About a 'dairy free' diet and its connection to inflammatory bowel diseases

These are the key points I took from excerpts published in the Daily Mail, in May 2000, from 'Your Life in Your Hands' by Jane Plant, based on the original Chinese way of eating.

• Milk is a whole food for babies.
• We are the only mammals who continue to consume milk, in any form, after weaning.
• We are the only mammals who consume the milk of another mammal.

The following points were gleaned from a dairy-free cookbook, which had a long foreword on lactose intolerance.

• At the age of about 4, we no longer produce lactase, the enzyme that digests the milk sugar, lactose. (See below) 
• By the age of 50, approximately 70% of adults are lactose intolerant.
• This is the age when many adults develop inflammatory bowel disease of one kind or another.

These points led me to give up all dairy products. From that time on, I have had no recurrence of the symptoms of ulcerative colitis which I had had for thirty years since my mid-twenties. 

When I mentioned this to my consultant at the time, he told me that there was some scientific evidence of a correlation between dairy products and inflammatory bowel disease. 

NB  I read somewhere that because our consumption of milk has been a part of our diet for maybe thousands of years, our bodies can continue to produce lactase for years but by the age of fifty, this begins to tail off.