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Cheese and butter have very little lactose, and yoghurt has only a quarter of lactose content of milk. In many human populations without lactose tolerance, preparing these was actually a way to consume milk they couldn’t drink directly.

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They still do have lactose though. I’m lactose intolerant and even a little butter used for cooking causes me to bloat up and gain 5-10 lbs within 30 minutes.

Some cheeses are supposedly lactose free, but seem to cause the same effects.

That’s highly unusual level of intolerance. A whole cup of butter contains only 0.1 g of lactose, and since cup of butter is 1500-2000 calories, in a typical meal that includes butter you’ll consume much less than that. If you just use 1-3 tsp of butter for frying, and then don’t consume everything you cooked, you’ll be consuming less than 1 milligram of lactose. For comparison, most people with lactose intolerance can consume around 10 grams a day, that is, 10 000x times as much. What you describe looks more like allergy than regular lactose intolerance.

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