Allergies to food. Diagnose and treat by cutting the most common offenders from your diet first: gluten, eggs, nuts, dairy. If there’s no improvement and you’re desperate, cut everything from your diet except rice and water, and add foods one-by-one until you isolate the culprit. You may have an intolerance to food which isn’t an allergy, e.g. coeliac disease. These can be diagnosed by a colonoscopy.
Allergies to other things in the environment that are causing issues, e.g. fragrances.
SIBO (small intestinal bacterial overgrowth). Diagnose by doing a SIBO breath test, and treat with a combination of antibiotics for the initial cull, pre and probiotics until you develop a healthy flora, then be very wary of having antibiotics from then on.
SIBO is often caused by a hereditary inability to absorb a certain type of dietary sugar, e.g. fructose (fructose malabsorption) or lactose (lactose malabsorption). When eating foods containing that sugar, you don’t digest it, which leads to an overgrowth in bacteria which consume that sugar. Diagnose by doing a SIBO test, treat by avoiding that food and/or taking enzyme supplements to help you digest it.
(I don’t know any scientific basis for this point, but it seems to be this way from observation) There seems to be certain ‘types’ of people: red meat people, white meat people, no meat people or it-doesn’t-matter people. If your diet is heavily slanted towards one of the ‘types’, it’s worth trying out the other types to see if you do better on that diet.
There’s a few supplements which are generally useful, and good to have in the toolkit:
Slippery elm powder in capsule form is a great soother, forming a mucus-like material in your guts.
Activated charcoal capsules are useful for soaking up toxins in the gut, which is an issue experienced with SIBO-related bacterial die off. Be careful with over-supplementing with these, because it will soak up nutrients also.
I mostly want to let 1000 flowers bloom on this, but activated charcoal is on my list of “only use if you have a very specific model of exactly what you are solving and what the costs are, with numbers”. To the extent it works, it does not discriminate between toxins, nutrients, and medicines.
I am not sure what you mean by this. Do you mean this comment is great and worth the recommendation, or should be buried so that its corpse produces a thousand flowers? Genuinely unsure.
Normally that’s an idiom for “We’re not sure of the best approach here, so let everyone try whatever approach they like, and hopefully among a thousand methods, some will be useful”.
It sadly also was used by Mao, possibly to lull dissenters into a false sense of security, to then be cracked down upon:
During the campaign, differing views and solutions to national policy were encouraged based on the famous expression by Mao: “The policy of letting a hundred flowers bloom and a hundred schools of thought contend is designed to promote the flourishing of the arts and the progress of science.”[3] The movement was in part a response to the demoralization of intellectuals, who felt estranged from the Communist Party.[4] After this brief period of liberalization, the crackdown continued through 1957 and 1959 as an Anti-Rightist campaign against those who were critical of the regime and its ideology. Citizens were rounded up in waves by the hundreds of thousands, publicly criticized, and condemned to prison camps for re-education through labor, or even execution.[5] The ideological crackdown re-imposed Maoist orthodoxy in public expression, and catalyzed the Anti-Rightist Movement.
woah. thanks a lot for mentioning SIBO, because somehow i was not aware this was a thing until you mentioned it, much less that sugar malabsorptions can cause this.
i’ve had weird digestive issues for years now, and i always sort of blamed them on my fructose malabsorption (as did my parents and doctors), even though the timing and symptoms didn’t really fit, so i guess i will get a test for SIBO now.
it would be fitting to randomly find a solution to a health problem under a post that specifically says that sometimes blind luck fixes problems where actual medicine can’t/won’t.
Hmm, from the literature I’ve consumed so far, I had the impression that SIBO isn’t actually that common, and it’s just one possible (and not particularly wide-spread) reason for irritable bowel syndrome. That said, evidence is mounting that SIBO was absolutely [my problem](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/fFY2HeC9i2Tx8FEnK/luck-based-medicine-my-resentful-story-of-becoming-a-medical?commentId=FXit9XoHTjevw6goD), so I have no anecdata leg to stand on. (Personally I’m gradually experimenting with the carbs my gut is okay with it, since it has such a strong dislike for most of them (especially starches, for some reason).) Thanks for the tip with the elm powder!
(Edit: Erk, sorry, I can’t seem to make that link work. This is what I get for not commenting here often!)
A lot of gut issues are a combination of:
Allergies to food. Diagnose and treat by cutting the most common offenders from your diet first: gluten, eggs, nuts, dairy. If there’s no improvement and you’re desperate, cut everything from your diet except rice and water, and add foods one-by-one until you isolate the culprit.
You may have an intolerance to food which isn’t an allergy, e.g. coeliac disease. These can be diagnosed by a colonoscopy.
Allergies to other things in the environment that are causing issues, e.g. fragrances.
SIBO (small intestinal bacterial overgrowth). Diagnose by doing a SIBO breath test, and treat with a combination of antibiotics for the initial cull, pre and probiotics until you develop a healthy flora, then be very wary of having antibiotics from then on.
SIBO is often caused by a hereditary inability to absorb a certain type of dietary sugar, e.g. fructose (fructose malabsorption) or lactose (lactose malabsorption). When eating foods containing that sugar, you don’t digest it, which leads to an overgrowth in bacteria which consume that sugar. Diagnose by doing a SIBO test, treat by avoiding that food and/or taking enzyme supplements to help you digest it.
(I don’t know any scientific basis for this point, but it seems to be this way from observation) There seems to be certain ‘types’ of people: red meat people, white meat people, no meat people or it-doesn’t-matter people. If your diet is heavily slanted towards one of the ‘types’, it’s worth trying out the other types to see if you do better on that diet.
There’s a few supplements which are generally useful, and good to have in the toolkit:
Slippery elm powder in capsule form is a great soother, forming a mucus-like material in your guts.
Activated charcoal capsules are useful for soaking up toxins in the gut, which is an issue experienced with SIBO-related bacterial die off. Be careful with over-supplementing with these, because it will soak up nutrients also.
I mostly want to let 1000 flowers bloom on this, but activated charcoal is on my list of “only use if you have a very specific model of exactly what you are solving and what the costs are, with numbers”. To the extent it works, it does not discriminate between toxins, nutrients, and medicines.
I am not sure what you mean by this. Do you mean this comment is great and worth the recommendation, or should be buried so that its corpse produces a thousand flowers? Genuinely unsure.
Normally that’s an idiom for “We’re not sure of the best approach here, so let everyone try whatever approach they like, and hopefully among a thousand methods, some will be useful”.
It sadly also was used by Mao, possibly to lull dissenters into a false sense of security, to then be cracked down upon:
Yeah I’d love to have a less loaded phrase for “encourage people to try a bunch of stuff” but Mao did a great job optimizing his.
Makes sense, thanks.
woah. thanks a lot for mentioning SIBO, because somehow i was not aware this was a thing until you mentioned it, much less that sugar malabsorptions can cause this.
i’ve had weird digestive issues for years now, and i always sort of blamed them on my fructose malabsorption (as did my parents and doctors), even though the timing and symptoms didn’t really fit, so i guess i will get a test for SIBO now.
it would be fitting to randomly find a solution to a health problem under a post that specifically says that sometimes blind luck fixes problems where actual medicine can’t/won’t.
Hmm, from the literature I’ve consumed so far, I had the impression that SIBO isn’t actually that common, and it’s just one possible (and not particularly wide-spread) reason for irritable bowel syndrome. That said, evidence is mounting that SIBO was absolutely [my problem](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/fFY2HeC9i2Tx8FEnK/luck-based-medicine-my-resentful-story-of-becoming-a-medical?commentId=FXit9XoHTjevw6goD), so I have no anecdata leg to stand on. (Personally I’m gradually experimenting with the carbs my gut is okay with it, since it has such a strong dislike for most of them (especially starches, for some reason).) Thanks for the tip with the elm powder!
(Edit: Erk, sorry, I can’t seem to make that link work. This is what I get for not commenting here often!)