Disaccharidase Deficiencies: Anyone else confused?
A little background on this condition since when I heard it I literally had no idea what it even was. I vaguely remembered something from Biology about a disaccharide and I knew it was in your body but other than that… Nope. Nothing. Just fluff between the ears left over from college.
But even that much was nothing. But when you learn that there’s a disaccharidase deficiency and that someone in your family is diagnosed with it, you start to do a lot of research very quickly.
So now for the norm.
A disaccharide in its base form is a sugar or carbohydrate that your body breaks down and uses for energy. Your body uses a disaccharidase to break it down. When your body is deficient in those it’s not able to absorb the food you eat like it needs to and so it can cause different symptoms.
Make sense? It started to but I still didn’t know what exactly a disaccharide was or why we could eat fried potatoes and not boiled while on the diet. So here’s more research download.
A carbohydrate is a unit of energy that your body uses for energy. The cells metabolize the carbohydrates and convert them into power to keep everything running from your heart to your brain. When you eat your body breaks down the food into usable pieces. Proteins for building, water for hydration, nutrients and minerals, and carbohydrates for energy. It continues to break down carbs into simple sugars. Sugar=energy.
In order to use these simple sugars, your body produces certain enzymes (disaccharidase) that attach themselves to a specific type of sugar (disaccharide) and break it down/absorb it into the body and take it to where it’s needed. So, when you have a disaccharidase deficiency, your body isn’t producing that type of enzyme in order to digest the sugar. That means the sugar passes through undigested and can sit in your digestive tract longer than it should. This can cause pain, swelling, bloating, nausea… etc. It can cause a lot of other symptoms too but those are the most common.
Anyone familiar with lactose intolerance? That is a form of disaccharidase deficiency when your body doesn’t produce lactase. Lactose is milk sugar and if you are lactose intolerant than your body can’t absorb it and so it causes digestive distress. Yeah. Lots of sciency talk for saying that ice cream isn’t everyone’s friend.
When you are diagnosed with disaccharidase deficiency they don’t know which sugar your body doesn’t like so you go off of all of them for at least four weeks to try and resolve the symptoms. Then, once you’re feeling better, you start introducing one food back into your diet at a time and see if there are any reactions. This is the tricky part because everyone’s body is different. To use our example above, some people who are lactose intolerant can’t drink straight milk but they can tolerate ice cream or cheese because of the way it’s prepared or modified.
It’s the same with the other sugars. Some people can tolerate small amounts, some people can tolerate everything again and just needed to let their body heal. It’s a crazy world.
The three sugars you are avoiding while on this diet are lactose, sucrose, and maltose. Lactose is found in milk, sucrose in table sugar or white sugar (also found in some fruits and vegetables), and maltose is found in grain.
For the diet there are some exceptions to these which is where I was confused but that’s more research that you don’t necessarily need to read unless you want to. ;) It’s a lot to take in and I’ve been doing a lot of reading.
Alright diet specifics. So dairy is a no no except for some cheeses. Hard cheeses like cheddar have been modified enough that they don’t react as much. However yogurt is a no no.
Potatoes are another tricky area. Boiled potatoes release the starch that are in them and it breaks down into simple sugars that your body reacts too. However fried potatoes such as hash browns and french fries don’t have that because the high heat and the oil make the starch react differently. I don’t understand it apart from that high level explanation but I’m sure someone with more cooking science background knows the exacts on the chemistry portion. I only did the basics in chemistry. See? There’s a very good reason to pay attention in school.
The fruit specifics are easier to break down because it just has to do with sugar content. Fructose is a sugar that you can eat so fruits and veggies that have that are fine (like blueberries and parsnips) but ones that have sucrose aren’t (like bananas and carrots). The hardest part there is just keeping track of which ones are allowed.
Grains are pretty much a hard and fast no as are nuts. That was hard because we use grain in almost everything in the US. Even our french fries are often coated in flour to give them that extra crispy deliciousness. After my husband met with the dietician she told us that we could use coconut flour and cassava flour in small amounts but to still be very careful since coconuts are high in fat and cassava is a root vegetable so it can be high in starch if it’s boiled. But after two weeks on the diet we were getting desperate for ANYTHING that wasn’t eggs and potatoes.
I’ll keep posting more recipes and things that we did but if anyone is looking for some resources for this diet /resources on what it is I used these a lot.
Study on Disaccharidase Deficiencies
Anyone else out there know anything about this? Let me know!
