Lactose

From Open Food Facts wiki

Objective

Analyze the list of product ingredients to determine if:

  • the product contains lactose
  • the product may contain lactose
  • the product does not contain lactose

Identification

Using 3 lists of ingredients (contains, may contain, and does not contain lactose), we can analyze the list of ingredients and thus identify the presence of lactose in products.

Caution: The absence of lactose will only be possible for products whose all ingredients are present in the "does not contain lactose" list. In order to sort the ingredients most present in products first, you can look at the [[URL non valide supprimée] list of all ingredients] and sort it by number of products As of 12/20/2013, we have 476 products containing "skimmed milk powder".

Uses

Indication of the presence or absence of lactose

In product sheets on the website and on mobile applications.

Search form

Search for products without, with, or possibly containing lactose.

Notes

On the same principle, we have already implemented a palm oil detector, and we could adapt the model to gluten and other constituents that can cause intolerance or allergy problems.

Ultimately, we will have to try to create a taxonomy of ingredients with properties such as the presence, probable presence or absence of lactose, gluten, palm oil etc.

See also, the mission The 2 plants

Bonus

Streptococcus thermophilus, thermophilic streptococcus
Lactobacillus delbrueckii subsp. bulgaricus, Lactobacillus bulgaricus
Lactobacillus acidophilus

Cheeses are better tolerated -> so bonus on the "Cheeses" category.

Potentially bonus

"Lactic bacteria"

Malus

Bifidobacterium bifidum

Processing of ingredient names

The adjective "organic" attached to certain ingredient names must be masked.

Additional ideas

The category tree gives the name of many cheeses. We can use this list to detect the presence of cheeses in the ingredients. Yes, the ideal would be to create the taxonomy of ingredients by integrating certain categories that also correspond to ingredients. The amount of lactose is sometimes present in the nutritional table! Lactose has been one of the recognized nutrients since 12/19/2013 :-) $

Estimate the amount of milk contained

Difficult problem in some products.

Lactose patient associations we can reach to, by country

Australia & New Zealand

Austria

Belgium

Bulgaria

Canada

Croatia

Cyprus

Czech Republic

Denmark

Estonia

Europe

Finland

France

Germany

Greece

Hungary

Ireland

Israel

Italy

Japan

Latvia

Lithuania

Luxembourg

Malta

Netherlands

Norway

Poland

Portugal

Romania

Slovakia

Slovenia

Spain

Sweden

United Kingdom

United States