Would eating a plate of mixed vegetables cause stomach cramps?
I thought eating what I read to be low FODMAP vegetables would be a good idea for dinner. No meat or chicken, just 5 different vegetables.
The result is really horrible stomach pain after a pain-free 'good' day.
What am I doing wrong?
Hi Beckybecks1
It depends on the quantity and whether you are fructose intolerant I guess. I am fructose intolerant and follow fodmap and whilst a very small quantity of melon (5 cubes) has no effect if I have a 6th I’m in agony until the following day. I worked out my intolerance’s with the support of a dietitian and use the fodmap app developed by Monash university, I can add my intolerances and the app outlines quantity etc. Worth getting if you don’t already have it. Hope you get it sorted soon, all the best.
I have the fodmap app and try to follow it but for me it's not always correct. There are foods in the high area that totally agree with me and low fodmaps that my stomach cant handle.
I guess its all down to trial and error.
Hi, I'm afraid I can't tell you what you are doing wrong because I've had IBS for nearly 35 years and I have no idea what I am doing wrong, plus it's always changing the goal posts. But I do know I couldn't eat a plates of vegetables without spending most the next day in the loo!
Thank you. Ive just been chatting with my Doctor and he agrees with you! One vegetable at a time apparently. Im learning the hard way 😐
What I have been doing for many years is trying to eat the right constistency. For example, if I have something dry like salmon, I might add mash and peas. What I am trying to do is get the food to the right consistency so it comes out the right consistency. If I eat all dry foods, it tends to make me more constipated and if I eat all soft food, it can make me runny. So I think what would it look like if you put it all in a food processing and mushed it up like you would in the eating process. I hope that makes sense. It kind of works in a fashion, for me, anyway.
What type of vegetables?
Squash, zucchini, green beans, carrots, butternut.
Doctor told me some people cant eat squash
That's a lot of fibre....! Definitely choose two veg, zucchini and carrots in one sitting may be better...
Which selection and how did you cook them?
Oh squash can be laxative for me!
Hi Beckybecks, yes, I'm not surprised! Agreeing with the others, you have got to be careful with vegetables, the only really safe ones are carrots and boiled potatoes (not fried.) The FODMAP diet is generally good, I was on it for 7 years, but found that I had to be stricter and stricter to make it work, to the detriment of my vitamin levels. IBS is damned complicated. Low FODMAPS can help you get back on track, but please read the following:
This is my general response to help people find a baseline. First, go to the doctors and get yourself checked for intestinal infections, and whatever other tests they want to do. Most people find they are all clear, and that IBS is a condition brought on by our modern diet, freely accessible food, sedentary lifestyles and is usually initially set off by a GI infection or other trauma to the GI tract. The gut becomes hypersensitive to certain triggers, and the official description is that a physical brain-gut dysfunction develops which causes the gut to over-reacts to very mild stimuli.
After 27 years of suffering with IBS I have found that the long-term solution that actually works is about FOUR key topics: your vitamins, daily fasting periods, toxins that are freely dished out by the food industry, and adrenalin control. You are effectively the manager of a “food nutrient extraction factory”, I know that may be obvious, but I have found that IBS is not about medicines, but about changing the way you run the factory, and learning how to get the best performance out of it. I don’t recommend any medicines, as they only work in the short-term and eventually become less effective, and I just don’t want to be dependent on medicines until one day when I have no other choice.
This is based on some excellent publications, and also by observing how healthy people live. But, if you are all clear from the doctor’s, then the first thing to sort out is your vitamins and the timing of your eating and fasting periods. An incident of food poisoning or infection can start you on a cycle that you need to make a really concerted effort to break out of. IBS causes vitamin deficiencies which are practically impossible to overcome in most people’s diets, especially because you are probably eating selectively to manage your symptoms. Your vitamin levels affect the health of your intestines, and the health of your intestines affects your vitamin absorption, so it is a vicious circle that you have to break. If your farts really stink like something died in your guts, then this is because partially undigested proteins are making it through to your large intestine and the amino acids lysine and arginine are being metabolized by bacteria into cadaverine and putrescine which are the compounds that give the smell to rotting flesh! – do not worry that you yourself are rotting, this is just temporary, but it shows that you really need to sort your digestion out.
So, get some really good, expensive, multi-vitamins (ideally constituted for your age) and take them without fail every day before your breakfast. Get a blood test for Vitamin D and get you doctor to judge your supplement level required in IU’s to get you well healthy for Vitamin D. Do not get vitamins with high calcium and magnesium content initially as certainly in large doses these minerals can mess you up as they consume your stomach acid, and magnesium particularly can give you diarrhoea. You should get enough of these minerals from your diet. If you are on the low FODMAP diet, go for all lactose free dairy products to boost your calcium, as unfortunately the diet tends to cut out almost all of the good calcium sources.
Second, sort out your fasting periods immediately. This is normally overlooked by GP’s, but is an absolutely essential element for resolving IBS. Your small intestine should be practically sterile, and your stomach acid along with bowel cleaning contractions during fasting (called MMC) will usually do the cleaning. But, you need to fast for this to be effective, and by that I mean, ABSOLUTELY NO eating in between meals, ideally drinking only water. Imagine that you never washed your dinner plates and just kept putting food on them all the time!, they would be filthy and full of bacteria. In your guts, this results in SIBO (Small Intestine Bacterial Overgrowth), which is apparently responsible for 85% of IBS cases, but is only one of factors that you need to address. You need to give your small intestine plenty of time free of food for cleaning and maintaining the factory. The modern scenario of have cupboards full of rich foods permanently available day and night is a modern luxury outside of human evolution. Your stomach will sort itself out when you have got control of your small intestine (although if you've got gastritis you'll need to finish a course of omeprazole first), and then your large intestine will improve later as nutrients are more efficiently absorbed from your small intestine. Furthermore, you should be able to avoid future bouts of gastritis as during the fasting periods, your stomach acid is more neutral at nearly pH 4. As a basic program, eat a good breakfast at say 7am (porridge with 50% almond milk or lactose free milk) or what suits you and then a good lunch at 12 o'clock - absolutely no food in between. After lunch, no food at all for at least 5 hours, and eat well again for your evening meal because it has got to get you through the night. Ideally, no food after 7 pm, no supper or snacks, no food or milk at all until breakfast the next day.
You will feel hunger in the fasting periods, but this is doing you good!, and you must NOT respond to the hunger - only with water or black tea. This is CRITICAL. Importantly, when you are feeling better, do not resort to your old ways, you are still recovering, and you need to make a life-style change to have this level of discipline in your eating and continue with it. It takes a few weeks at least, and you need to persevere with this. You then need to maintain a healthy and consistent way of eating and always keep the vitamins topped to prevent you from relapsing. In a couple of weeks, you should be able to be getting off the low FODMAP diet, and begin mixing back in the higher FODMAPs. Eventually, you can almost forget about low FODMAPs altogether, depending on how well your small intestine is performing.
The third aspect of IBS is that some food additives are quite simply toxic for you and cause direct inflammation of the colon, allergic reaction of the colon, or they are laxatives that give you diarrhoea that you didn’t realise you were eating. These are to be considered separate to the usual SIBO and vitamin mechanisms that you are dealing with above:
1.) Try to seek out and eliminate “trans-fats”. These cause direct inflammation of the colon, and you will be more sensitive than most people and this confuses what is causing you trouble. Chips, hash browns, butter, doughnuts, popcorn and things cooked in cheap or old frying oil as you find in many restaurants and commercial products can give you colon pain directly through inflammation. It can take up to three or four days to recover from this inflammation, but trans-fats are bad for you in a miriad of ways (cardio-vascular and diabetes), not only by inflammation of the colon. There is evidence that as cooking oil is re-used that the trans-fats (and other compounds) increase. So, if you want fried food as a treat, do it at home with good oil at a low temperature, and use it only once. Ideally, starches should only be boiled, rather than fried.
2.) E407, or “Carrageenan” – is a food additive derived from a red seaweed, which is only present in small quantities as a thickener, but even at low levels it has been shown to be “highly inflammatory to the digestive tract” and associated with IBS, colitis and other GI diseases. There is loads of literature and objections to this substance on the internet. It is present in cheap Crème Caramels, and many other dairy and meat products. After weeks of good health, just one of these products knocks me out for 24 hours with colon bloating and pain. I have found this by trial and error several times. Food tests show that even the food grade carrageenan contains between 2 and 25% of the non-approved “degraded” carrageenan, which is colon damaging and carcinogenic. Some food agencies now prohibit this additive altogether, and it may be responsible for a lot of IBS cases. It might be found in chocolate milk, cottage cheese, cream, crème caramel, ice cream, almond milk, diary alternatives, such as vegan cheeses or non-dairy desserts, coconut milk, creamers, hemp milk, rice milk, soy milk, and particularly processed meat. It is used extensively in cheap meats and is even injected into beef joints – so always get organic or local butcher fresh good quality meat!). It may be labelled as E407 or Carrageenan, but if you’ve got IBS, consider it as highly toxic for you.
In the same category is carboxy methyl cellulose (CMC) which is more widely used in the food industry, but has similar toxicology in animal studies, giving inflammation of the colon. However, the jury is still out on CMC to its impact on humans.
I’ll also put here mono-sodium glutamate (MSG). Clinical trials and several scientific literature articles connect MSG with IBS, so given the option to avoid it you should avoid it.
Also, NICE advises against the use of Aloe Vera for IBS, although for skin burn inflammation it is miraculous.
3.) E338, E339, E340, E341, E450, E451 and E452, are phosphates, diphosphates or polyphosphates as different salts. Natural phosphates are essential for life, and your body is full of organically bound phosphates, however, free ionic phosphates have several problems. Firstly, they are laxatives and will give you diarrhoea (sodium phosphate was once used to prepare patients for colonoscopies!). Secondly, they are associated with cardiovascular disease and accelerated aging. Since the 1990’s we are now exposed to twice the amount of added phosphate in foods, and this is bad. There are calls to have added phosphate labelled on products as a health warning. Particular culprits are mass produced sausages and processed meats (another reason to go to your local shop butcher), some cheeses, and cola (both diet and normal). Personally, for me all phosphate additives make me ill.
4.) Aspartame and other sweeteners definitely have a negative role to play in IBS for many people. As with the other toxins above, your ability to cope with them varies on a spectrum. If you look at some of the work of K.J. Mielke, many of these additives can be allergens or “pseudoallergens” and with time you can develop a reaction to them. The best sweetener for IBS is normal table sugar (sucrose), but it will rot your teeth in tea / coffee all day unless you do extra teeth cleaning. Ideally, general advice is to cut down on these stimulants, no more than 3 cups a day is the NICE guidance.
You must remember that there are many different causes of IBS, and one person’s solution may not be another’s - because of the allergies that you may or may not have developed, plus all other factors in play.
The fourth major topic in treating IBS, is adrenalin control. The GI tract is very sensitive to adrenalin. There is some literature about serotonin along a similar vein. A friend of mine says that “adrenalin not used by your muscles goes to your guts” and there may be some truth to this. If you have a busy life, you are probably not coasting along on a bed of feathers, and you probably not aware of your almost constantly high adrenalin levels – that is until you start actively lowering them. Personally, listening to whale music doesn’t lower my adrenalin, nor does yoga, because immediately afterwards I’m back in the busy life again. Crucially, what does work, is hard exercise to burn up your adrenalin and stop it interfering with the nervous system of your guts – and this is a powerful effect. My advice is to do something every day, two or three times if you can just before eating. Do whatever you can manage in your busy life, because it will all help. It will improve your gut motility, general health, bone strength, relieve tiredness, help you sleep better, improve your mental agility and help get your anxiety under control. To many people, exercise may seem like a waste of time, but it is equivalent to spending a bit of time sharpening an axe – it is not wasted recreational time, but time very well spent in servicing your whole body and mind.
Other points...
Red meats generally take a long time to digest, and also contain some trans-fats, but are usually tolerable. Only have them once a day, ideally for lunch, and just a light salad to go with them, not a load of starchy food or grains, as they have long digestion times. You don’t want carbohydrates being held up in transit because of heavy meat digestion late in the day.
There is a lot of support for L-glutamine to help with repair of your small-intestinal lining; this means buying 500g of the bodybuilder powder type 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.
I am not a fan of pro-biotics, I have never found that they actually do anything. However, I am a fan of pre-biotics, which is basically food for your large intestine good bacteria. This helps to strengthen the lining of your colon, and further improve your resilience to potential trigger foods and inflammation.
I should also mention hormone changes in women can be connected with IBS, affecting the brain-gut nervous system, but I have no personal experience in this (being a bloke!). Similarly, hypnosis is actually recommended by NICE as the best alternative therapy, again trying to get a grip on the nervous system dysfunction. Personally, I’ve yet to try it, but I wouldn’t rule it out.
Dealing with Flare-ups
First thing is, fix your SIBO as described above. But if you are on top of your SIBO, then a bowel toxin usually hits you 5 to 8 hours later as the food gets to your large intestine. The first line of attack is ibuprofen which is far more effective than paracetamol for bowel pain, and I find that 200 mg alone is enough. Second, a couple of Buscopan will stop the cramps. Third, have available in advance some linseed (seeds) and natural aniseed (Star Anise), and make the following tea: in a saucepan, add 1 teaspoon of linseed, ½ to 1 anise star, 1 teaspoon of sugar, a squirt of lemon juice (bottled is fine), and one mug full of water. Boil to simmer for 3 to 5 minutes, then sieve off the hot liquid back into the mug. This is a very effective remedy that I have used countless times, and it really does help. The reason that it helps (anecdotally) is that the “gooey” linseed extract coats the intestinal lining. There may be some truth to this, as some propose that the mechanism of bowel inflammation is a chemical attack on the mucus lining of the intestine which then allows food particles be exposed to the more delicate tissues underneath, causing inflammation. The linseed goo would provide a temporary replacement to the mucus lining, preventing further inflammation. In fact, NICE recommends oats and linseed for daily consumption.
A few references…
“Treatment and Management of SIBO — Taking a Dietary Approach Can Control Intestinal Fermentation and Inflammation, by Aglaée Jacob, MS, RD; Today’s Dietitian; December 2012, Vol. 14 No. 12 P. 16”.
badgut.org/information-cent...
guidelines.co.uk/gastrointe...
Thank you very much for all this information. Ive had this flare up for four months now so have tried pretty much everything. Alot of what you suggest I am doing. Im also having accupuncture which is a huge help because my ibs is greatly aggravated by chronic and extreme anxiety. I had a course of glutamine for a month and am now on two types of probiotics. Im very careful what I eat, everything fresh, nothing processed. No fast food no fried food. I eat fish or chicken, eggs, rice and now stick to one vegetable at a time.
Ive had lost of tests and they've picked up my deficiencies which I'm now being treated for, one of them being low cortisol, hence the chronic anxiety. My stool tests were clear.
I had a scan and they discovered I have gall stones. Im not so sure that theyre the cause of my symptoms though. I dont have any of the symptoms for gallstones. But they tell me I should have surgery to remove my gallbladder now. Im not too sure about it yet.
My IBS symptoms have completely disappeared since the mistake I made with the vegetables, so Ive had quite a few good days with careful eating. Pity about the gallstone diagnosis though which has got me worried again.
The squash butter nut squash are higher in sugar content. If I were you I would stick to the vegetables that suit you. Carrots are a good source of vitamins, and beta carotene and potatoes are a good source of minerals, and carbs and when cooked aren't so difficult to digest. I don't think a fodmap diet would agree with me as there is too much trial and error and being told you can re introduce a food to which you are intolerant. I had a test for 64 different foods for intolerances and I hit the jackpot - I was intolerant to every food I enjoyed and had to work out a new diet, Having stuck to my diet, I may much better, removing wheat rye barley - malt- rice and maize - corn syrup corn flour egg, most soft cheeses and going lactase free. You can buy the test on line which is post free and do a test at home - your blood sample is sent to the lab - (results sent back by e mail) probably a finger prick test like for diabetes which looks similar to the test I did privately. Amazon.com does self testing food intolerance kits and having all those foods tested for, even if not severe changed my life so my diabetes is under control as well as IBS. Have you looked at any articles written by Suzy Cohen pharmacist? suzycohen.com) - she explains how people have histamine intolerances, an how the immune system works going into overdrive causing inflammation pain bloating and gas. Hope you are back to normal with the foods you know are helping.
Thank you. Unfortunately I cant order the tests as I'm in south africa. But I'm learning which foods suit me now and feeling better while I stick to them. I dont think I'll try introducing any new foods for a while though. While I feel well I dont want to interfere!
So you can't buy stuff from amazon.com? If you are eating anything like rice or other combinations of grain, such as barley, and other grains in your country, rice can be part of multigrain allergy. If you are eating eggs - this might be another intolerance - guess you have tried as hard as you can. Can you order through medichecks for tests or blue horizon?
No we dont have that facility here. Ive worked through my foods and found the ones I'm comfortable with for now. In a while I'll try introducing new foods. Rice works well for me, I dont eat any other grains. Eggs too never give me problems. I suppose everyone is different and we all have to experiment and find out for ourselves what our stomachs are sensitive to and what are the good foods for us.
Yes you are right - another approach to the anxiety and irritability might be through Gaba amino acid producing foods which when combined with vitamin B6 activate the production of gaba in the brain which is a neurotransmitter. The main foods which contain glutamine which helps to make the gaba in the brain are easy to find. Whole grains, brown rice, oats, beef, liver, broccoli citrus fruits, halibut, lentils, cherry tomatoes.
Foods which contain B6 are milk, ricotta, salmon, tuna,
eggs, chicken liver, beef, carrots, spinach, sweet potato, green peas, bananas, chick peas, cereals, and avocado. Interesting info is that one medium carrot contains the same amount of B6 as a glass of milk. B6 helps to promote a protein sheath, around your nerve cells - myelin.
healthline.com/health/vitam...
doctoroz.com/articles/gaba-...
Gaba is made in the body and helps calm the nerves. Gaba supplements are not the same and may not be as effective.
No need to reply.
I would be careful of compounding fodmaps from the same food streams like just vegetables. Try and split fodmap between food groups. I must ad however the fodmap diet long term will affect your vitamin uptake. It should be strictly adhered to for 8 weeks then to start reintroducing foods one at a time. I must add this should also be carried out under dietician supervision.
Thank you. From now on I'll eat just one vegetable at a time. Im not really sticking to the fodmap diet anymore because I've found there are certain foods on the 'no' list that actually work for me. So I suppose its a matter of trial and error. Ive found some foods that do suit me now and I'll stick to them for a while until my stomach isnt so sensitive. The doctor has tested me for all vitamin deficiencies and is treating me for this.
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