If you are an irritable bowel syndrome sufferer, it is instinctively obvious that your diet plays a major factor in deciding how well or how sick you feel on any given day.
Consequently, it is likely that you have already searched for appropriate dietary information, details of the foods that you can and cannot eat that can help you to reduce the number of attacks you suffer as an irritable bowel syndrome sufferer.
If so, I would wager that you have been somewhat disappointed with most of the information you have found because from my own research, I have found most of the information available to be vague, generalized and often little more than a wild stab in the dark at what might or might not work.
For example, you may have seen general advice that a high fiber diet or a diet that is rich in vegetables is good for someone who suffers from IBS. Whilst this might be true for a small percentage of sufferers, it is likely to be very small percentage indeed. A high fiber diet is the last thing you need if your condition is one where diarrhea or both diarrhea and constipation are present. Furthermore, if eating vegetables is a good idea, what kind of vegetables should they be?
One of the problems seems to be that the majority of IBS sufferers know that there are certain foods which irritate them and certain foods that they can eat almost every day without any problems whatsoever. However, in between these two categories, there are many foodstuffs that irritable bowel syndrome patients can eat one day, but not the next.
This leads to a good degree of confusion and a certain lack of clarity because there seems to be no logic in a scenario where you can eat something one day but not the next. Hence, some sufferers spend many fruitless hours trying to come up with a list of specific foods that cause them problems, whereas a lot of the time, compiling a list of this nature is almost impossible.
Allied to this is the fact that because irritable bowel syndrome is not one recognizable disease or condition, every individual sufferer is different. It might therefore be valid to ask, is there such a thing as a generalized IBS diet that will help at least the majority of sufferers, if not all of them?
Fortunately, the answer to the question is affirmative because although IBS is an individualized condition, it is not so individualized that some general dietary strategy that will work for most IBS sufferers cannot be formulated.
The first thing to understand is that you should try to get away from the idea of one single item of food (or drink) being your irritable bowel syndrome trigger. Instead of thinking of single, particular items of food as being triggers you should instead try to think in terms of food or drink groups.
Every different food or beverage group is either a gastrointestinal irritant or stimulant and each group will therefore be one that you should be including in your diet regularly or rarely, depending upon your own condition.
If you classify foods and beverages in groups in this way, it enables you to create a diet plan that does not focus on a very small, limited number of foods that you know to be (at least relatively) safe as far as your IBS is concerned.
On the other hand, it does allow you to eat a balanced, healthy diet, one that provides the variety and interest levels that you need in order to ensure that living with IBS does not get you down too much.
Remember what we have already said about anxiety and stress? If every day is miserable because you can never eat the kind of foods that you want to eat, this will inevitably increase your stress or anxiety levels. This further exacerbates your problem, thus it is clear that being able to eat a balanced but varied diet is extremely important both psychologically and physically.
In a nutshell, the best kind of diet for the majority of irritable bowel syndrome sufferers is one that is high in soluble fiber and low fat foods that are not likely to trigger an adverse gastrointestinal reaction. On the other hand, foods that are featured in the ‘triggers’ group should only ever be eaten rarely, if at all.
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