Since I am involved with biestmilch/colostrum, the diagnosis of lactose intolerance seems to have spread like an epidemic. Self-diagnosis and the diagnosis made by physicians – sorry to say so – as an easy way out for all kinds of functional gastrointestinal disorders has become so common that one has to develop reservations.
If you take your time and read the latest research done on this topic, doubts about the reliability of this diagnosis appear more than justified. Don’t get me wrong, there is no questioning about people suffering gastrointestinal symptoms, only the given reason may be highly questionable.

The topic is of great relevance for athletes who very often suffer from functional gastrointestinal disorders due to stress, be it mechanical, biochemical or mental. My impression is that these problems are rarely adequately analyzed and diagnosed, but overhastily labelled either as infectious, lactose- or stress-induced (means vegetative). The following paragraphs can only give you a very superficial idea of a complex problem.

Lactose and lactase, what is it about? A more state-of -the art view on intolerance

As far as it is known, lactose has no special nutritional value for adults. It is the most important source of energy during the first year of a human’s life, providing almost half the total energy requirement of infants. Lactose has several applications in food industry. It is used in sweets, confectionery and sausages because of its physiological properties: lactose provides a good texture and binds water and color. To be absorbed it needs to hydrolyzed. This is what lactase is doing. Lactase is found abundantly at the beginning of the small intestines. It is found at the tip of the intestinal villi and is therefore more vulnerable to intestinal diseases that cause cell damage (other enzymes that degrade other sugars are located deeper in the cell lining).  If lactase secretion drops about one tenth or less of suckling level after weaning, then this is referred to as primary hypolactasia. Congenital lactase deficiency is extremely rare. Secondary hypolactasia or maldigestion may be due to operations or damaged mucosal lining of the gut (infections, inflammatory diseases). This is where biestmilch comes in. The minimum amount of lactose that may cause symptoms is not known, and may be a very subjective thing. On average amounts of dozens of grams have to be ingested to cause symptoms (e.g. 50 grams are used in the lactose tolerance test for diagnostic reasons). Don’t forget that you ingest lactose with many kinds of foods!

Biestmilch is low in lactose. It only contains 5% to 7% of the amount of lactose in milk. (more…)

Since I am working and investigating biestmilch (colostrum) – for me the most complex therapeutic and performance “enhancing” as well as recovery “improving” substance – I am looking much closer at common sense concepts in exercise science and exercise physiology. Understanding biestmilch means to understand the body as an organic machine of well coordinated regulatory processes. There is not one single relation in our body that is a point to point or a cause-effect relation. Each molecule, each entity in our body is multi-functional and part of a system that is based and organized following the principle of redundancy to secure our lives in case of failures that may occur every day.

Currently high racing season is lying ahead of many athletes. Especially elite athletes disappear for training into the higher regions of our Alps to train at altitudes between 1500m and 2000m. Altitude training is postulated to improve performance at sea level. Since the Olympics in Mexiko 1968 this story haunts athletes all over the world and lets them climb up mountains. Analyzing the subjects shows that evidence is scarce proving a positive effect of altitude training. On the contrary, when athletes from sea level first go up to altitude, their performance suffers badly. (more…)

Oh boy, it is a big job to give our girls* the shape they deserve. But don’t you think they look nice already?

Nina working on Meike's helmet

I try my very best ...

Yvonne and Meike

*for those who are not familiar with triathlon, we are talking about Yvonne van Vlerken and Meike Krebs.

Chris Solinsky, last weekend, was the first American runner below the 27-minute barrier over 10,000m. Solinsky is the heaviest runner ever to break 27 minutes, and by some margin too. Solinsky is a relative giant at 73 kg to the runners above him.  Bekele at 54 kg, Gebrselassie (56 kg), Tergat (63kg) and Sammy Wanjiru (52kg) are some of the names on that list.
There are only 30 men in history who have done it, but Solinsky is 9 kg heavier than the next heaviest guys (Mohammed Mourhit and Mark Bett at 64 kg).  In other words, until Solinsky, nobody heavier than 65kg had run sub-27 minutes, which is quite remarkable!

He is also the tallest. Paul Tergat held that record, but Solinksy is 3 cm taller than him, and the second slowest in history over 5,000m to break 27 minutes, but that should change when he gets to the track later this year.

On this weekend I myself have been in the midst of a triathlon race. It was amazing how size and especially weight were one of the main concerns and issues in the ongoing pre-race chit-chat. There is one faction that believes – the word belief is very crucial – leanness is of fundamental importance, especially, if you want to perform on the run. But as you know there are famous triathletes who are big and successful too, among them famous Chris McCormack, but also Ronnie Schildknecht from Switzerland, Torbjørn Sindballe from Denmark are big guys, and far beyond of being unsuccessful. Therefore you find another group of athletes and coaches who are stressing the fact that endurance needs glycogen stores that can be retrieved during a race, energy that is ready for use, and does not need to be metabolized through the gut during a race.

The proof of concept for either approach is still missing. One may assume that the necessary scientific evidence is not possible to give, because we start out from inadequate premises. There are strong arguments for both factions and for all other sizes. So we might be obliged to reconsider our logic and explanatory approaches. Perhaps both conclusions that a light body can runs faster and is more economic than a heavy one, and that a heavy one is superior to light due to more energy stores, may not apply.

Could it actually be that the body as whole, its balance, its proportions, its compositions may play a major role, its genetic outfit that determines to a large extent the resilience and robustness of an organism, and its capacity to process and respond to stress factors? Could it be that the body as a whole generates our abilities to perform, and depending on this whole performance levels vary among individuals in a wide range.

My work with biestmilch, one of nature’s most complete and vivid substances, taught me many a lesson during the last decade. I had to realize that there is not one one-to-one, not a single one-cause-one-effect relation within our body. Complexity science underlines that notion in many ways, and proves that the trend in up-front science leaves the path of the one cause – one effect concepts.