<<Disclaimer: Verify this information before applying it to your situation.>>

Hi everybody. Sorry this summary took so long in coming, but this month went
into overdrive on me from day one.

First off, I think I should explain that the post I originally put up about
the milk question probably should not have gone out in the first place. It
turns out that mainly I had leaky gut brought on by 10 days of Doxycycline
to treat pneumonia (before I took the Lactaid and did the dairy trial). It
didn't even occur to me what had happened from the antibiotic because I was
feeling pretty good after the pneumonia was gone. I take L-Glutamine daily,
am 100% GF in my diet, and take daily vitamin/mineral supplements. I have
only been GF since June last year, not quite nine months yet. I am still in
the "GF womb", or in "baby steps" as my friend tells me... still learning to
walk in the GF world.

I got sick with pertussis ("whopping cough") in January, and it mutated into
pneumonia on me by February. For the first ten days in February I took
Doxycycline, 100 mg, one every twelve hours until they were done. About a
week after that, feeling good again, I decided to try the Lactaid Chewables
with dairy. Second big mistake! The FIRST big mistake I'd made was I'd
stopped taking the probiotics in December. I'd been taking them and the
L-Glutamine daily, the bacteria twice a day, three times a day for the
L-Glutamine, but I also eat Mountain High's excellent yogurt every day, and
I'd gotten to the point where my gut health was very good from yogurt and
L-Glutamine alone. It seemed I was doing well even after I stopped taking
the probiotics in December. So in taking the Doxycycline, I did not think
about what this strong antibiotic would do to all the good healthy bacteria
in my gut that had finally come back after months of this regimen. What the
antibiotic did was kill all the bacteria, the pneumonia bacteria, pertussis
bacteria, and all my friendly gut bacteria too. All gone, all wiped out in
10 days. By this point food was not being broken down to appropriate
absorbable size, and was tunneling into my blood stream via the leaks in the
intestines, and oh my goodness, what a mess I became, and very quickly too.

I also had stopped taking the vitamin/mineral supplements during the
Doxycycline. Why? The Doxy warnings say it interacts with just about all the
good vitamins and minerals! (A lot of different foods too, if I recall
correctly) And it is kind of silly how they want you to take it. You have to
take it one to two hours before a meal, don't eat for 3 hours after you take
it, and have no vitamins and minerals or foods that interact with it and
neutralize it! I pretty much had to rearrange my eating schedule around the
antibiotic. So I'm afraid with the combination of leaky gut, and the
malnutrition from not being able to take the vitamin/mineral supplements, I
was quite a mess for a few weeks :-(  It turned out to be a very, very bad
decision to try Lactaid Chewables a week after the Doxy!

My conclusion about this whole mess is, leaky-gut is bad for anybody, but
especially for Celiacs - fix it if you have it (better yet, avoid it at all
costs to begin with), Lactaid Chewables contain gluten (their Ultra tablets
don't), and finally, it is highly unlikely, very improbable that cow's milk
contains gluten.

I got a ton of responses re: the cow's milk/gluten question, and if after
reading this, you still want me to pursue it, I will give you a summary of
the posts. Let me know.

Regards,

Jerry

* Please remember some posters may be WHEAT-FREE, but not GLUTEN-FREE *