this post was submitted on 04 Nov 2025
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They're lactose intolerant to their own mother's milk?
kittens start out lactose tolerant, just like humans, but then often develop lactose intolerance as they age and don't need to drink their mother's milk anymore. some cats are more tolerant than others, and for the intolerant ones you can give them lactose free milk (or "cat milk" which is lactose free cow milk with nutrients for cats)
if your cat likes regular cow milk but not lactose free milk though you should probably not give it regular milk anyway. lactose intolerance is a menace and even just the tiniest bit of unprocessed lactose can absolutely annihilate your gut, and cats don't often decide what's best for them in the long term.
And then there are people like me, that ate yoghurt and curd for half a year on a nearly daily basis until I developed a tolerance. What a shitty time.
You can develop a tolerance to lactose by eating specific foods?? Neat!
Over time as the lactose becomes a more reliable resource in the gut, bacteria which can process it will begin to grow and with sufficient resources can compete well enough to stabilize in the gut biome. HG Modernism on Youtube has a video on it if you're interested.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h90rEkbx95w
(Results may vary)
Seems like it.
That's kinda how the very small percentage of humans that aren't lactose intolerant became lactose tolerant. The only way you can be lactose tolerant, as over 80% of humans are lactose intolerant, is to be descended from mid-northern European ancestry. Basically the proto Germanic and proto Southern Nordic tribes force fed themselves so much cheese and milk that they became lactose tolerant.
they... stayed the same?
Intolerant ≠ tolerant. They weren't lactose tolerant originally. We can actually prove that with their remains and DNA.
i think its just bad wording or something bc i had to read that a dozen times to figure out what you meant
All mammals lose the tolerance to lactose as they age. Except for a handful of mutants.
Maybe you're descended from one of them. Note that cheese was a way to store milk with very little lactose so it was edible by all.
Cat's milk doesn't have lactose.
afaik the milk produced by cats does actually have lactose. it's just the store bought "cat milk" that's lactose free so adult cats can also drink it.