Milk allergy or intolerance to lactose

The milk allergy is quite often confused with intolerance to lactose component. The difference is rather thin to understand for the common people that don’t have medical knowledge. The allergy to milk means that the organism can’t digest the essential proteins contained by the milk. On the other hand, the intolerance to lactose means that the sugar from milk and other milk based aliments are impossible to digest by the organism because of an enzyme lack disorder. Still, most doctors established that patients with intolerance to lactose suffer from allergy to milk also. So we could say that one includes the other.

The allergy to milk affects more than half of the adult population all over the globe. The aliments with no milk components are sold widely all over the world because the allergy to milk has become quite common even starting with small babies.

In case of small babies the milk allergy presents symptoms like vomit, diarrhea and impressively powerful abdominal pains just after feeding time. More over most of the breastfed babies suffer from reactions to milk proteins. A common mistake from mothers and even pediatricians is to establish that the baby suffers from allergy to breast milk due to the large amount of sugar component and in consequence the mother is indicated to avoid sweets. Regardless of how much sweets the mother consumes this components doesn’t affect the quality of the breast milk. If the child is observed to have insufficient ability to digest sugar if he is solely breastfed, than, most probable, the baby suffers of lactose intolerance. The next logical step is that the mother decides to keep the baby only on powder milk and feed him with the bottle. Still, even artificial formulas for powder milk for small babies contain traces of milk components which will harm the baby. In this case, medication is indicated and periodical tests to determine the level of milk allergy.

The similar signals found in cases of small children suffering of forms of allergies to milk are also shown in cases of grown ups people. The factors that determine different forms of allergies to milk go from the hereditary inheritance from parents suffering of milk allergy to environmental or signal of unbalances in hormonal systems due to age symptoms. Still do not confuse allergy to milk with lactose intolerance. The intolerance to lactose can be considered much graver than allergy to milk since lactose is a common component for more aliments. This protein is found generally in processed aliments, from bread, some fruit juices, cereals to sour cream based creams from sweets and cakes. The best thing would be to carefully check the labels and understand fully the components of that aliment.

Even if the lactose intolerance is graver disorder than allergy to milk, the milk allergy is rarer. Commonly is determined in case of small babies which will cure from itself until the three years age, but in cases of adults is sign of other unbalances or disorders of either hormonal system of stomach and liver diseases.