Over the years, I've had hundreds of people ask me why, when encountering food that has too much dairy for my lactose intolerant stomach to handle, I don't just take a Lactaid tablet and soldier on.
If only lactose intolerance was so easy.
There was a time when I used Lactaid tablets frequently and carried around a tube of chewable Lactaid pills in my purse, but I don't bother anymore. Lactaid Pills were like a bad boyfriend who treated me horribly one night and wonderfully the next. It took me a few years of lactose intolerant-focused abuse before I matured enough to dump those Lactaid Pills and forced myself to stick to a dairy-free diet instead.
Lactaid tablets are not the Knight in Shining Armor that they are advertised to be, and I learned the hard way that they don't always work (for me, I should add). Part of the problem was the packaging which used to read "chew one or two tablets before eating dairy food." (I'm paraphrasing, of course.) I tried taking one Lactaid tablet and had no success eating the ice cream cone. The next time, I tried two tablets with only slightly better results. I think my lactose intolerance is worse than the two tablet maximum dictated by the Lactaid package. It became obvious very quickly that two Lactaid tablets only worked fifty-percent of the time and the fifty-percent of time when they DIDN'T work was so agonizingly bad that they weren't worth the successful times.
So I don't bother with Lactaid anymore. For the same reason I gave up chocolate mousse and bakery-made butter-cream frosting, I gave up trying to eat ice cream cones by chewing a Lactaid tablet before I began. I am a firm believer in the old adage "Fool me once, shame on you; Fool me twice, shame on me." And besides, there's dairy-free ice-"cream" now. So, HA! Lactaid. I am in a new, kinder, gentler, lactose-free relationship and I'm pretty sure it's going to last for the long haul!