Just Found Out Little One is Lactose Intolerant. What Now?

Carmina_Piranha_3

My lactose intolerant brothers and cousins had a tough time as babies, but things are much easier now with so much available over the counter.

my children are both lactose intolerant and like my brothers they do grow out of it gradually as they get older. my 12 year old is fine now and can eat normal chocolate and ice cream without problems. my 2 year old drinks lactofree semi-skimmed milk from the supermarket and can tolerate a small amount of chocolate or ice cream although it still makes him a bit poorly - a whole ice cream certainly makes him ill but most sellers will swirl it around and make it look as if he's getting a whole one, but they've only used half the amount. swedish glace ice cream is quite nice, that's made from soya. you could use lactofree milk in cooking, on cereal etc. when they are older and nurseries etc. will let you take lactofree in and they'll give it to your child when the other toddlers get their milk.

with my youngest we just saw the GP, and when he reached around a year old i had a couple of telephone conversations with a dietician, and sent in a food diary that she asked me to fill in. the dietician was busy and we weren't a priority as long as she knew i'd been given good advice.

there's a danger that children who are lactose intolerant as babies will be kept away from lactose for years by their parents 9and most of them will have already outgrown their intolerance), and might miss out on calcium during the years when they grow the most. doctors aren't keen on parents self-diagnosing.

please speak to your GP. in the meantime there are things available over the counter. SMA make lactose free formula milk - it comes in a half-size tin (from boots, i don't know where else) and it has a tiger on the tin. it's called LF and it costs around twice as much as ordinary formula. LF is ordinary formula which has been treated with the lactase enzyme.

the lactase enzyme itself is available as a colic remedy, it's called colief and will cost around £10 a week depending on how many drops you need. I got colief on prescription at my 6 week check, and the GP advised me on cutting down to see if my baby could manage without it at 4 months and again at 12 months because most babies can product their own lactase in their bodies by then. Colief has to be kept cold, and it only works at body temp so you have to warm the milk, wait for it to work etc. or make bottles 12 hours in advance. LF formula is much easier, but i didn't find out about it until the dietician told me. i don't know if you can get it on prescription - i didn't ask because my baby was weaned by then and only needed it for putting on cereal or for the bedtime drink.

Noozan

Carmina_Piranha wrote: »

please speak to your GP. in the meantime there are things available over the counter. SMA make lactose free formula milk - it comes in a half-size tin (from boots, i don't know where else) and it has a tiger on the tin. it's called LF and it costs around twice as much as ordinary formula. LF is ordinary formula which has been treated with the lactase enzyme.

the lactase enzyme itself is available as a colic remedy, it's called colief and will cost around £10 a week depending on how many drops you need. I got colief on prescription at my 6 week check, and the GP advised me on cutting down to see if my baby could manage without it at 4 months and again at 12 months because most babies can product their own lactase in their bodies by then. Colief has to be kept cold, and it only works at body temp so you have to warm the milk, wait for it to work etc. or make bottles 12 hours in advance. LF formula is much easier, but i didn't find out about it until the dietician told me. i don't know if you can get it on prescription - i didn't ask because my baby was weaned by then and only needed it for putting on cereal or for the bedtime drink.

Our baby is lactose intolerant and our HV recommended that I buy Colief to add to her milk, which worked a treat. (I didn't think to ask if it was available on prescription!)

It occured to me one day that it seemed silly to buy milk that had lactose in it, then add an enzyme to remove it - post baby brain so forgive me for taking a few days to think of this lol. I searched high and low for lactose free formula but couldn't find it anywhere, I saw on the SMA website that they made a lactose free milk so went to GP to ask about it. GP said he didn't believe in either intolerance or colic :mad: I had to insist very strongly to get a tin of SMA LF to try and it worked wonders within 24 hours, the difference in baby was amazing. I now have it on repeat prescription.:T

Kimitatsu

Noozan wrote: »

I searched high and low for lactose free formula but couldn't find it anywhere, I saw on the SMA website that they made a lactose free milk so went to GP to ask about it. GP said he didn't believe in either intolerance or colic :mad: I had to insist very strongly to get a tin of SMA LF to try and it worked wonders within 24 hours, the difference in baby was amazing. I now have it on repeat prescription.:T

Oh I would love to have half an hour with him! DS1 had raging colic for the first few months and DS2 is lactose intolerant. I agree with thriftmonster that if lactose is the only thing they are intolerant to then it is in many many cases cheaper to make things rather than buy them. DS2 hates soya milk, rice milk, but likes lactofree, so thats what we buy.

Some children will "grow out of it" but not all, in the majority of cases their tolerance levels just rise to a level that they feel comfortable with. You may find that in the winter they will get more of the snuffles as lactose is one of the things responsible for excess mucas - it was the first thing we noticed about DS2 taking lactose away. We had our son diagnosed by an allergy specialist when he went in for something else, intolerances seem never to come in ones and twos.

As for the calcium side of it, you just have to be more inventive with their diet, greens such as broccoli are excellent sources of calcium and having a strapping rugby player who is 9 years old and lactose intolerant, I can say that he has no problem with lack of calcium

Carmina_Piranha_3

thanks noozan - so you can get LF formula milk on prescription.

somebody in the playground told me i could get colief on prescription, and it just so happened that he had his 6 week check during that week when after 5 weeks of horror somebody in the school playground told me about colief and i thought it was worth a try.

my doctors don't believe in lactose intolerance either, especially not in a baby who isn't losing weight and looks healthy. colief is cold as a colic remedy though, so that's why they gave it to me - i had bought one bottle and within hours my baby was a different child so i would have continued to buy it even if i hadn't been given it on prescription. it is fiddly to use when out though. LF is a much easier option, but colief can be added to breastmilk so if i had known about it before my milk dried up i could have added it to expressed milk (i think you can also add it to a tiny bit of expressed milk and then continue to feed from the breast, but don't quote me on that).

my brothers and cousins had horrid soya formula on prescription, but that was years ago. my brothers knees are in a state because he was calcium deficient as a baby - my mum didn't know about calcium back then. the dietician told me they were currently prescribing something vile made from potatoes, but my baby didn't need it because the colief made such a difference and he was fine as soon as he went onto it.

i have no idea why both of my children are lactose intolerant, and why my brothers and male cousins are too. there's probably nothing in the fact that it's only the males in the family who are affected, but it's odd that i myself wasn't lactose intolerant, and nobody in my parents generation seems to have been. my gran says some of her children didn't feed and just screamed constantly, but back then if a baby refused the breast they were left to scream in the garden, then weaned early to avoid starvation.