I have been suffering from IBS for the past couple of years now and I have been finding it extremely difficult to find any snack bars that don't cause me any upset. The FODMAP diet does seem to help me, and I know it cannot be for the long-term but I wish there were more things on the market that catered to this diet.
I live in central London and even with the abundance of "healthy" snack bars on the go I simply cannot find any without one or two FODMAP ingredients (they always have dates or raisins!!!). So more recently I have just been making my own snack bars at home, it takes up a lot of time, but they taste awesome and so I see it as being worthwhile
Being a student at business school I thought I might use my entrepreneurial (and snack bar making) skills to start making yummy snack bars with no FODMAP ingredients for my fellow sufferers. So I guess I just wanted to know if other people would be interested in these, or if I am the only one - in which case I will just continue making my homemade ones for me!
Please let me know your thoughts!
Stefan
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stef832
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Yes! That would be perfect. It would be my dream to be able to buy a brand of food that has no IBS triggering ingredients in it! Shopping would be sooo much easier.
Crisps are my absolute guilty pleasure. Sometimes I can tolerate them.. Too much salt and fat ? What brand are the gluten free ones you mentioned and where do you buy them.? Cheers
Yes please! I am fructose sensitive too which makes it very difficult to find healthy ish snacks. I do like protein balls but they are expensive and have a few nasties in them. Like you I make my own like gluten free chocolate cake and flapjacks.
I'm currently following the restriction part of fodmap due to years of cramps and poorliness.
No gluten or lactose. No high fodmaps either. It's proving hard to find much to eat !!! Yes my symptoms have eased tremendously but it's not the answer.
Snacks are a problem. Not much out there that is lactose and gluten free with low fodmap ingredients too.
Im due to see the dietician in January and she is putting me on the low fodmap diet. I find it very confusing as to what you can have and cant. At the moment two very bad bouts of IBS and this has been a rather shite year for me, in fact the last five years have, so the pain has been crippling as much as the stress which then begins the vicious circle. I had colofac which I found really helped especially after the first week, and could eat what i liked, dont like being on pills so weaned myself off, rather bad mistake. Ive had flare ups since, so trying to find out what the basic fodmap diet is, at the moment im in to starving myself
And don't be discouraged by how many foods you can't eat! The FODMAP diet is only temporary and so once you have done it for a little bit you should be told to slowly reintroduce foods and see what you can handle.
IBS is a real curse, but people have recovered from it before and so will you! I would also recommend introducing plenty of probiotics into your diet. Your gut flora is probably in bad shape and so it helps to reintroduce some friendly bacteria in there
Thanks for that I will try and see what I can do with it food wise as I am a driver and out on the road all day. I have started taking yakkult twice a day and am off the colofac at the moment but back to taking buscopan for cramps and otherwise just wing it and go through the spasms of cramp.
If you have IBS, snacking is a bad idea altogether. I recommend this to everyone with IBS-D symptoms now, because after 27 years of suffering this is now what is working for me, and for the first time I feel that I am in control. It is based on some excellent publications, and also just observing how healthy people live. First, go to the doctors and get yourself checked for intestinal infections, and whatever other tests they want to do. If you are all clear then the first thing to sort out is your vitamins and the timing of your eating. An incident of food poisoning or infection can start you on a cycle that you need to make a concerted effort to break out of. IBS causes vitamin deficiencies which are very difficult to overcome in most people’s diets, especially because you are probably now eating selectively to manage your symptoms. Your vitamin levels affect the health of your guts, and the health of your guts affects your vitamin absorption, so it is a vicious circle that you have to break. Get some really good, expensive, multi-vitamins (ideally constituted for your age) and take them without fail every day before your breakfast. Do not get the ones with calcium and magnesium initially as certainly in large doses these minerals can mess you up as they consume your stomach acid, and you should get enough of these from your diet. If you are on low FODMAPs, go for all lactose free dairy products to boost your calcium. At the same time, sort out your eating and fasting periods straight away. Your small intestine should be practically sterile, and your stomach acid along with bowel cleaning during fasting will usually do this. You need to fast for this to be effective, and by that I mean, absolutely NO eating in between, only water, or tea with saccharin. Imagine that you never washed your dinner plates and just kept putting food on them all the time!, they would be filthy. You need to give your guts plenty of time free of food for cleaning. Eat a good breakfast at say 7am or what suits you and then a good lunch at 12 o'clock - absolutely no food in between. After lunch, no food again for at least 5 hours, and eat well again for your evening meal because it has got to get you through the night. After that, no supper or late night snacks, no food or milk at all until breakfast the next day. In general, do not eat fried or roasted starches, i.e. crisps, chips, roast veg or fried rice. Fried and roasted starches, the high temperature produced lovely crispy bits, are complex polymers that are very bad for you and are very difficult to digest, they feed the bacteria and make you ill. Starches should be boiled, and this is enough. You will feel hunger in the fasting periods, but do not respond to it - only with water and drinks - not fizzy drinks or milk. Importantly, when you are feeling better, do not resort to your old ways, you are still recovering. Start doing some exercise if you don’t already, this will also help with your gut motility. Equally, only eat red meats at lunch time as they take the longest time to digest. Your intestines take time to fully recover, it takes a few weeks at least, and you need to persevere. You then need to maintain a healthy and consistent way of eating and always keep the vitamins topped up to prevent you from relapsing. There is a lot of support for L-glutamine to help with nutrition specifically for your intestinal lining, this means buying some bodybuilder powder and having a couple of tea-spoons of this a day, one before breakfast and one just before you go to bed, and you can have this in a light cordial drink. A lot of this was taken from this GENIUS paper below, but it does fit exactly with what I have experienced, and for the first time I really feel in control and on the mend. Good luck.
Treatment and Management of SIBO — Taking a Dietary Approach Can Control Intestinal Fermentation and Inflammation
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