Irritable Bowel Syndrome: It’s Fixable !
The Why and When of IBS Symptoms:
IBS is so common that fully 30% of all referrals to a gastroenterologist are for IBS symptoms. In the past, women were told that the problem was basically psychological (are we ever going to stop telling people it’s all in their heads just because stress can be a trigger?). It is now known that people with IBS have greater sensitivity in the nerves and muscle fibers in their intestines than those who don’t have it. This means they are more reactive to a variety of stimuli including certain foods, chemicals we produce under stress, and hormones.
IBS symptoms may occur just situationally, for example, before a major exam, job interview, date, or public speaking engagement, or they can occur regularly, making you uncomfortable, or even downright miserable, many times each day, though most people with IBS struggle with it regularly even without major obvious emotional triggers.
Most, though not all, IBS sufferers report that their symptoms occur or are worse after a meal. Many women report that symptoms are worse just before the start of their periods. Some of my patients have had such significant problems with gas or loose stools that they are anxious about social events, and what should be normal activities like going grocery shopping or having to travel any more than short distances for fear of needing a bathroom quickly.
Conventional treatments include a variety of medications from antispasmodics to reduce cramping, to laxatives to control constipation, to antidepressants and anti-anxiety medications to control mood. These all provide symptomatic relief but do not get to the root causes, meaning the underlying factors that lead to the gut hypersensitivity or irritability.
The good news is that IBS does not cause permanent damage to the intestines or lead to any dangerous or life-threatening disease. But for many, it can be socially disabling and downright uncomfortable.
My experience as a practicing integrative and functional medicine doctor has shown me that there are clear causes for IBS, and that it can be cured. I’ve seen it happen so many times that I’m sometimes shocked that conventional medicine just hasn’t caught on yet.
I’m going to share with you exactly what I share with my patients about how to cure it.
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The 4 Root Causes of IBS
IBS has four main root causes: diet, food intolerances, stress, and dysbiosis. In most cases, there’s a combination of all or several of these going on at once. Often, one cause leads to another. For example, you might be more intolerant to dairy than you realize, and this might be the core trigger of your gas and bloating, and even your constipation or loose stools, but overtime, this intolerance also causes inflammation in your gut which in turn causes you to develop “dysbiosis” (messed up gut flora). This then makes you fructose intolerant (more on that in a minute or watch me talk about it here on Dr. Oz), leading to more gas, bloating, and loose stools.
We’re going to talk about each of these root causes in just a minute, so you can figure out which are affecting you. And we’re going to talk about how you can restore balance so you can move beyond a life that revolves around your digestive discomforts ! continuer read below.
Identifying & Correcting Your Personal IBS Triggers:
When identifying your IBS triggers, the first thing you have to do is learn to connect the dots – that is, you have to start to pay attention to when symptoms occur. Doing this can start to clue you into some of the causes of your IBS – and each person’s are slightly unique to them, though this article reviews the common themes. One of the most effective tools for identifying your triggers is to keep a 5-day food journal. Write down what you eat at each meal and snack and then notice how you feel between 15 minutes and an hour later.
The crazy thing is that once you start to connect the dots between your triggers and your symptoms, you’ll realize that staying IBS-free isn’t as hard as you might think. Initially it’s a matter of paying attention to your body and knowing how to anticipate and prevent triggers, and over time, healing your gut so you have fewer triggers that you need to avoid.
01/ Dietary factors
IBS with constipation:
A diet high in protein and low in fiber from fruits, vegetables, and whole grains can be very constipating, so if you are predominantly constipated, increasing your intake of fruits and veggies, especially high fiber veggies -like cooked leafy greens including kale, collard greens, and broccoli – and high fiber fruits like apples, can really get your bowels going.
Increase your fiber intake (a good goal is 30-50 grams/day) by eating a wide variety of vegetables, ideally 2 servings per meal, and include vegetables as part of your snacks if you have any, for example, fresh vegetable crudités. You can substitute fruit for one or two of your vegetable choices.
Additionally, consider adding in 1-2 TBS fresh ground flax seed into a daily shake, or onto your salads to increase your fiber intake.
Consider taking 300-600 mg of magnesium citrate before bed each evening to get your bowels going regularly (start with the lower dose and adjust up or down until you have an easy regular daily BM) and
Add in a daily probiotic which can help with intestinal motility, which can also be slow if you have IBS with constipation.
Additionally, certain foods trigger many people, and tend to be more problematic if you have IBS. These
include: caffeine, fatty foods, and alcoholic, so pay attention to whether they trigger you and avoid them for now if they do.
IBS with loose stools:
On the other hand, if you are more prone to loose stools, fruit and veggies, especially those high in fructose, can be a major trigger for you. If a high fiber diet gets you on the run, then:
Try a Fructose Elimination diet for 3 weeks and see if this helps, along with improving your gut flora by treating for dysbiosis.
Take a digestive enzyme and a probiotic daily to help your body tolerate more foods by giving you the enzymes and bacteria you need to break down sugars and fats.
Lots of other surprising foods contain fructose and can be causing your symptoms, so follow the fructose elimination diet completely, and keep a food journal as you go to be able to track improvements or symptoms.
02/ Food intolerances:
One of the facts known about IBS is that “visceral hypersensitivity,” an extra-sensitive state of the intestinal lining in people with IBS, can be caused or aggravated by inflammation in the intestinal lining. Food sensitivities are one of the most common reasons for intestinal inflammation. Therefore, identifying your food triggers is key.
The most common foods that lead to intestinal irritation are gluten-containing foods (anything with wheat, barley, or rye) and gluten cross-reacting grains, especially corn and dairy products including milk, yogurt, cheese, and other milk-based products (with the exception of butter which is usually easy to tolerate).
Of note, many people who are diagnosed with IBS might actually have celiac disease that has not been diagnosed. If taking gluten out of your diet significantly improves symptoms, and adding it back in aggravates them again, then also consider whether you could have celiac disease.
An Elimination Diet, done for at least 4 weeks, along with a 4R program to heal your intestinal lining, can help relieve sensitivity to many foods, however, you may be more permanently sensitive to either gluten or dairy, and might need to keep those out of your diet indefinitely. The reintroduction phase of the elimination diet can help you sort this out.
03/ Stress:
If you’ve ever had “butterflies” in your stomach, felt like “you just couldn’t stomach something,” or if you just “knew something in your gut,” you’re probably not surprised that science has established, beyond any doubt, that there is a direct relationship between the brain and the gut. In fact, the nerves in the intestine come from the same origins as the nerves in the brain and spinal cord in the fetus, and are closely connected in adults. As a result, chemicals that affect our nervous system, mood, and emotions affect our gut, and in someone with IBS, this connection is even more sensitive. It also works the other way around – symptoms in your gut can affect your emotions! Therefore, if you have IBS, you’ll want to have a set of tools you can use to keep your inner peace as much as possible.
Mindfulness and meditation have been shown to keep moods more even and helps to relieve IBS symptoms. These don’t require sitting in one place and breathing deeply for an hour – think of it more as learning to get into a tranquil mindset by using specific thoughts, images, or deep breathing to calm yourself and bring your emotions to center, while calming your gut. Here’s one of my favorite meditations, called The Quickie. You can do it anywhere, at anytime! Use mindfulness before and during your meals to eat slowly and in a relaxed, enjoyable way, rather than anxiously eating because you’re anticipating symptoms after. Keep calm and don’t panic is a great way to think of it!
Of course, getting to the bottom of any ongoing stresses in your life is important, too.
04/ “Dysbiois”
Western medicine has, until recently, pretty much overlooked the important role of the microbiome – the vast collection of bacteria and other organisms that live in our intestines (and outnumber us by factors of 100s!) in health. This is part of why an effective cure for IBS hasn’t been “discovered” by conventional medicine. However, as our awareness of the impact of diet, lifestyle, and emotional stress on the microbiome has grown, so too have our insights into how dysbiosis, or imbalance in the microbiome, can contribute to IBS.
If you experience gas, bloating, and particularly if it’s worse after meals, you likely have dysbiosis. What is dysbiosis? It’s too many of the harmful gut bugs, and not enough of the good ones. This can arise because of lack of variety in the diet, especially of high fiber vegetables, overuse of antibiotics and other medications like ibuprofen and PPIs (i.e., Prilosec) that impact the gut and gut flora health, as can prolonged stress. Most commonly, in functional medicine practice, we see conditions like SIBO, overgrowth of candida species in the intestines, and too little of the good guys like Lactobacillus and Bifidobacterium species.
Key ways to improve gut flora include:
Eliminating medications that interfere with gut flora and gut health,
Adding fermented foods into your diet on a regular basis (saukerkraut, kimchi, miso, and if you tolerate it, yogurt or kefir), and
Taking a daily probiotic that contains the helpful species I mentioned above.
Sometimes it is also necessary to reduce the number of the not-so-great gut bugs using herbal medicines such as Oregon grape root, oregano or thyme essential oil, or others. A couple of the products I use in my practice that contain herbs like these are Candibactin AR, which I use for gas and bloating, and Candibactin BR, which I use for SIBO. In some functional medicine practices, severe dysbiosis is also treated with anti fungal medications or a non-absorbing antibiotic. Dysbiosis is discussed more extensively in the 4R program.
Is Medical Testing Necessary?
If you have blood in your stool, then it is important to speak with a doctor because this can indicate that you have more than just IBS going on. Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis can cause blood in your stool, whereas IBS should not. However, straining to have a BM can cause hemorrhoids which lead to blood in your stool.
Many integrative and functional medicine doctors use quite a bit of extensive testing to diagnose what’s going on in your gut. This includes looking for food sensitivities with IgG and other tests, gut microbiome analysis, tests for parasites, digestive enzymes, and intestinal antibodies. I recommend giving an elimination diet 6-12 weeks, following the 4R program for this same amount of time, and only after this, if you haven’t gotten substantial relief, would I suggest pursuing testing, as it can be expensive and doesn’t always provide valuable information.
The Key to Lasting Relief: Healing Your Gut
All of the above steps alone or in the combination that most matches your symptoms can bring you significant relief, but if you try those for 6-12 weeks and they don’t, or you get relief but not completely, consider doing the 4R Program, a systematic plan for restoring gut heath.
Also Read: 10 Signs That You Have a Leaky Gut + How To Heal It.
Also Read: The Colon of Patients With IBS Reacts Differently to Bacteria !
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