CLAIM: A majority of Keralites are lactose intolerant, while 70% of West and North Indians can easily digest milk.
FACT: Studies show that while Indians in general are lactose intolerant, more South Indians were prone to the condition than those from Northern parts of the country.
A popular reel on Instagram claims that a majority of Keralites are lactose intolerant and cannot digest milk, while the opposite is true for those hailing from Northern and Western parts of the country.
The video, which is in Malayalam and titled "biggest blunders," has close to 58,000 likes and over 3 million views on Instagram.
It shows a woman offering a glass of milk to a man who says he has stopped drinking milk now.
"Most of us Malayalis are better off not drinking milk. Lactase enzymes help digest the sweet lactose sugars in milk by converting them to glucose and galactose. The fact is that 3 in 4 Malayali adults over the age of 15 do not have the lactase enzyme to digest lactose. That is lactose intolerance," the man goes on to explain in the video posted by an Instagram user called @modern_vaidyar, who has close to 2 lakh followers on the platform.
He says that while 70 per cent of Indians from Northern and Western regions of the country can digest milk easily, about 75 per cent of Keralites are lactose intolerant.
"This means that 3 in 4 South and East Indians cannot digest milk," he says, while adding how this undigested milk then goes on to create gas and other issues in one's digestive system.
A longer version of the video, titled "Why Keralites cannot digest milk?" was also shared by the same user on their YouTube channel named @modernvaidya.
First Check looked into the claims stated to sift the facts from fiction.
It appears that there has been extensive research on the matter, which shows that Indians in general are lactose intolerant, with a higher prevalence of lactose intolerance among South Indians.
A multicentre study from 1981 found that 66.6 per cent of subjects from South Indian centres were lactose intolerant, while only 27.4 per cent of subjects from North Indian centres were found to be lactose intolerant. "The lower incidence in the North Indian subjects may perhaps be due to the fact that they are descendants of the Aryans who have been dairying for long and are known to be lactose tolerant," it said.
First Check also reached out to Dr Uday C Ghoshal, a renowned gastroenterologist who has published a research paper more recently on lactose intolerance among Indians with similar findings.
"We took a pool of people and gave them all 50 gm lactose, which is the international standard for measurement for this and what we found was even if we gave a person 25 mg, which is half, even then the symptoms similar to irritable bowel syndrome showed up. This points to, and we can conclude that we are not able to digest the protein in milk," he said of his study.
"We wanted to find out how many people cannot digest lactose in India, so we conducted a survey across multiple regions. From all the information we got, we found that if you take four people at random, then three of them cannot digest milk properly," he said, highlighting how Indians, in general, were lactose intolerant.
"If you talk about the variation across regions in India, this is seen to be higher in the south; at least 82 per cent of people cannot digest milk; it just does not happen," he added.
Dr Uday said that what we need to understand is that "lactose intolerance is quite prevalent in our population," but "the numbers and percentages will differ across studies, and consensus needs to be built."
"More research needs to be done, but the underlying agreement is this, that most of us cannot digest milk once we cross into adulthood," he said.
So it appears that the claims in the video are, in fact, true that while Indians, in general, are lactose intolerant, more South Indians were prone to the condition than those from Northern parts of the country.
This story is done in collaboration with First Check, which is the health journalism vertical of DataLEADS.
