Deadly nightshade vegetables.

[Moggiedee]

In a recent post on here the poster put a link to info about auto immune Paleo diet. In this we are advised to steer away from vegetables from the deadly nightshade family. Potatoes, tomatoes, aubergine & bell peppers. I've done a lot of research into IBS intolerances etc but I have never come across this before. I knew this family included potatoes & tomatoes but not the other two. I am going to try excluding them from my diet & see if it makes any difference. I use sweet potatoes ( not related) so not a problem but I love tomatoes , However if giving up favourite foods could cure my IBS I would willing do it. Have a look here patient.info/news-and-featu.... Hope the link works. xxx

[Smeese]

These articles appear regularly - if you listened to all of them you would end up eating nothing at all. Tomatoes also contain a lot of beneficial things (lycopene for instance which fights cancer) and if they are cooked they cause a problem for very few people. Cutting out potatoes invariably means people greatly increase pasta and bread, which are far more inflammatory for almost everyone. If however you are having very large amounts of tomatoes at every single meal you might need to balance out your diet a bit. A lot of the problems we have with inflammation is eating too much of the things which are hard to digest and not enough of the things that are anti-inflammatory. If you are looking for a place to start then the Fodmap diet will steer you in the right direction but we are all very different and the modern diet means most of us are very attached to baked goods, sugar, saturated fat and additives which we believe to be a 'comfort'. Sadly too much will put a strain on our digestion, and especially our liver, which makes us tired, foggy of mind, and lethargic. Rather than cutting out whole food groups you could reduce inflammation, and help your digestion, by greatly reducing sugar, dairy and wheat and increasing your vegetable intake. Good luck.

[Moggiedee in reply to Smeese]

Thank you for your reply. I think our diet has to be everything (which we can eat) in moderation. I limit myself to 2 slices of bread per day & alternate between a salad & cooked meals in the evening. I basically follow the Fodmap diet eating nothing in the brassica or onion family. I always believed that tomatoes & bell peppers were good for you so another contradiction in the info we are bombarded with. There is no size fits all in how to treat IBS. What diet plan or medication works for one is detrimental to another. It'a all trial & error searching for that "miracle" cure so we can live "normal" lives. xx

[Iesgobdafydd]

Peppers were one of the easiest things to digest for me, when I tried cutting back to few foods and adding them back in gradually. Potatoes, on the other hand, tasted wrong to me when I had IBS and it took months after my symptoms had largely cleared up before they tasted more or less normal again. Though there is considerable overlap, as research on FODMAPS bears out, people's tolerances for various foods vary enormously from one person to the next. Sure, try out these various diets people suggest, you may find one that helps you, but don't put too much faith in any one of them till you see it working for you.