Lactose Intolerance, or Something Else? Help!

A child can be intolerant to a food without being allergic. One of mine is intolerant to dairy. He's been tested and is not allergic. But it still makes him feel crappy. When he was smaller, he would spit up and be very fussy after dairy, now that he's 4 he doesn't spit up anymore but he will cry that his tummy hurts if he has dairy.

My suggestion - Why not just try a dairy elimination diet and see if she feels better? Or, keep a food diary and see what patterns you can find with her illnesses.

The getting sick after a lot of activity does sound like ongoing reflux to me. But reflux can be aggravated by food sensitivites, so these things might go hand-in-hand.

I think you're so smart to be thinking of this, and you're absolutely on the right track.

Just a few quick things, to add to your "arsenal" of information.

Medically, there are allergies, and then there are intolerances and sensitivities. "Allergy," to a doctor, means something big and serious. Like those kids who go into anaphylactic shock if they just smell a peanut, that's an allergy. However, a sensitivity/intolerance means something that affects the whole system -- digestive, the ENT track, mood and emotions -- but it produces a diffuse set of symptoms; it doesn't trigger a potentially fatal immune response. Allergists' tests do NOT screen for intolerances/sensitivities. That's not even what they work on. The only way to tell if someone has one is to eliminate the suspected trigger and observe the results.

The second thing is, this sounds more like a milk protein (caesin) intolerance than a lactose intolerance. (Lactose is a sugar; milk protein is a ... protein, so chemically they're very different animals.) Lactose tends to affect certain ethnic groups more than others, and to last a lifetime. Caesin often strongly affects young children, but it's often outgrown. The symptoms you describe sound spot-on for caesin.

So, what do you do? Nothing with dairy, whatsoever. That includes not just milk, but any baked goods, any processed foods, anything. Read every ingredient list. And no other animal milks, like goat and sheep's milk. Some people also discourage soy, since soy and milk protein are structurally similar, but many caesin-intolerant people, my son included, do fine with soy. For calcium, I give my son a daily green smoothie -- mango, apple cider, and spinach (you can use any fruit, and any juice). Please also know that thanks to intense lobbying from the dairy industry, most Americans get a whole lot MORE calcium than they really need.

I would also recommend trial-eliminating gluten. I don't have enough experience with that to make specific recommendations, but you're right to be thinking about that as well.

Good luck!

"She frequently gets sick after a big event/lots of activity.".

How old is she?

My gut feeling (sorry) is - I don't think it's food/allergy/sensitivity related.
I'd take her to a pediatric gastroenterologist to have her evaluated.

She might have cyclic vomiting syndrome (CVS).

http://digestive.niddk.nih.gov/ddISeases/pubs/cvs

Or maybe it's a physical problem with the sphincter between her esophagus and stomach.

Throwing up a lot/often is not good for her teeth or anything else above the stomach level.
It's worth it to have a specialist check her out and find out what's going on so it can be fixed and/or managed before secondary problems arise.

My daughter had similar sensitivities. After much anguish, I discovered she was terribly affected by synthetic chemicals. They're not good for anyone but for her it was simply overload. She had been diagnosed with ADHD but when I removed the chemicals from our home, her diagnosis was removed. Her symptoms went away...they only occur if she's exposed to an abundance of fast food or a venue where the place has been overloaded with chlorine bleach. We detoxed our home when she was seven and her school work improved drastically, was on grade level within eight weeks.

Detoxing was simple and the way I did it was inexpensive. It would be a good first step to at least getting her to a baseline of good health. I have seen asthma go away completely with detoxing....

God bless,
M.

There are some interesting suggestions here. We all seem to agree that it's not normal for a child to vomit like this and to be sick so often. She clearly has an immune system that is not where it should be.

I have a friend whose daughter had cyclic vomiting - but it was more frequent than your daughter's and more violent when it occurred. So they were pretty miserable for a long time, and there was little diagnosis or treatment available. Even so, the treatment is just putting a band-aid on the condition, not preventing it.

I know once a month is a lot for a kid to be sick, so even if it's not CVS, you need to do something. I think the "weird quirk" isn't - I think it's a key. Now, it's hard to know whether it's part of CVS or whether it's connected to her asthma or her tendency to get a lot of ear infections (which tells me there's a lot of mucus production and inflammation. She's not testing positive to food sensitivities but that doesn't mean she's not having some trouble with certain things. Still, that's not the entire cause because of the situations that seem to precipitate these episodes of vomiting.

I work in nutritional epigenetics - epigenetics is the field that deals with damage in the cells that effects the coating around our DNA (our genome). The DNA controls what our cells' function is, but the epigenome above/around it controls how well that function is carried out. So the genetic material is like your computer's hardware, but the epigenetic action is like the software - if there's a glitch in the software, the whole thing goes haywire and doesn't work properly. It can be a small switching problem that causes big problems.

What we're learning about so many diseases is that they relate to a small problem, which can be caused by a variety of things. But the discovery of, and extensive research into, a simple food peptide that corrects this damage, is bringing a lot of hope and documented clinical results to thousands of people and hundreds of problems. The interesting thing is that, because all cells have the same genetic material, they need the same nutrition. The genes in each cell that switch on and off are what determine the cell's function and appearance - which is why a nerve cell and a skin cell and cells in the stomach and lungs all look and do different things. A defect in the switching can occur due to disease, age, environmental triggers, and a whole host of other things.

In my experience, you can go through a long series of difficult and time-consuming activities like limiting intake of certain foods (then waiting 3 months to see if there's a difference), and then spend the rest of her life reading labels and restricting her in restaurants, friends' houses, and so on. It's not necessary. You can also medicate the symptoms (as you have with the asthma). You can go through something like the suggested detox of your home, but sometimes that stirs up as many problems as it eliminates.

But you can actually boost her immune system (and your own) very simply and repair the cells all through her body, which I would predict would solve the vomiting, the ear infections, the asthma, and all the colds.

This has been in well over 70 scientific papers and clinical studies, has been featured in major news magazines, on news programs and Dr. Oz, and everything in between. I've been to quite a few seminars on this subject, and the research is impeccable. Moreover, it's a plant-based solution which is totally safe. It's consumed by kids, pregnant women, people with cancer (it interferes with the spread of cancer cells), and everyone else. It's used in feeding stations and clinics serving seriously malnourished kids in a disease-ridden regions, and they are flourishing.

I have a lot of colleagues who are off their asthma meds, no longer have food issues, and have solved digestive problems like reflux and IBS. I myself am off all allergy and other meds, am no longer sick 4 times a year with colds and bronchitis, and am no longer dealing with clinical depression. If you want to try something else before taking this little girl through a whole bunch of diagnostic tests, I think it would be worth your time.