| Hi Olivia,
I hope you have had a great week!
We have had a very eventful week with myself and little girl being admitted to hospital with pneumonia! Luckily we are both fine which is great but obviously not ideal timing at 37 weeks pregnant.
But I have put been able to put some of this hospital time to good use and put together this overview on fructose intolerance.
Because fructose intolerance is actually very common in IBS with at least 22% of people thought to have an issue.
So perhaps this will give you some insight in to your symptoms.
I am going to keep this email as 'to the point as possible.' But if you want to dive into fructose and IBS more click here for the full post.
What you need to know.
1. Fructose is a sugar found naturally occurring in some foods like fruit and vegetables but may also be added into processed foods like canned drinks or cakes.
2. Your body breakfast down fructose in the small bowel using an enzyme called fructase or alongside glucose across the small bowel wall.
3. Intolerance occurs when one or both of these systems are not working well. This leads to undigested fructose being in your large bowel.
4. Fructose intolerance causes abdominal pain, gas and diarrhoea.
Sadly there is no test to diagnose fructose intolerance so please save your money on breath testing (it is not accurate). If you have had a previous test then ignore those results.
The only way to diagnose fructose intolerance is through reducing your intake to see if symptoms disappear. Then if they do, you need to reintroduce fructose to confirm your symptoms were not just placebo and also find out how much fructose you can have before it becomes an issue.
Once you have a diagnosis, you can manage your condition by reducing your intake to the amount that you found you can tolerate. Taking fructase enzyme may also help but it is less well documented so we don't know the exact amount you would need.
A few interesting points to note that we have seen in The IBS Dietitian Clinic;
1. Most people seem to be able to tolerate a good amount of fructose before getting symptoms.
2. Some people find their tolerance improves but this is likely due to their gut being less reactive to undigested carbohydrates. In other words - when you have IBS, there are a lot of things causing you gut to be sensitive and if you worked on all of them then it may allow you to tolerate more of something else.
I hope that overview makes sense, but as I said we also go through it all in this post if you want foods lists and a bit more detail.
Best Wishes
Kirsten Jackson BSc Hons PGCert RD - The IBS Dietitian Founder |
