Bluejake

Next time you're at Murray's, get the Humboldt Fog. It's this delicious goat cheese with ash...it's heavenly.



By the way, read the chapter of the book I gave Karen, It Must Have Been Something I Ate by Jeffrey Steingarten. He claims lactose intolerance is a scam.

i'd like to lock him in a room with me and a few slices of pizza and no lactaid and see who blinks first!

For the record, my lactose-loving self was pretty ill after that amount of cheese.



Bizzare that you mention the Humboldt Fog. It's my parents' new favorite cheese after my brother had an enormous wheel of it at his wedding reception. They tried to force some on me when I went by last night to give them the borderline inedible leftovers from the cheese orgy. The fact that my face turned an ugly shade of green at the suggestion of more cheese seemed to disuade them.

Steingarten on lactose intolerance:



JS: Yeah that is a true allergy. Other ones I figure are very questionable.



M: Like take lactose intolerance. I'd love you to talk about that just a bit because I have something to contribute to that from a scientist friend who's doing work on that. So you start and tell the people what your feeling is about all the people who claim to be lactose intolerant.



JS: Well, actually, fewer and fewer people now seem to, but around two and a half, maybe three years ago, that was the kind of fashionable food intolerance for the whole country. People who because they're neurotic, and that's my theory, neurotic about food one way or another, need to imagine that food is hostile to them, they all became lactose intolerant.



It's a very rare symptom, you know, true symptom, and there's also a breath test called the hydrogen breath test. Apparently, if you cannot digest lactose, which is the sugar in milk, then your stomach produces extra hydrogen in your breath, and they can measure for it. People come in to a clinic and say that they think they're lactose intolerant, that can be tested very, very easily. Now some people who come into a clinic and say they're lactose intolerant may actually be allergic in some way or another to milk protein, but just talking about lactose intolerance. People who say that they can't eat cheese, and I've met a number of them, because they're lactose intolerant, are probably crybabies.



JS: Because most cheese doesn't have any lactose in them. Within fifteen minutes of the making of any fermented cheese, all the lactose has been turned into lactic acid and carbon dioxide, which is the beginning of cheese aging, I mean the first fifteen minutes of cheese aging after the thing cools down. There's no lactose in cheese. It's also been measured.



M: So the lactose is gone.



JS...It's just all gone. I mean, it's the substrate for fermentation and the carbon dioxide is used to make holes in the Swiss cheese and the lactic acid is the thing that gives cheese its basic tangy flavor, and then the aging causes all these other flavors in turn.



There was a study at Mass General Hospital in Boston. These doctors had attempted to study lactose intolerance by testing a large number of people in the general population, and they were unable really to identify very many people who had lactose intolerance, so they advertised for people who were sure they had lactose intolerance. and those people signed for the study. And the first thing that was done, after their history was taken, was to give them the hydrogen breath test, and only a third of them were actually lactose intolerant.



JS: But that's the normal ratio when you advertise for people who are allergic to one food or another, and then you test them, and you find that only a half or a third are. Then,the people who were lactose intolerant were given lactose in one form or another, usually in the form of milk to see if they did get symptoms from the milk, and very, very few of them did. And very few of them were able to tell the difference between getting lactose-free milk in the morning, a whole glass of it, and getting milk that had lactose in it



M: Well, you know what I was going to mention, and then we're going to have to leave lactose intolerance just because we have so many other questions to ask you. I was just going to mention that a friend of mine who does lab research in this area was saying that when people think they're lactose in tolerant, they stop drinking milk and having other dairy products, and it actually causes lactose intolerance, depriving yourself of the lactose.



JS: Uh huh, that can happen. You know know, the lactase enzymes stop being produced because they're no longer needed…

Okay, so if you take that plus what I wrote about self-diagnosis on Gothatmist...

genetically speaking, tolerance to lactose was not in our original code [not past the infant feeding period at least], but was more of an evolutionary quality...



oh, and cheese is supposedly the easiest to digest.

Sometimes I wish that you could include smells with webpages, b/c these cheeses were really smelly.

i really like the Franch Blue chees

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And very few of them were able to tell the difference between getting lactose-free milk in the morning, a whole glass of it, and getting milk that had lactose in it

Very cheesy!

Yes cheeesy, cheesy and cheesy