IMPORTANT NOTICE ABOUT COMMENTS

COMMENTS HAVE BEEN DISABLED

Because of spam, I personally moderate all comments left on my blog. However, because of health issues, I will not be able to do so in the future.

If you have a personal question about LI or any related topic you can send me an email at stevecarper@cs.com. I will try to respond.

Otherwise, this blog is now a legacy site, meaning that I am not updating it any longer. The basic information about LI is still sound. However, product information and weblinks may be out of date.

In addition, my old website, Planet Lactose, has been taken down because of the age of the information. Unfortunately, that means links to the site on this blog will no longer work.

For quick offline reference, you can purchase Planet Lactose: The Best of the Blog as an ebook on Amazon.com or BarnesandNoble.com. Almost 100,000 words on LI, allergies, milk products, milk-free products, and the genetics of intolerance, along with large helpings of the weirdness that is the Net.

Tuesday, September 05, 2006

Pediatricians Agree That LI Kids Can Have Milk

Hey, it looks like pediatricians are finally catching up with our reality.

Just two days ago, I posted an item, Kids and Lactose Intolerance, in which I said that kids who are lactose intolerant don't need to avoid dairy entirely.

And guess what: the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) just put out guidelines in its journal Pediatrics concerning Lactose Intolerance in Infants, Children, and Adolescents, written by Melvin B. Heyman, MD, MPH for the AAP Committee on Nutrition. And it does not recommend eliminating dairy products to treat lactose intolerance.

An article on Forbes.com summarizes the new guidelines.

New guidelines say the academy "supports use of dairy foods as an important source of calcium for bone mineral health and of other nutrients that facilitate growth in children and adolescents." Specifically, it does not recommend eliminating dairy products to treat lactose intolerance.

In practical terms, said Dr. Melvin B. Heyman, a member of the committee that wrote the guidelines, the new advice is for parents of children with lactose intolerance, in collaboration with pediatricians, to "test the system and see how much milk, cheese and ice cream they can tolerate."

One reason for the new advice, said Heyman, who is a professor of pediatrics at the University of California, San Francisco, is that "we have more information about what people will tolerate. We know that children who have lactose intolerance have a tendency to tolerate some dairy products."

At least an equally important factor is the need for the calcium in dairy products, he said. "Young people have to get as much calcium as they can to lower the risk of problems with bones as they get older," Heyman said.

There's hope for doctors yet. Maybe eventually they'll even learn the difference between dairy allergies and LI.

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1 comment:

Steve Carper said...

Sorry for the spam on this page, everybody.

Evidently the spam jerks don't understand that each comment generates an email to me, so I can make their spam disappear as soon as they send it.

Why do so many choose this particular page to spam? That I don't know. If anybody understands please help my headache by supplying a reason for the unreasonable.