Hacker News Reader

Comment by erichmond | Hacker News Reader

I can confirm this was the case for me. After months of testing I was considered “not gluten sensitive”, while experiencing bad IBS when consuming gluten. Once I tried the FODMAP diet I found that the food should high in fructans were my trigger.

View on HN

Seconded. For our situation, it was fructans and polyols (to a lesser extent). Gluten seems to be a non-issue for us, except that wheat products also tend to be high in fructose and oligosaccharides. If you're reasonably diligent about keeping to the diet restriction and only reintroducing one food group at a time, it's possible to be quite precise about identifying what compounds might be a problem.

I put my story in another comment, so I'll be light on details. While seeing a specialist at a digestive disease research center, I learned that people with sets of food sensitivities, including those successfully addressed by a fodmap diet, may find relief by taking special antibiotics that target the digestive tract. After 3 years of severe problems with gluten and corn, I'm fine thanks to those antibiotics.

Looked that up, sounds perhaps like a harder diet than gluten free. Giving up onions and garlic, plus pasta, bread, etc...ouch. You have my sympathy.

It certainly does but you CAN eat things like pickled onions, various grains like corn, oat, quinoa, etc. I'm sure it makes going out a huge hassle.

Had to do it for two months while recovering from severe gut issues. It's no walk in the park. There were very few meals that I was able to enjoy, and I found it difficult to really meet my nutritional needs.

I had to give up all of that stuff initially, but after symptoms recede (a few days) I was able to selectively reintroduce foods until I found the much smaller subset of foods that caused symptoms.

Ideally you should use FODMAP as an elimination diet to determine what food's you react to. I went though it a couple of years ago and discovered that onions (and large amounts of garlic) will give me IBS symptoms. I'm fine with everything else on the FODMAP list. I know others that have discovered they are sensitive to fruits such as apples, pears, etc.

I don't know anyone who has stuck to a strict FODMAP diet long-term.

I know someone who has, but that was because it helped manage her auto-brewery syndrome. Pretty much any time she ate off-diet she immediately regretted it the next day, so that was very effective at keeping her honest.

We went through a FODMAP elimination diet to try resolving some food intolerance issues that our kids were having. After the initial inconvenience, it's really not that big of a deal adhering to a (reasonably) strict FODMAP diet. Garlic-infused oils in cooking instead of chopped garlic, rolled oats instead of toast, bananas instead of apples. You get used to switching ingredients pretty quickly. We now tend to cook most meals from scratch instead of processed/prepared, so I feel like it's been a net positive change for the whole family.

There is a huge difference between the two mechanisms for causing problems. In celiac, proteins cause massive inflammation in the digestive system, any amount of protein is usually enough to trigger the effect.

That's not how the high fodmap issues work. Everyone has some tolerance level for fermentation in their digestive system. These people just have a lower tolerance so the total high FODMAP foods in their diet has to be lowered. You don't have to give up bread, past, etc. You just need to cut things down. And honestly it's usually easier to cut out other things, like certain fruits. The reason it's done by iterative exclusion is because you don't know just how much you need to cut out and it would be really harmful to your life to cut out more than necessary. So you remove one thing at a time until you've cut enough. Generally you start with the foods on the list that are your least favorite and go that way.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com