Yet another “I Told ‘Em!” (30 years ago). This is starting to get embarrassing.
You all know my pivotal place in the history of food allergies and bringing them to public attention.
Irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) was one of the easiest things to solve. Just stop eating the allergy foods! Now scientists have “discovered” that if you restrict peoples’ diet, the IBS is much better (if they had done it exactly the way I describe in my Diet Wise book, it would have disappeared altogether!)
Their plan was to have patients avoid some fancy sugars. It’s called the FODMAP diet (fermentable, oligosaccharides, disaccharides, monosaccharides, and polyols).
These sugars are found in wheat, rye, onion, garlic, leeks, artichokes, mushrooms, cauliflower, snow peas, beans, chickpeas, lentils, milk products except hard cheese, honey, apples, pears, watermelon, mangos, stone fruits, high-fructose corn syrup, sorbitol, mannitol, maltitol, and xylitol. And more.
So avoiding those is going to improve a great many people, right? In fact it’s a rather severe elimination diet. Although the allowed foods included bananas, blueberries, grapes, oranges, tomatoes, maple syrup, gluten-free breads and cereals, rice noodles and rice, water crackers, oats, polenta, broccoli, bok choy, carrot, cucumber, green beans, sweet potato, olives, lactose-free milk, rice milk, hard cheeses, butter, margarine, and soy yogurt.
What happened was they dumped the patients on this diet for over a year (ugh!). About three quarters got better and, interestingly, about three quarters got better!
The trouble is, because they don’t know how to do this properly, they never follow through. That means to re-introduce banned foods, one at a time, and figure out which are the chief offenders. THOSE are the foods to avoid.
[SOURCE: American College of Gastroenterology’s 76th Annual Scientific Meeting, Washington D.C., Oct. 28-Nov. 2, 2011].
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