Fifteen percent of adults suffer from Irritable Bowel Syndrome. Most of them get a prescription to treat the gas, the pain and the inflammation. Most of them don’t get much better.
The question should be asked, what is irritating your intestines? The answer is rooted in common sense: your diet! Refined, high sugar and meat diets unbalance our microbiome, which is the source of the gas, pain and inflammation. The latter leads to “sticky” intestinal walls, which created blind loops where gas is trapped. The bowels cannot stretch beyond a certain point, which is painful. When a test is run, the blind loops may be gone, to reappear on another intestinal segment later.
Diet is also at play with more severe microbiome disorders, like Ulcerative Colitis and Chron’s disease.
References
IBS symptom reduction ‘twice as large’ with dietary intervention vs. medical treatment
Healio Minute, June 25, 2024
At 4 weeks, the dietary interventions reduced symptom severity in 76% and 71% of patients vs. 58% on medical treatment. More than half of patients in the diet groups reported improvement in overall health.
Although two restrictive diets and medical treatment all reduced the severity of symptoms in irritable bowel syndrome, the effect was greater with diets, suggesting their potential as first-line treatment, according to researchers. “As IBS is a disorder that can manifest in different ways among patients, we wanted to conduct a large, randomized controlled trial to test three different treatment strategies — two dietary treatments vs. pharmacological treatment — to gain a better understanding of how we can optimize treatment in this patient group,” Sanna Nybacka, PhD, of the department of molecular and clinical medicine at the University of Gothenburg, told Healio.
A catered low-fat, high-fiber diet ‘new, hopeful option’ to manage Crohn’s disease
Healio Minute, June 3 2024
Patients with Crohn’s disease who ate the catered Mi-IBD diet for 8 weeks had “a high dietary adherence.” They also had a decrease in proinflammatory marker levels, as well as improvement in quality of life. “We know that most patients with Crohn’s disease seek dietary counseling and ask their physicians about the foods they should consume,” Hajar Hazime, PhD, who trained at the Abreu Lab at the University of Miami Health System Sylvester Comprehensive Cancer Center, told Healio. “However, it is still unclear which diets are the most helpful for patients with inflammatory bowel disease, leading to confusion and reduced enjoyment of food. Some IBD patients even develop overly restrictive diets similar to the avoidant and restrictive food intake disorder. Additionally, patients who receive dietary counseling rarely follow this advice, with previous studies reporting low dietary adherence.”
Hazime added: “We aimed to determine whether providing participants with a catered low-fat, high-fiber diet makes it easier for them to adhere to dietary recommendations and whether this diet can improve CD symptoms, inflammation and microbiome function.”
