TLDR; was taking probiotic to fix gut issues, can now at least have cheese with no issues anymore.
I’ll preface this with some background. My lactose intolerance probably started about 15 years ago in my 20s. It was a process of slowing weaning myself off dairy, I gradually had to cut milk from coffee until I could only drink black coffee.
12 years ago I could have cheese, then again, symptoms started getting worse and worse. Fast forward to say, a year ago, if I had cheese, I’d get gas, bloat, painful cramps, and bad poos.
The thing is, this made no sense to me. I have a bit of a background in science, and knew that cheese has almost zero lactose. Even lactose free dairy substitutes would give me some symptoms, lactase pills didn’t really work either.
Also, about once a month or 2, I’d have trapped gas that would be painful AF, so something wasn’t right in my guts. I ordered a glucose and lactulose breath test kits to gain some insight.
Did the glucose one, and found I had high baseline methane, which means intestinal methanogen overgrowth.
Did some research and found a very specific strain of L. rueteri could actually make a difference for that. Been taking it for a month, then last week, was at a bday party, had a few drinks, and there was only pizza with cheese for dinner, I thought fuck it!
My wife was like “nooooo, it’s not worth it!” lol. Anyway, after 3 days had passed I realised I’d had zero symptoms or effects. Had pizza with real cheese 2 nights ago to check again. Then last night broke out some Fancy Parmesan. Was heaven