In Case of Poison Ingestion: Drink Milk?  The other day, Sarah
noted that on her laundry detergent, it said “In case of
accidental ingestion, give a glass of water or milk, and contact
a poison control center.” She thought it odd that they would
want you to drink milk. The purpose of drinking at all was
clear… to dilute the detergent. Even very dangerous poisons can
be handled by your body if they are diluted enough. But what was
so special about milk? We had two theories: one involved the
basicity of milk, and the other involved the lactose sugar in
milk.  I looked into it further, and my lactose guess was right.
See, milk contains a sugar called lactose that the human body is
unable to digest by itself. Lactose is a disaccharide (sugar
made up of two units) consisting of one glucose unit and one
galactose unit connected by a beta linkage. Lactose is digested
in mammals (like humans) only with the help of an enzyme called
lactase which cleaves the lactose in half… allowing the
individual sugars to be absorbe