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Hi guys,
I realize this topic is kinda unpleasant, but my mom has IBS pretty bad, and her guts are all clenched up and in pain basically all the time.
I was wondering if you guys have had, or know someone who has/has had IBS and could offer some tips on what to do about it? I’m currently under the impression that it’s relatively permanent, so I guess some suggestions on treating the symptoms would be good?
Any help is much appreciated. Thanks.
My brother has it. There doesn’t seem to be any ‘cure’ so to speak, but my brother has learned (through a lot of trial and error) what foods to stay away from and how to ‘coat’ his stomach. I think a lot he had to learn on his own because the so-called experts weren’t that helpful. You kindof have to learn your own body. My brother stays away from egg yolks, butter, milk, whole wheat, and beef. Basically he eats a lot of white meat chicken, fish, white bread, and potatoes. Vegetables and fruits he has, but he has to coat his stomach with white bread first as a buffer to help digest it. He also drinks a lot of peppermint tea which is supposed to settle his stomach. Don’t know if that is helpful at all, but I think she should experiment with what does and what doesn’t bother her as much to eat.
The digestive system is very very sensitive to stress. As well as sticking to “safe” foods you have to look after your mental health too 😉 which is difficult when you have constant stomach pain! As for food, I think it’s very different person to person. We all have different intolerances so stick to what seems to work best and try the elimination process to identify the main trigger foods causing pain.
Hope she feels better soon 🙂I had IBS when I was young. Since then I have studied nutrition and herbal medicine for years and have discovered that treating or curing any problem can be done with diet. I have found what works best for me is to drink lots of fresh fruit and vegetables juices or make my own smoothies with frozen fruit and avoid any added sugar. I drink lots of filtered or spring water and eat lots of nuts (raw or unsalted are best). Basically the biggest thing with any intestinal problem is to get lots of fibre but also lots of liquid to help break down and digest the fibre. Whole grains and nuts, fruit with skins and non peeled vegetables have tons of fibre. I usually make smoothies with frozen berries, banana, apple, kale (so good for you) and juice but you can also add nuts and powdered fibre and green powder or vegan protein powder.
Foods that irritate intestinal problems and increase inflammation are white flour, sugar, processed foods, red meat, fat, butter, cafein and especially dairy. When I would have milk or dairy as a kid I would get really bad tummy aches and intestinal bloating and cramping. I cut out all dairy and now only drink almond milk and coconut milk and haven’t had any problems since. I would say also eat tons of veggies, in salads or in whole grain wraps which help to cleanse the system and move other foods through the intestinal tract. Instead of butter, use olive oil or coconut oil. Instead of red meat, eat fish, chicken, turkey or beans. Instead of white flour, use multi grain or whole wheat. Instead of white sugar, use raw sugar, stevia, maple syrup or honey. Instead of cooked veggies, eat raw or steamed. Instead of white rice, eat brown rice. Instead of regular pasta, eat whole wheat or multi-grain pasta. Instead of fried potatoes, eat baked or boiled. Instead of any carbonated beverages, drink juice. Instead of coffee, drink herbal teas. Instead of cow’s milk, use almond or coconut milk. Also avoid alcohol.
The only exception to avoiding dairy would be eating natural, organic or greek yogurt because probiotics are very important for digesting food. Also you can take digestive enzymes in capsules or probiotics in capsules with every meal to aid in digestion. Papaya fruit or papaya supplements also have great enzymes for digesting foods. Avoid deep fried foods and skin and fat on meat. Avoid artificial sweeteners and flavour enhancers like aspartame and MSG. Always drink filtered or spring water as unfiltered water with fluoride or chlorine can also have a negative impact on being able to digest foods properly. Avoid fast food or pick healthier alternatives like subs, pitas, wraps, or vegetable soups. Always have twice as much veggies or fruit with a meal than proteins like meat and carbs like potatoes or pasta. My diet mainly consists of a lot of fruit juices and smoothies, oatmeal with fruits, seeds and nuts, salads, vegetable soups, wraps and sandwiches, stir fries with lots of veggies and legumes on brown rice, whole grain pastas with tomato sauce and lots of veggies and not a lot of bread or white flour foods or meat or sugar and I am healthier than ever. Anyway please pass this on and I hope it helps.
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I will just interject here as a warning that beans might not be the best protein – they can really really make IBS worse, I have a friend with IBS who was told beans beans beans and the first time she had a beans only meal she was sweating from the pain of it half an hour later! So careful with beans! Broccoli, cooked and raw, also aggravates it terribly for her, as does tomato or anything acidic, so your mileage may vary! I will just never forget the look on her face and the way she was sweating from those beans!
I have a rather odd situation, as I develope IBS every 3 months when I’m on the ‘white pill’ for my birth control meds. For me, in order to minimize the misery, I have to avoid dairy products, as apparently I become lactose-intolerant (like my dad) to some extent during that time. So milk, cheese, etc has to come out of my diet or I’ll be hurting for it.
I feel your mom’s pain, dealing with that all the time. Trying to find what sort of food is ‘triggering’ is definitely a key in coping.
It might be worthwhile to investigate and research what wheat (all forms.. whole grain, processed, white, etc) and other grains can do to our digestive systems. Maybe it will provide some relief.
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My art: featherdust.comI will just interject here as a warning that beans might not be the best protein – they can really really make IBS worse, I have a friend with IBS who was told beans beans beans and the first time she had a beans only meal she was sweating from the pain of it half an hour later! So careful with beans! Broccoli, cooked and raw, also aggravates it terribly for her, as does tomato or anything acidic, so your mileage may vary! I will just never forget the look on her face and the way she was sweating from those beans!
The lectins in beans/legumes can certainly be a big problem for those with sensitive digestive systems… and a moderate problem even for those without (ever wonder why they tend to give gas?).
Some legumes contain more lectin than others, and nearly all are easier on the stomach if you purchase dry beans, soak, then sprout (at least 1/4″ “tail”) then cook as directed. Lentils are one of the best sprouted and then cooked legumes, along with mung and adzuki beans.In the end, nutrition can be complicated, and it’s worthwhile to really research the foods we eat. It’s ESPECIALLY important to research the foods that we eat that are “new” in our diet… stuff that humans have only started eating in the last several hundred years is still very “new” for our systems.
It is important to note that modern dairy is usually homogenized and ultra-pasteurized and is NOT the same fresh-from-the-teat, grass-fed dairy that our ancestors consumed.
There is a lot of conflicting information out there so the best thing one can do is research and try to make an informed decision. It also pays to mind that some of the research out there is intentionally biased to sell the most commonly produced food goods out there. To say that it is not at least partially corrupted would be silly.
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My art: featherdust.comFor those of you who have problems with dairy, have you always been that way, or all of a sudden one day did it start making you sick? My family drinks a ton of milk (like probably about 4-5 gallons a week), but I would imagine that our bodies are used to it after all this time. Never let the lac operon shut down 😉
I don’t know if this will help, but my aunt’s doctor recommended this book, Eat to Live: The Amazing Nutrient-Rich Program for Fast and Sustained Weight Loss, Revised Edition.
He read this and incorporated it into his diet and says he feels a million times better. My aunt has been reading it and from what she says many of the foods we eat are like poison to our bodies. I read Food Justice for the class I teach and I can see that after everything “food companies” put into our food.
I would believe that diet would be a big help, may other aunt and cousin suffer from siliac’s (sp) disease and their guts were tore up until they went onto the gluten free diet. Mary had been diagnosed with IBS and it turned out to be siliac’s.
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Sun Dragon Koi #3For those of you who have problems with dairy, have you always been that way, or all of a sudden one day did it start making you sick? My family drinks a ton of milk (like probably about 4-5 gallons a week), but I would imagine that our bodies are used to it after all this time. Never let the lac operon shut down 😉
Thing is, as you grow older, you have less and less of the enzyme needed to break down dairy. Therefore, intolerance is most of the time gradual. However, this can differ quite a bit from one person to the next! Plus we all have a complete different threshold when it comes to discomfort and pain.
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http://www.sarahjestin.com/feedbacklists.htmI was just recovering some information for someone else concerning this. There is a newspaper column that runs weekly called The Peoples Pharmacy and they repeatedly get readers writing in who swear that eating macaroon cookies relieves the symptoms of IBS. Sounds kind of bizarre, but who knows? Also their website claims that enteric coated peppermint oil tablets could do it as well. http://www.peoplespharmacy.com/build/mt-search.cgi?blog_id=1&tag=Irritable%20Bowel%20Syndrome&limit=20
We also have relatives and friends with confirmed celiac disease (gluten intolerance) so I would be very careful with the advice above about eating bread to coat the digestive system. Eliminating all gluten is a very complex problem but, if it was me, I would seriously consider going gluten free for six weeks or more. Gluten derivatives are in more foods than you can imagine and my sister, who has celiac disease, claims it is even found in such odd things as Philadelphia Cream Cheese. If needed I might be able to get a list or a link from her, but a thorough internet search would get you started.
The problem with dairy is not only that most people can’t digest lactose properly because they lack the enzyme needed to but also the fact that what they have turned it into the last few years is actually not healthy for our bodies. A calf would die drinking the milk people do because they take all the nutrition out of it with pasteurization and homogenization. Also, unless you buy all natural or organic milk, you risk ingesting toxins, growth hormones, antibiotics and pus. Most cows from factory farms in the U.S. are fed GMO corn which is not natural for them, which they can’t digest properly and cause an overgrowth of bacteria to build up in their stomachs which is why they are given antibiotics. Not to mention that the research that has been done on anything GMO or genetically modified is scary. Studies have been done on rats that were fed a GMO diet that developed cancerous tumors after a year.
Also if you do more research on milk, you can’t actually absorb the calcium from it properly because it is protein based so in order to break down the protein to absorb the calcium, your body actually uses twice as much calcium so you lose calcium every time you drink it. There was a family on Doctor Oz that drank tons of milk all their lives who were overweight and unhealthy and when they tested their bone density levels, they were quite low. If I were you I would watch the documentaries: ‘Food Inc.’, ‘Food Matters’, ‘Simply Raw’ and the best of all ‘FORKS OVER KNIVES’.
‘Forks Over Knives’ is based on ‘The China Study’ if you look up the book. Two doctors from the U.S. who both grew up on dairy farms became specialists in the nutritional field and did this huge study on the effect of meat and dairy in people’s diets on their health, all across China over a period of several years. They found that the people who ingested the most meat and dairy, had the highest risks and instances of cancer and heart disease. Coincidentally from their research, both doctors turned to raw vegan diets and treat all of their sick and terminal patients with the same diet and have had amazing results. They even did a study on rats where they increased their levels of casein (dairy protein) they were fed and their rates of cancer sky rocketed whereas when they decreased the amounts, the cancer levels went down and even reversed in some cases. Anyways, I highly recommend watching those and doing more research on how the food industry works and what foods actually help or harm your body.
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I don’t want to start an argument, but the China study has a lot of bias and does not look at the whole diet and the interactions that different foods give us in its entirety.
It is true that eating commercially farmed meats in conjunction with a normal american diet is unhealthy in the long run. This does not mean that meat in itself is unhealthy. It means that commercially farmed meats are unhealthy, and that in conjunction with our current diet, the processes in our bodies store the fats from the meat in vastly different ways, and thus as part of a whole diet, it is unhealthy. Commercially farmed meats are… pretty terrible, oftentimes. The animals are treated poorly and are fed with unhealthy diets (you are what they eat, so to speak) and it’s just bad. I am talking about large scale farms that raise and butcher thousands of animals, not local farms with cows on rolling pasture or chickens running around in the sun.
Eating natural meats (pastured animals raised in healthy ways) is not necessarily unhealthy, but one must remove inflammatory items from the diet (this varies from person to person, but grains- especially wheat- give most people problems even if they do not realize it) and one must remove glycemic foods (I am looking at you, sugars) in order for the body to process the meats “correctly”.
This is not a knock on veganism, as I greatly respect vegans. Most of my meals are actually vegetarian. I am just saying that it’s a lot more complicated than simply “meat is bad for you”.
Anyhow, we are venturing into territory that becomes debate instead of helping Amy! I just wanted to express my concern with the statements above. It is vitally important to remember that food interactions within the body do not work in a vacuum– each thing you eat can influence how your body processes all of the other things you eat as well, and most importantly how the body breaks them down and absorbs them. This is science that is only just starting to be understood– we (humans) have a long way to go before we really get what is happening inside, so to speak. In general though, modern foods are going to be more harmful than helpful to anyone that has a compromised digestive or immune system.
If I were to have IBS, I would probably go on a purge type diet. This is where you eliminate known irritants for a month, then slowly introduce them one at a time to see if any of them seem to be the culprit. This can take a long while and patience is necessary, but it also might mean living the rest of one’s life knowing which foods are to be avoided.
Common irritants to the digestive system:
Dairy
Caffeine/Coffee
Alcohols
Grains (all grains, I’m afraid)
Legumes
Highly starchy foods such as potatoes
Sugar or sugar substitues
Commercial meats (try http://www.localharvest.org/ to find humanely raised, pastured meats near you. Much healthier for you and the environment)Optional: Nightshades… some people have reactions to these, but it’s less common. Usually only people that have problems with alkaloid substances. Nightshades are things like tomato, peppers (all), eggplant, paprika, pimentos.
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