can trying getting your kids to load up on green vegetables and fish for their calcium but many parents report that it's a harder job.

And there is a hidden danger of merely yanking milk away from a group likely to drink large quantities of it. The alternative is all too often not soy "milk" but soda. Sweet soda contains twice as much sugar per glass than milk does and has virtually none of the many nutrients milk is famous for, according to NutritionData.com:


In short:

• Know what problem you're trying to solve.
• Know both the pros and cons of the food you're concerned about and the food you want to replace it with.
• Learn whether your child will accept and adapt to the new diet.
• Learn to stop being frightened. Unless you child had a true allergy, which only affects 2-3% of children, and therefore must eliminate milk, dairy products are always an option. They may not be essential. They may not be necessary, since vegans can have perfectly healthy diet with the same kind of attention and intimate knowledge of their food that I suggest. But there is no good reason to think that they are actively harmful. The data is sketchy and limited. We need better studies all around before we start eliminating major food groups.

In the end it's a private choice for adults and a reasoned choice for parents of children. You can keep a child perfectly healthy and happy either way. Convenience, cost, and availability, especially of packaged food, restaurant meals, and eating with Friends and family, may become the determining factor.

You can find a middle course through the dueling experts. It's called common sense. Parents are good at finding that middle ground, even in a subject as contentious and poorly understood as milk and dairy.

Webber Naturals Lactase Enzyme

WN Pharmaceuticals, Ltd. is another Canadian firm that makes a lactase enzyme product. It's called webber naturals lactase enzyme. It comes in blister packs, meaning that you pop each one out of a flat package individually. Apparently, it comes only in the triple strength 9000 FCC units. Inert ingredients are cellulose and magnesium stearate.

Wikipedia states that:

Magnesium stearate melts at about 88 °C, is not soluble in water, and is generally considered safe for human consumption[citation needed]. Because it is widely regarded as harmless, it is often used as a diluent in the manufacture of medical tablets, capsules and powders (E470b). In this regard, the substance is also useful because it has lubricating properties, preventing ingredients from sticking to manufacturing equipment during the compression of chemical powders into solid tablets; magnesium stearate is the most commonly used lubricant for tablets.

When used as a filling agent in the manufacture of capsules and tablets, such as vitamins, the source of this ingredient is typically bovine.[citation needed] However, there is an increasing number of vegetarian options in which the product specifically indicates it contains magnesium stearate from vegetable sources.

You can read a product monograph .pdf about webber naturals lactase enzyme online.

It is available from many of the same online sources as SteriMax's Dairy Free lactase enzyme so it may be orderable in the U.S. in addition to Canada.

SteriMax's Dairy Free Brand Lactase Pills

SteriMax Inc., a Canadian pharmaceutical firm, makes Dairy Free lactase enzyme, in regular strength - 3000 FCC units - and extra strength - 4500 FCC units.

Each white, round, biconvex tablet contains 3000 FCC lactase units of ß-D-galactosidase derived from Aspergillus oryzae Non-medicinal ingredients: cellulose, colloidal silicon dioxide, povidone and magnesium stearate Store at room temperature, away from heat Available in bottles of 100

Lactase Enzyme is for you when you suffer from GAS, CRAMPS, BLOATING, or DIARRHEA caused by milk or dairy products

Dairy Free is certified Kosher
Dairy Free is listed on the Quebec Formulary

Povidone is something most of you would probably not recognize. It is a synthetic polymer used as a dispersing and suspending agent. I found on Wikipedia that:

references state that as polyvinyl pyrrolidone and its derivatives are fully from mineral synthetic origin. Therefore, its use in the production should not be a problem for vegans.

The Extra Strength tablets are available only in bottles of 80.

Dairy Free Lactase Enzyme is available though a number of online Canadian suppliers. Some of them may ship to the U.S.

OmnigestEZ, A Lactase Pill

Saw this on the shelves of my local supermarket. OmnigestEZ claims to be an all-around digestive of "most all types of food: fats, protein, starch and carbohydrates, vegetables and dairy."

How does it do this? With a mix of several digestive enzymes: acid protease, amylase, cellulase, glucoamylase, lipase, and nutral protease in addition to lactase.

There are many such pills on the market, but few contain what I consider to be a useful amount of lactase. OmnigestEZ does, with 3000 FCC units, the same as most basic (not ultra) lactase pills. That justifies this statement on their FAQs.

Q: I am lactose intolerant; will OMNIGEST EZ help me?


A: Yes. OMNIGEST EZ contains the right amount of the enzyme lactase to aid in the digestion of typical meals containing dairy products.

The History of Lactose Tolerance

Evolution is the most powerful idea in science. Scientific American Editor in Chief John Rennie said that. He's right. We don't have to spend much time thinking about quantum mechanics or relativity. We are, and need to be, obsessed about our bodies, the food we eat, bugs spreading infectious diseases, all the animals in the world, the floral environment, medicine, surgery, everything we do and experience every hour of every day of our lives. The only way that life in all its ramifications can be understood is to study the basics in terms of evolutionary systems. As seminal biologist Theodore Dobzhansky once wrote, "Nothing in Biology Makes Sense Except in the Light of Evolution."

My point of entry into the world of evolutionary history is always lactose tolerance. People who can drink milk as adults display the most recent major mutation in the human body. Scientists are fascinated by the utterly amazing fact that 30% of the world's population shares a mutation that is less than 10,000 years old.

John Rennie and Steve Mirsky devoted part of a podcast to this bit of amazing genetics.

Steve: For example, our ability of, some of us, to digest milk, the lactose in milk as adults, it's a very recent adaptation in evolutionary history.

Rennie: Well, right, because really until we started to develop agriculture, until we started to herd animals and collected milk as a good source of protein, mammals don't continue to breast-feed throughout their lives; so the young have the ability to digest breast-milk and then after they stop drinking it, they stop making that lactase enzyme that allows them to breakdown the lactose sugar in the milk. But we kept drinking milk: We raised cows and milk was a ready source of protein and other nutrients, and we would keep on drinking that throughout our lives. And so evolution started to act on the human populations and in populations that traditionally drank a lot of milk, we have this ability to keep making the lactose throughout our lives, or lactase throughout our lives.

Steve: Let's just explain a little bit mechanistically. I mean, its likely that the mutation that enabled adults to digest lactose cropped up now and again, you know, throughout the history of human evolution; but there was never any selection pressure to keep it around until we had agriculture and were starting to try to use milk as a nutritional source, as a food, as adults.

Rennie: Right.

Steve: At that point in human history, all of a sudden those individuals who happen to have this genetic mutation have a big advantage over their comrades who can't digest the lactose, and so the combination of the environment and that genetic influence makes that genetic construct get selected for and preserved in the population. And all of a sudden, you know, within a couple of thousand years, the majority of Europeans can digest lactose.

Rennie: Right. You know, that's a good point, because it's always important to remember, you know, people always have these sorts of arguments about nature versus nurture and are there genes for various traits; you know, discussions about genes for intelligence and so forth are always notorious about this sort of the thing. But the reality is, you can't really discuss a gene, the idea of a meaning of a gene outside of the environment in which it's going to be expressed. You can't really talk about the meaning that it has, what it will do, whether it has any sort of positive or negative value in that way. Ultimately, you know, we talk about genes as though they are building blocks for some sort of complicated traits, even a trait like, say, being able to drink milk. But of course, the reality is, the molecular biological reality is, that the gene is just a stretch of DNA that happens to make a protein that breaks down a sugar that is in milk. So only under a number of different circumstances in which people happen to have exposure to, they happen to have easy access to, a lot of milk that happens to contain a lot of lactose that they can't digest very easily unless they happen to still make a lot of the lactase enzyme that they all made as children. All of these circumstances come together to make something like that beneficial. Anything that breaks down that set of circumstances, it's just another little stretch of DNA that may not prove its worth and as you said, it vanishes back in as random noise again.

It's exactly this idea that DNA changes just happen, without direction or outside influence or intention or for the good of the body, that seems so threatening. If we are nothing more than a collection of random events how do we claim a purpose for ourselves?

While I understand this fear, I don't share it. Our lives, our actions, our interactions are exactly what we make of them, good or bad, helpful or hurtful, intelligent or ignorant, caring and giving or selfish and self-indulgent. I choose to help, to gain information and to share it. We can all make that choice or a similar one no matter what is happening inside our DNA. Evolution has given us that power of individual choice, a power no other animal or plant can wield. Evolution is not just the most powerful idea in science. It's the power inside all of us.

Lactase from the Antarctic?

Lactase is the enzyme that digests lactose. You hear that a lot. I say that a lot. But it's not as simple as that sentence makes it out to be.

Lactase is not a thing, a simple protein. There are lots of lactases, or at least lots of variations in the basic protein. Each animal's lactase is slightly different. And the yeasts and fungi and bacteria that also manufacture lactase make a zillion more variants.

Each of the variants digests lactose, true. That's the definition of lactase. But each works best, has its highest activity levels, at different temperatures and at different pH values.

That's hugely important. The lactase we manufacture is designed to work best in our small intestines because in nature that's the only place it ever needs to work. Then human ingenuity came along. We wanted lactase for people who didn't make lactase. That's a problem. Few people would consent to having lactase injected directly into their bowels before each meal. Swallowing a pill is the only realistic way to take lactase. A swallowed pill has no choice but to go through the stomach before entering the small intestine. The stomach has particularly high acidity. Human lactase wouldn't work if swallowed, but the lactase from a fungus called Aspergillis oryzae has exactly the properties needed, an optimum pH of 4.5-5.5, a stable range of 3.0-7.0 and an optimum temperature of 37C (98.6F) or body temperature. All lactase pills are based on the lactase from this fungus.

That's great. Now, don't let the food scientists rest on these laurels. Tell them they have to find a lactase that will work in the chilly confines of a refrigerator and in the different pH of milk to create lactose-free milks. A dairy yeast named Kluyveromyces lactis happens to manufacture lactase that has these properties. And that the lactase that is used in lactase pills.

K. lactis has its own limitations. It won't work at the freezing point of 0C or 32F. You'd think a bacteria found in Antarctica might not mind the cold as much.

You'd be right. If you read through the heavy science of this press release from 7thSpace.com you'll see the connection.

[W]e present a new beta-D-galactosidase as a candidate to be applied in the above mentioned biotechnological processes. The gene encoding this beta-D-galactosidase has been isolated from the genomic DNA library of Antarctic bacterium Arthrobacter sp. 32c...

Although, the maximum activity of the enzyme was determined at pH 6.5 and 50degreesC, 60% of the maximum activity of the enzyme was determined at 25degreesC and 15% of the maximum activity was detected at 0degreesC.

Conclusions: The properties of Arthrobacter sp. 32c beta-D-galactosidase suggest that this enzyme could be useful for low-cost, industrial conversion of lactose into galactose and glucose in milk products and could be an interesting alternative for the production of ethanol from lactose-based feedstock.

A process for better lactose-free products. I'll be looking to see if this makes it into industrial production at any time soon.

Incidence of Lactose Intolerance Among Young Children

Simple questions deserve simple answers. How I wish that were true. So many of the simple questions I get can only be answered by "maybes" and "possiblys" and "we need more facts."

Take this simple question.

What is the incidence of Lactose Intolerance among young children?

You might think I could just check my sources and give a quick answer. But no.

First, how young is young? The answer will differ greatly at five months, five years, and fifteen years. Second, while I can usually assume my questioners are asking about the U.S., I don't know this for sure. The answer differs greatly around the world. Heck, it differs greatly among various populations in the U.S.

Start with very, very young children. The ability to manufacture lactase in the intestine is one of the last functions to develop in a fetus. Most premature babies, therefore, can't handle lactose very well. Fortunately, the intestines mature rapidly after birth. Within a few days they catch up to other babies and should be fine after that with proper care.

A very few full-term babies are born without any ability to manufacture lactase at all. This condition is called congenital lactose intolerance. It is extremely rare. And by rare I mean in the tens or hundreds worldwide ever. Today this problem is caught very rapidly and the baby is put on a non-dairy formula. Congenital LI never goes away. The individual must go dairy-free for life.

Humans, like almost every other mammal, are programmed to drink their mother's milk until weaning. That means the percentage of children under three who are naturally LI is near zero. You can become unnaturally LI, though. The common gastrointestinal illness known incorrectly as the "stomach flu" can knock out the lactase-making ability temporarily. This is known as Secondary LI. A pediatric gastroenterologist I spoke with said that at any moment, 10-15% of the children in his practice are experiencing GI problems and 10-15% of those become LI as a result. Doing the math, if I could freeze time and just sample the population for that split second, about 1% of young children, under three, would be temporarily LI.

What happens after weaning? Humans, again, are programmed to lose their lactase-making ability after weaning. This is Primary LI, the LI that usually gets talked about. Medical researchers have scoured the globe doing tests on every possible population. The results are very mixed, partially because of small sample sizes, different lactose loads, and older testing methods, and partially because humans themselves are mixed. Pure populations are rare to non-existent, and this is doubly so in the U.S., that mongrel melting pot.

Overall, the most that anyone can say is that populations that tend toward having a very high percentage of their members LI as adults are also populations that tend toward losing the ability to make lactase as a very early age, some with high percentages even by age three.

Populations, like northern Europeans and their descendants, that tend toward having a low percentage of their members LI as adults tend to lose that ability at a later age, many not until adulthood. That's why Primary LI was mistakenly called Adult-Onset LI for a while, until researchers learned better.

A very long and complex answer to a seemingly simple question. I hope you found it better than my first try, which boiled down to "nobody really knows." That's still true, but now you know why that's true. And that's the big step forward.

Premature Babies and LI

Here's a question I wish I could have been more help with.

my baby was born at 28wks 5 wks ago and is not tolerating his breastmilk via tube feeds - this is why i am following up the LI lead

This was my reply:

The research I have says that premature babies develop the ability the manufacture lactase very rapidly and so normally do not have LI.

Here's one mention of the problem that may be of some relevance.

"Early initiation of half-strength lactose-containing formula or breast milk results in rapid induction of lactase activity in the brush border and less feeding intolerance. A recent study suggests that full-strength lactose formula resulted in more feeding intolerance than low-lactose formula in premature infants; thus, the precise lactose concentration of lactose for inducing lactase activity is still undetermined."

A little-known fact is that lactase-production does not reach full strength in the intestines until almost the last week before birth. Foodreactions.org gives this chart:

> 23rd week ------------------------- 10% of full term
> between 25th and 34th is ------ 30% of full term
> between 34th and 35th week -- 70% of full term

Therefore all premature babies are born lactose intolerant. Although some sites suggest that the lactase-making ability is still lacking until the baby achieves what would have been a full term, this is not supported by most experts. Babies may need non-dairy liquids or lactose-free milks for the first feedings, but should regain their ability to drink breastmilk of a proper formula shortly thereafter.

Can LI Hurt You?

Lactose Intolerance (LI) isn't a disease, yet it can cause symptoms that vary from annoying to sheer misery. It's not surprising that every once in a while I get questions asking whether LI can cause actual damage.

I replied:

It depends (you knew that was coming, right?). If your symptoms are minor, then really nothing of concern is occurring. If you have serious diarrhea, you can wind up with several things that are bad to have, although certainly not life threatening. You may become dehydrated; may lose important nutrients; may develop anal fissures or hemorrhoids from the continue strain on the tissues. If you start bleeding while on the toilet, you need to see a doctor. It's most likely hemorrhoids, but you need to make sure.

The same advice holds for those who wonder whether going off lactase pills is a bad thing. The symptoms may become a problem if you don't take lactase, but whether you take it or not has no effect on your intestines or any other part of your system.

The Lacteeze Store

I posted about a month ago, in Lacteeze Drops Now Available Through eBay, that Pat Gilbers was planning to be the first U.S. distributor for Lacteeze brand lactase, formerly available only in Canada. Lacteeze is an important name because it makes the liquid lactase drops to be used directly in milk and other liquid dairy products to reduce the lactose content as well as the solid lactase tablets.

I also promised then to let you know the minute Gilbers' Lacteeze Store website officially opened. That's today.




The site is pretty straightforward. There are three products: Lacteeze Drops (in two sizes), Lacteeze Tablets, and Lacteeze Chewable Children's' Tablets. The children's' tablets are strawberry flavored.

You order them through the website.

Voilà.

Let me know if you try the site.

Lactaid's 25th (and 35th) Anniversaries

When I first learned I was lactose intolerant, in 1978, I had never heard the words before. Didn't know what lactose was. Milk, well, milk was supposed to sooth the stomach. The concept made no sense.

No books were available on lactose intolerance. Almost no articles could be dug up at the library. No web, of course. I poked here and there, doing my own research.

Who doesn't know about lactose intolerance (LI) today? The phrase is a standing joke. Just mention milk and somebody will throw out a reference to LI. People think they're LI even if they're not. Consume any dairy product, suffer any digestive complaint? Boom, you're LI. See lactones on a label? Lactylates? Lactates? Lactic acid? Lactacystin? Must cause lactose intolerance. Not one of them contain any lactose, and not one of them would have been noticeable or comprehensible on a label in 1978, but today the connection is automatic. Amazing.

There were no specialty foods aimed at the lactose intolerant in 1978. What few diary alternatives existed were created for the kosher market, as a way to get around the prohibition of eating milk with meat. Today, the corner supermarket will have shelves full of milk-alternatives of all types, varieties, and bases. Some are from international food conglomerates; many are made by small firms struggling to find a niche for their products.

That's one major reason I maintain this blog, to help readers find the complete range of products and services available if you want to reduce or eliminate dairy in your life. I'm constantly passing along press releases about new foods, new companies, new cookbooks, new ways of dealing with the issue.

And by concentrating on the new, I suddenly realized how little attention I've given to the one constant in the LI world, the one that made lactose intolerance as well known as it's become, the one that everybody knows so well it's become almost the generic word. Lactaid.

I have in front of me a copy of a January 1984 news clipping announcing the introduction of LactAid brand lactose-reduced milk to Rochester. Yes, with a capital "A" in the middle. LactAid wasn't new even then. It had been introduced late in 1979. (Four years to get to Rochester. You'd think LactAid was high fashion.) New to Rochester meant new to me. No web, remember.

A quart of LactAid cost 89 cents in Wegman's then, which made it "roughly 20 to 30 cents higher than regular milk." In today's shopping trip I checked current prices. Fat-free regular milk cost 76 cents. Fat-free Lactaid was up to $2.19. We're still very much a niche market, and we continue to pay that price.

LactAid the firm had been around for a decade by then, although I didn't know that either. It's first product was a lactase powder that could be mixed with milk to remove most of the lactase. Alan Kligerman, the inventor of Sugar-Lo, an ice cream for diabetics and later Beano, introduced Lact-Aid powder in 1974, making this year Lactaid's 35th anniversary. Lactaid finally got its lactase pills on shelves in 1985.

In 1990 Dairy Ease, made by a division of a pharmaceutical giant, emerged as a competitor with its own line of milk and lactase. That energized Lactaid, which had been taken over by McNeil Consumer Products, a subsidiary of the equally gigantic Johnson & Johnson corporation. The two companies staged massive competing promotional campaigns in 1993. They have to be among the most successful ad campaigns in history. Lactose intolerance became a household word.

Lactaid eventually won out over Dairy Ease, which no longer makes lactase and whose milk is distributed by Land O'Lakes but is much harder to find. In fact, Lactaid has no real competitors in the LI market. It just keeps rolling along. While I've mentioned Lactaid products and promotions a few times in this blog, there's never been a reason for me to do a big intro to the firm. But anniversaries count, even if they're only meaningful to me.

The company's website, lactaid.com, unfortunately requires Adobe Flash Player to see all the contents, an annoyance that is increasingly common and worthwhile only to the graphics types in the marketing department, not actual consumers.

The products are only accessible through a lot of mousing and clicking, so I'll summarize them here:

Milk: fat free, low fat (1%), reduced fat (2%), whole, chocolate low fat (1%); all except the chocolate also available calcium-fortified
Organic Milk: fat free, reduced fat (2%)
Dietary Supplements [lactase]: original, fast act caplets, fast act chewables
Ice cream: chocolate, vanilla, cookies & cream, strawberries & cream, butter pecan
Cottage Cheese: low fat
Eggnog: Christmas holiday season availability only
Evaporated Milk: available only in Puerto Rico

None of the products are truly national. The Fast Act lactase is available in the largest number of states, but many of the products can be found in fewer than a half dozen.

That's too bad, but at least the lactase caplets and chewables are available online from anywhere in the country from such dealers as Amazon.

So happy 35th anniversary, Lactaid. Hope you stick around for another 35 years.