Lactose-Intolerant Superbaby

The enzyme lactase, the one that digests lactose, doesn't develop in the fetus until the ninth month. Premature babies, therefore, are often born with lactose-intolerance, although this usually goes away when the baby catches up with itself.

Liam Hoekstra was one such premature baby. And a sickly one.

Liam was born four weeks early and had a small hole in his heart. He also had eczema, enlarged kidneys, was lactose intolerant and had severe stomach reflux that made him vomit several times each day, his mother said.

He's more than up for it since, as a story by Jeff Alexander appearing in several papers, revealed.

Liam Hoekstra was hanging upside down by his feet when he performed an inverted sit-up, his shirt falling away to expose rippled abdominal muscles.


It was a display of raw power one might expect to see from an Olympic gymnast.

Liam is 19 months old.

But this precocious, 22-pound boy with coffee-colored skin, curly hair and washboard abs is far from a typical toddler.

"He could do the iron cross when he was 5 months old," said his adoptive mother, Dana Hoekstra of Roosevelt Park. She was referring to a difficult gymnastics move in which a male athlete suspends himself by his arms between two hanging rings, forming the shape of a cross.

"I would hold him up by his hands and he would lift himself into an iron cross. That's when we were like, `Whoa, this is weird,'" Hoekstra said.

Liam has a rare genetic condition called myostatin-related muscle hypertrophy, or muscle enlargement. The condition promotes above-normal growth of the skeletal muscles; it doesn't affect the heart and has no known negative side effects, according to experts.

Liam has the kind of physical attributes that bodybuilders and other athletes dream about: 40 percent more muscle mass than normal, jaw-dropping strength, breathtaking quickness, a speedy metabolism and almost no body fat.

Only a few people are known to have this condition. The worst side effect for Liam today is that he eats six meals a day and can't gain weight.

Expect a tv series about, oh, next Thursday.