Wednesday, September 12, 2012

Ethan's dairy intolerance

Ethan has developed a dairy intolerance. It's quite sudden and surprising to us, as he has never had any problems with dairy since birth.

Over the last 2 months he has been having accidents of loose poo in his underpants. He races to the toilet, and just doesn't make it. At first we thought it was an attention/behavioral problem, and tried different techniques to try and stop it, but with no luck.
We decided to keep a record of his bowel motions to see if we could see any pattern. We noticed he had about 10 motions a week, and 5-6 were 'accidents' in his pants. Often soft/loose.

We brought up the issue with his doctor, and she suggest we take him off various foods as a trial to see if there is an intolerance. We choose dairy first, and it's worked!

Ethan has been off dairy for 3 weeks, except for one day that he "accidentally forgot" and drank some milk. He has only had one episode of poo in his pants, about 4hours after he drank that milk, and has been totally fine every other day!

We are happy to have solved the problem. We have gone from poo in his pants almost every day, to no accidents!

We plan to keep him dairy free for the rest of September, then gradually introduce some "dairy" we are going to start with goats cheese, and then some good quality yoghurt.

Tracie did some research, and apparently a dairy intolerance can develop from a nasty virus of diarrhoea and vomiting...(which irritates the lining of the bowel and strips away the body's ability to digest certain foods) Ethan had a gastro bug (stomach flu) for over a week during our trip to America back in April/may.

She also learnt that high fat dairy (cheese/butter) is easier to digest than low fat dairy. When he resumes dairy, we will have to work out what he can tolerate. If he can't tolerate it, he will be off it for a few more month, and we will try again.

Poor Ethan isn't enjoying being dairy free, he loves his milk. We are trying to provide alternatives (cashew milk is his favourite), and mostly eat dairy free as a family so he doesn't feel like he is missing out.

1 comment:

ROOT226 said...

OH NO i love milk too so i know how Ethan must feel. :( Nothing tastes as good as cold glass of milk. A couple of months ago we switched from cows milk to Almond milk(plain)and have been pleasantly suprised and don't think the boys have noticed the difference.