Hi allthis is the first time I have posted. IM going to be candid because it sounds like we all share a similar kind of problem here. I have noticed that sometimes I barely digest foods when IM in the toilet. Food seem half digested when I go to the toilet.Does anyone hav ethe same problem?Is this a classic symptom of having IBS?Appreciate any help/commentsCyanic
hardly any digestion
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Usually much of how digested the food looks coming out has to do with how well you chewed it going in (Yep...Mom was right....chew your food).EVERYONE has some undigested material in their stools. Analyzing stools (fresh or fossilized) is a standard technique to figure out what someone or some animal has been eating. Usually fossilized for ancient animals and people and fresh for animals that tend to be "shy" and don't usually seem to eat in front of researchers (often animals that about the only way you know where they are is from tracks and "scat")Anyway, in IBS there isn't more undigested food than in other people, but if your stools tend to be loose that can increase how well you can see it, and also people with IBS sometimes examine what is in the toilet much more closely after they get sick than they ever did before. So colors, undigested material, etc that may be quite normal for them seems to be something new that happened after they got IBS.Some food items are much more likely to cause this sort of problem. The skins of things, corn, beans, are all things that often pass through pretty much untouched unless you chewed them up pretty well to start with. The digestive juices do break stuff down, but can only do so much to those things that aren't mechanically broken up in the mouth. After all we don't eat rocks like birds do so we don't have anything further down to grind things up if we do not do it at the start.K.
This is absurd. There is an undeniable association between food intolerances and our condition. Not all of the people here experience this but a good number do. Also, I think that many people think that they don't have the problem but in fact they do.Can a person claim that we are digesting food normally when it is laying in the toilet 3, 5, 8 hours after we just ate it? They can if they are a fool. If an immune response is taking place in the small intestines then digestion is not normal.
Food intolerence is not IBS, and there are specific conditions in regards to food intolerence that have names!!!Most IBSers absorb foods normally or they would have malnutrition, however because the diets in IBSers are often stay away from a lot of healty foods and eating habits, there maybe malnutrition in people with IBS from not eating and the fear eating causes symptoms.The impaired transit time of IBSers with D or c, but specifically d is more in the lower colon and the food has already been digested. There can be upper gi problems to be tested for as well that have to do with malabsorbtion a doctor should test for as well.There are malabsorbtion conditions with there own names also and they should be looked into and tested by a doctor. The foods we just ate are in the throat still and the lower colon is signaled to get rid of foods in the sigmoid colon to make room.
Eric, I am afraid thatI cannot agree with you here. I have been tested for every possible thing and I am now almost 100% positive that I have IBS. When I eat one of my "no-no" foods, I pass it exactly as it went in, and it cannot be an intolerance because this is on a very wide spectrum of foods. It passes through thoroughly undigested, and it all begins with indigestion even before it arrives at the colon.
I remember reading somewhere recently that IBS can also involve the upper digestive system (eg stomach and duodenum) I am not sure how, but in my case the stomach is clearly linked to what the colon is doing, if I eat "no-no" foods, I start by having colon pains soon after eating said foods, which is followed by indigestion at a gastric level, by the time this foods reaches the colon, I then have gas and D follows shortly afterwards
Eric, this is an example of black and white thinking. It does not have to be a raging case of malnutrition. Look at the concentration camp survivors. they hardly ate any good food yet some stuck around for 5 years. even if "some" IBSers are malnourished, the body can still make remarkable adjustments.back in the days when i had diarrhea, often times I would see my lunch in the toilet 4 hours later. the spinach and the grapefruit were unmistakeable. To this day, i get sick when i eat either of these foods.Food intolerance is still a part of IBS even though it should not be. however, doctors do not diagnose it and treatment is poor other than elimination. therefore, doctors still say that the patient has IBS. Until the profession changes the differential diagnosis methods it will still be considered a part of the IBS "syndrome".
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If you had no colon. Food leaves you 4 hours or so after you eat it.No absorbtion of nutrients occurs in the colon, it isn't broken down any more into more digestible bits there or anything like that. So by 4 hours you have had all the time you ever will have to absorb the nutrients. Whether or not it spends 1 minute, or 3 days hanging out in the colon.Now some people do get responses in the colon that causes it to dump fast (like often eating the next meal will cause the colon to dump) Any food you didn't chew enough that ends up in the colon in recognizable pieces comes out of the colon the same way it went in.Looser stools makes it easier to see this, but even people with 100% totally normal stools and digestion if you look at the stools closely enough and disect the compacted stuff apart will have recognizable bits of undigested food in it as long as they eat anything with fiber, or shape to it. (like corn...you don't chew it up enough it comes out of everyone pretty much the way it went in...even if you chew it well the outer husk goes through unchanged no matter how many hours it is in there).No food is ground up by the colon.Mostly all that happens in the colon is water absorption.If you take your standard run of the mill IBSer and test them their levels of nutrients in the body reflects what they eat. Anemia or other signs of mal-nutrition is a sign that SOMETHING OTHER THAN IBS IS GOING ON.Small-intestinal issues (like celiac) ARE NOT IBS.Now do people get mis-diagnosed, yep, but that doesn't change what happens in pretty much every single person who is correctly diagnosed.AND that doesn't change that NORMAL people with NORMAL stools have undigested bits of food they didn't chew well enough and that by 4 hours after you ate it you have absorbed all you are going to from it.People without colons absorb all the nutrients from their food JUST FINE.IBS does NOT include every person with every GI problem on the planet. Really, it doesn't.AND one problem with food intolerances is the brain. If your brain knows that Spinach for instance makes you sick, sometimes it will make you sick if you eat it because it has been conditioned that way. Even if there is nothing actually going on in your immune system. REALLY. Raisins make me sick, but it is because I ate raisins once when I got sick for some other reason and now they bother me (well actually I think I have finally broken the connection in the brain and only now have been able to eat them again, but I had to avoid them for years to break the brain's conditioning that raisins are the great evil and must be expelled immediately (I usually vomited them up rather than diarrhea--but the same mechanism works) VERY often if you feed someone something that routinely makes them ill if the KNOW they ate it, but hide it so the brain never knows they ate it, they don't get sick. That adds a whole level of complexity to the food intolerance issue. Some of it has nothing to do with the immune system in your small intestine.K.K.
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IBS diagnosis (when done properly) requires certain symptoms.NOT just "couldn't figure it out".There are different criteria but they rule out most of the things that are NOT IBS.Malnutrition is one of the "red flags" that it is NOT IBS.This doesn't mean undigested food in stool. But things like Anemia, or bone problems or problems with blood work that indicate you aren't getting nutrients that you need.IBS does not change how the small intestine absorbs food. Many other diseases DO this. which is why evidence of malnutrition or weight loss that is not explainable by diet usually triggers additional testing to find the NON IBS thing that is wrong.With the caveat (when properly diagnosed). There are people who do not do the job right even in the medical profession.K.
That's so true. For years I couldn't eat spinach dip because I got sick off of it. Just the sight of it would make me ill. But spinach on its own doesn't bother me at all.I've had lots of people suggest that I'm lactose intolerant. But I have milk in my tea and cereal every day. Dairy products do tend to trigger attacks, but sometimes they don't. So I doubt I'm intolerant, but I do know that if I'm out somewhere, I stay away from dairy as much as possible.
Bonnie, "At least one thirds of IBS patients may have fructose malabsorption and one thirds of people with Celiac disease are misdiagnosed with IBS"May have is a key word here and it would be comorbid with IBS or that was the problem in the first place and same with celiac, those are both different conditions then IBS.It is however now recgonized more now that people should be tested for those two problems in regards to seperating those conditions from IBS.
I have been talking about fructose malabsorption for over two years now.Fructose intolerance and irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) Young K. Choi M.D., Michelle Jackson, Robert Summers M.D. and Satish Rao M.D.* Internal Medicine/ Division of Gastroenterology, University of Iowa, Iowa City, IA, USA Available online 17 October 2002. Purpose: Fructose intolerance may cause abdominal pain, bloating and diarrhea; symptoms that mimick IBS. We examined the prevalence of fructose intolerance in suspected IBS patients and characterized their symptom profiles using ROME Criteria.Methods: Patients with unexplained bloating, altered bowel habit, and pain filled out a questionnaire and rated symptom severity [0(none)�3(severe)]. Patients underwent fructose breath test and received either 10% (25g/250ml water) or 20% fructose solution (50g/250cc water). Breath samples were collected for H2 and CH4 at 1/2 hour intervals for 5 hours. Data analyzed retrospectively.Results: 209 patients underwent fructose breath test; 129 were excluded because of coexisting organic GI disorders including bacterial overgrowth. Among 80 patients [m/f = 26/54; age RANGE=20 �76] with suspected functional disorder, 54 received a 10% fructose solution (Group A) and 26 a 20% solution (Group
Bonniei,Fructose intolerance is a very interesting subject. Do you think that is your main problem?I am very suspicious of it myself!!!!! When I cut out ALL fructose and sucrose (1/2 fructose) my symptoms reduced dramatically. When I went on the antifungal drugs they reduced even more, when I went on the antifungal/antibacterial herbs and garlic they reduced to the point where I was normal for the first time in 17 years. I was also taking Ibsacol and Primal Defense.Flux stated something that was incorrect about fructose absorbtion. he said that sucrose would not be a factor because the glucose helps the transport of the fructose.I checked a medical textbook and it said that the absorbtion of fructose is independent of anything else. Either it functions independantly via "diffusion???" or the person has a problem.I think this could be one of the many reasons why sucrose keeps coming up as the villian by so many people.it sucks that I can not eat fruit. I feel deprived.
Bonnie, they have known about it for a while.It is not IBS however, but IBSers can have both IBS and fructose malabsorbtion." Fructose intolerance may cause abdominal pain, bloating and diarrhea; symptoms that mimick IBS"1/3 may have.Mimick IBS not match completely.Two different problems IBS is not caused my fructose malabsorbtion, fructose malabsorbtion causes fructose malabsorbtion.A person can have both however. This study was looking to see how common they were together.I also wonder what rome criteria they used rome or rome two, that would be interesting to know as well.
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