Lactose intolerance is a relatively common digestive disorder in which you aren't able to process the sugar in milk and other dairy products. This leads to intestinal discomfort upon consumption of dairy products. While you may have heard that sodium bicarbonate can resolve your lactose intolerance, this is unfortunately not the case.
Lactose Intolerance
Your digestive tract relies upon proteins called enzymes to help you break down the nutritional molecules in your food. The nutrient molecules you eat are far too large for your intestine to absorb whole; for that reason, enzymes are a critical part of getting energy-providing nutrients into the cells. If you're lactose intolerant, you don't produce lactase, which is the enzyme that digests milk sugar, explain Drs. Reginald Garrett and Charles Grisham in their book "Biochemistry."
Sodium Bicarbonate
Sodium bicarbonate is the chemical name for baking soda. It's a salt composed of positively charged particles of sodium and negatively charged bicarbonate particles, which have the chemical formula HCO3. Bicarbonate is mildly basic, meaning that it can react with acids and neutralize them. Baking soda has many household applications. It's used as a cleaning agent, as a leavening ingredient in baked goods and also as a mild antacid for indigestion.
Lactose Intolerance Prevalence
One of the problems with lactose intolerance is that it can be hard to diagnose, because the symptoms are nonspecific. In a 1999 article published in "The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition," Dr. John Saltzman and colleagues noted that lactose intolerance is highly overreported -- meaning commonly misdiagnosed. This is largely because many individuals assume that any digestive discomfort after dairy consumption indicates lactose intolerance. Many other things can cause similar symptoms, however, including milk allergy and acid indigestion.
Taking Sodium Bicarbonate
Some individuals think sodium bicarbonate works for lactose intolerance because they find that it relieves the uncomfortable symptoms that they experience after drinking milk. What this indicates, however, is that these individuals aren't actually lactose intolerant -- instead, they experience acid indigestion after dairy consumption, and the sodium bicarbonate neutralizes the acid. You can't treat true lactose intolerance with sodium bicarbonate, because the sodium bicarbonate has no effect whatsoever upon either lactase production or lactose digestion.
References
- "Biochemistry"; Reginald Garrett, Ph.D. and Charles Grisham, Ph.D.; 2007
- "American Journal of Clinical Nutrition"; A randomized trial of Lactobacillus acidophilus BG2FO4 to treat lactose intolerance; J. Saltzman et al.; January 1999
