When I say that I'm lactose intolerant ... it doesn't mean that I can't drink milk or eat milk products. It just makes it uncomfortable, it just makes me pass gas a lot more than others. Us native people get a big laugh out of it ... as a kid, we used to have a contest as to who could produce the longest, loudest, smelliest farts (my brother won by a large margin with this and he was quite proud of it .... sometimes we wondered if he was healthy or not judging by the gas he produced).

But on the other side of that, I can build a tolerance to lactose if I drink it enough and often. If I drink some milk every day, over time, I built a tolerance to it but if I stop for a while and then go back, then I'll get lots of gas and then I have to build a tolerance again. In my 20s and 30s, I used to get it to the point where I could eat cheesecake, milk shakes, milk in my cereal and ice cream on a regular basis and never had a problem. Now I count my calories and watch my heart so I tend to stay away from milk and milk products for other reasons.