I’ve recently moved to a meat heavy diet, and that pretty much fixed my ibs completely. I still get flare ups if I eat too many oranges or bananas, but eating meat on every meal is absolutely essential.
I'm the opposite, leaving out red meat made my gut feel a lot better. I do still eat the occasional beef burger, but mostly it's either vegan or fish/chicken.
This is the thing that's tripping up health professionals about gut health, people's guts are really different and there's no official accepted way of testing what kind of diet works for who.
Except for long-term experimentation and elimination and that's not "scientific", so we don't do that. Doctors just want to prescribe a pill that' fits everyone[0] and call it a day.
[0] everyone they bothered to test it on, so mostly white western males
Dr. Condor, in Stefan Zweig's novel "Beware of Pity":
"""
Don’t you know the medical tricks we play? When we don’t know what to do ourselves, we play for time, we keep patients occupied with chatter and little activities so that they won’t notice how baffled we are. Luckily for us, an invalid’s own nature is usually our ally.
Of course she feels better!
Any kind of treatment, eating lemons or drinking milk, cold-water treatment or hot-water treatment, will bring about an initial change in the organism and provide a stimulus that the ever-optimistic patient takes for improvement. That kind of auto-suggestion is our best assistant; it even helps the biggest fools among us doctors.
But there’s a snag—as soon as the charm of novelty has worn off, reaction will set in, and then you have to switch your approach in a hurry, pretend there’s a new treatment, and so we doctors manipulate our approach in really severe cases until perhaps the real, right method of treatment is found.
"""
> This is the thing that's tripping up health professionals about gut health, people's guts are really different and there's no official accepted way of testing what kind of diet works for who.
The more I've learned about my personal response to various health interventions, the more I've come to believe that a "human being" as a research subject for many medical interventions is very ill-defined simply because there is too much variation between individuals. The research subject should really be a single human individual. Poorly working medical treatments to many weird, complicated, chronic illnesses should really be replaced by an algorithm that allows a person to find the correct treatment or lifestyle adjustments themselves.
If you haven't read Invisible Women[0] yet, you should. Don't be intimidated by the page count, a good 50% of the book is just listing sources of _everything_.
The tl;dr is that women, for example, have been excluded from all kinds of medical, scientific and safety studies just because it's too hard to include them. Them having periods and hormones and all that stuff that makes science HARD. It's easier just to test on men =)
Quitting drinking for three years fixed mine, an unexpected side effect. Going keto also taught me that wheat gives me heart burn, which again, wasn’t an expected side effect. I drink and eat small amounts of wheat now without issue.
Having been skeptical, I think I would recommend elimination diets to people just to see if there’s an unexpected benefit to cutting an unexpected item
I don’t really remember, sorry, I just sort of realized after a while that the issues I’d had went away. During that period I drank a lot of Heineken Blue, yep. I’ve since started drinking again too and been fine (in my gut, at least)
Oranges and bananas are out for me too, because of histamine intolerance, which correlates heavily with gut issues. Sharing to help others since I wish I had known sooner!
Got any suggested reads on this? I have annoying sporadic rhinitis flare ups and I've always suspected a link with food. Would love to see if there's a way to determine what foods may be an issue!
A generally recommended elimination diet is the FODMAP diet (originally out of studies by the Australian Monash University).
It's primarily for IBS and identification of trigger foods, but the elimination and reintroduction steps may well help you with identifying your triggers.
Oh definitely. I did (and am still refining) a full elimination diet to get good clean data. I cut salicylates, amines (e.g histAMINE), and glutamates. Fedup.com.au is a clunky decades old resource, but the content is no-bs and so valuable.
I have rhinitis flare ups too - I’m not sure I’ve pinpointed exactly what flares mine up, but I most suspect guar gum / xanthan gum. Either as a trigger, or just causing thickening of mucus, which spirals into blocked noses and sinus infection issues and further rhinitis.
What really helps me is lymphatic drainage massage. There’s videos on YouTube showing you how to gently directionally massage the drainage channels to keep your sinuses clear.
I sometimes eat meat (chicken) and feel really good, but I alternate with rice and fruits. Fruits require exercise outdoor, that's where they work well, fruits indoor all day is not good from my xp
