# Eating vegetables



## yzi2424 (May 1, 2014)

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## Nojokeibs (Apr 14, 2014)

I have this same problem, even though I have a constipation problem. Veggies, especially greens come out undigested sometimes entire "baby geens" leaves will exit in the same form they entered. So what I do is I juice them, or I make baby food out of veggies. If you can tolerate fiber, coconut flour is a great thing to add to baked goods. There's a "muffin in a mug" trend going on so you can find lots of recipes online. Look for one with coconut flour and some kind of nut flour if that's okay for you to have. Coconut flour is very very high in fiber, so I can't have more than a tiny bit of it or instant constipation. The muffins are great though. I usually substitute a smaller amount of ground flax seeds for the coconut flour myself. Lots of options. You can also check out:

http://www.amazon.com/Muffins-Slim-Low-Carb-Gluten-Free-Microwave/dp/0985822422/

Also, if you're eating wheat, then you will automatically have bloat and gas. It might seem like it's the veggies but maybe it's the other foods in the meal that are higher in FODMAPs. Wheat is what the Monash researchers were using in the beginning as their first FODMAP when they started testing different foods. You can see their research here:

http://www.med.monash.edu/cecs/gastro/education/2013-public-lecture.html

FODMAPs are a matter of degree. You can't just eat a plateful of zucchini and expect to have no reaction. Even though it's a "low" FODMAP food, eating that much at once could put it higher on the list. So switching to a 5 meals a day plan is smart as the meals will be smaller and hopefully have less effect. Maybe start out with BRAT diet and when you have stability , work on one food at a time, each meal. That way you can have small amounts of things and not worry as much about accidentally making a food seem reactive when it's fairly safe.


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## Kathleen M. (Nov 16, 1999)

It is normal for things that are relatively tough (like green leafies) to come out the way they went down. The structure is not soluble in acid or water and we don't have enzymes to digest cellulose (not termites with their unique bacteria) nor do we have a grinding mechanism in the gut like a bird.

So what you do not grind up in your mouth with your teeth, with most of the water soluble nutrients leached out, will come out the way they went down.

So step one if you don't want to see veggies in your poop is chew better. Chewing better tends to be good for the digestion anyway, and most of use eat too fast as well. So slow down and really chew them.

Second. Cooked veggies are usually much easier for IBSers to digest than raw ones. Also tends to soften up some of the tougher parts so less to be seen on the way out.

And sticking to the low fodmap veggies can help, but I would still chew them well (or you can mechanically puree them, etc) and eat them predominately cooked.

For some people they can tolerate small amounts of raw veggies in a salad when they eat them they way is more common in France where the salad is severed toward the end of the meal rather than first, or as a meal by itself.


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## yzi2424 (May 1, 2014)

Thank you both for the replies.

As far as chewing, that is a issue to me for sure. I eat on the go A LOT. Grinding and juicing hasn't helped me with the absorbtion issue. Juicing has a laxative effect, as do pureed soups etc...


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## Lorelei56 (Apr 7, 2014)

Oh, that's too bad. I was wondering about getting a juicer because I was concerned about missing nutrients but apparently the irritating aspect of veggies is in the juice as well.


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## Kathleen M. (Nov 16, 1999)

Juicing may increase the grams of fodmaps you consume in one sitting. It is hard to eat 4 pounds of produce (when you should be eating them 1/2 a cup at a time on the low fodmap diet). It is fairly easy to drink the juice from that many pounds of produce.

Some juices especially in large quantities cause side effects in healthy people, but usually they decide the diarrhea, chills, etc are signs of "detoxing" and a "good thing". An adverse side effect is still a side effect even if it comes from something natural. The idea that nature can't kill or in any way harm you...when most traditional poisons are from plants...just confuses the heck out of me.







But enough of that soapbox.

If something bothers you when you eat it, assume it will bother you when you juice it. Often people add apples to green juices to make them drinkable and apple juices is loaded with fodmaps. You may tolerate the juices of something you tolerate whole, but it is going to depend if you make a shot of the green juice or drink a few cups because juice is the one and only thing you are consuming and you need to drink a lot of it to get your calories in.


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## Nojokeibs (Apr 14, 2014)

I love that soapbox... you go right ahead. I've heard similar sentiments from several sources and I think this way too. Plants have no way to defend themselves except by toxins. So all those people saying you can detox from environmental pollution by eating all fruits and veggies?? That gets me every time. They did get me.. I lived that way for long enough to know how much gut misery it gave me. After about 8 months I was in agony.

Denise Minger, another post-raw-vegan dieter, wrote a great book about diets and talks about how people in different diet "camps" not only practice religious adherence, but victim blaming when the diet doesn't work for someone in the group. One example she gives is the "detox" reaction. I can believe that you might get a reaction from a probiotic that would be something you can feel, but it shouldn't make you feel sick enough to get a fever, for example. It also shouldn't last long. Her book is "Death by Food Pyramid" but she's most famous for debunking "The China Study."

I think you're right on about the FODMAPs in juice. Even if you choose the fruits/veggies well, you could still be getting fructose in excess of glucose and causing a rise in water balance (not to mention bloating). I was thinking about small amounts of juice. When I make it, I refrigerate most of it (preserved with potassium sorbate I get from Amazon) and drink small amounts. I was assuming that people were not going to consume large amounts of juice, and were aware of FODMAPS, but I could be wrong. However, the traditional way to increase absorption of nutrients is to juice and puree. Just because it has some tricky aspects, doesn't mean it's bad advice. Cooking a steak has tricky aspects too.



Kathleen M. said:


> Some juices especially in large quantities cause side effects in healthy people, but usually they decide the diarrhea, chills, etc are signs of "detoxing" and a "good thing". An adverse side effect is still a side effect even if it comes from something natural. The idea that nature can't kill or in any way harm you...when most traditional poisons are from plants...just confuses the heck out of me.
> 
> 
> 
> ...


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## Kathleen M. (Nov 16, 1999)

Yep, I find a lot of victim-blaming in some of the diet/fad diagnosis/only we know how to be healthy camps. Especially the more extreme ones. If the diet/supplements/life style regime is not making you better, than it is your fault that you are cheating and not doing it right. If it makes you sicker then it is proof that it is working and if you would only suck it up for another month or year or decade without ever varying from the routine in any way then perfect health will eventually be yours.

I guess maybe it is the juicers I hang around. They all tend to be the only thing that will make you healthy is to take in nothing but juice, only juice and no other foods for days on end, preferably for weeks or even months on end. Usually the entry level juicer is doing a 7 day "detox" and usually they are usually aiming for a "21 day" or longer detox. You do a few 7 day juice only diets to get yourself ready for the longer juice fast, and funny how the body doesn't like regular food afterward because anytime you break a 21 day any kind of avoiding actual food fast your GI tract is going to need some time to readjust. Common scenario on Survivor is after 20 days of basically starving they get a reward, and then an unintended punishment for overindulging in the reward.

I do worry about some nutrients you may not get from all juice (like some of the essential fatty acids) and I have known someone that had a bleeding stroke after a couple of months on all fruits and veggies (not all juiced, at least) as that is some bible diet where you only eat plants as that is all people ate in the Garden of Eden.

Now doing a shot or two of green juice a day probably won't be a problem if you pick the right veggies for you. But like I said most of the juicers around here seem to think if you aren't doing some god awful amount like 20 pounds of produce a day you aren't drinking nearly enough juice.

Personally, I think the body is probably best adapted to the amount of chemicals that are in a normal amount you could actually eat. But then I'm a toxicologist and "the dose makes the poison" so I'm very skeptical that if 7 servings of fruits and veggies a day is great/ideal hen 17 or 27 or 77 servings a day with nothing else at all must be 10X, 100X, no a million-billion times better and anything that is a normal amount is by definition useless and not even worth the bother.


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## yzi2424 (May 1, 2014)

Small amounts of juice dont sit well with me either. I personally tried a lot of the "techniques" I have been reading about, most being very repetitive. I think it really is a case by case basis with this affliction. I do think, for me, whole vegetables are better than just the juice. Fodmaps is way too restricting to adhere to for a lifetime. Trying to find a permanent solution to this issue. Just have to stick close to toilets.And hopefully the drugs I will end up taking for high blood pressure will not be triggers for the IBS.


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## BQ (May 22, 2000)

> Fodmaps is way too restricting to adhere to for a lifetime.


Well maybe you wouldn't have to adhere to it for a lifetime... maybe for just a short time. And maybe you wouldn't have to avoid ALL of the "avoid" foods.. maybe just some....but you won't ever know if it helps unless you give it a try.

There are still many veggies/foods you can have!

And there really isn't a "permanent solution" for everyone yet.

Just for the record: I would personally stay away from juicing if one has D problems. Also IBS doesn't cause any malabsorption issues as it happens in the colon. Absorption of nutrients happens in the small intestine.

I would just cook your veggies really well... and try to not have to "eat on the go" so much. Just rushing could give me D.. regardless of what I ate.


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## Nojokeibs (Apr 14, 2014)

Okay, then try this maybe? Eliminate the onions, shallots, garlic, and the whites of green onions. Use only greens of the green onions (put the rest out for the aminals outside, they'll appreciate it, or at least the insects will.) If you can eliminate all oniony things, go for it, but when you must have that flavor, use the greens of green onions.

And add more yellow summer squash and zucchini to your meals. Cooked always. If you can handle eggs, then try an omelet with squash you cooked a bit first, and a sprinkling of a spice like curry, or if you're a purist, just cumin powder and turmeric.

Squash is cheap and plentiful, and if you get some instructions online about how to cook spaghetti squash, it makes a nice veggie rich meal with tomato sauce on top and your favorite GF bread toasted and covered in green onion flavored butter.


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## Colt (May 5, 2011)

I find that cooked or canned veggies seem to be okay for me. I mean cooked cooked. Any frozen veggies like peas, carrots or beans must be cooked until mushy.

I miss Caesar salad.


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## Nojokeibs (Apr 14, 2014)

Kathleen M. said:


> [..]
> 
> I do worry about some nutrients you may not get from all juice (like some of the essential fatty acids) and I have known someone that had a bleeding stroke after a couple of months on all fruits and veggies (not all juiced, at least) as that is some bible diet where you only eat plants as that is all people ate in the Garden of Eden.


I'm sorry your friend was hurt. I think I know that one. I've had a collection of several editions of "Back to Eden" for ages now. I'm fond of the ideas in that book, but I have never adopted the diet. There is a Bible diet too, but I thought it included meat. I think the story you tell is a great illustration that people are different and shouldn't try to shoehorn themselves into premade molds - unless they fit, of course.



> Personally, I think the body is probably best adapted to the amount of chemicals that are in a normal amount you could actually eat. But then I'm a toxicologist and "the dose makes the poison" so I'm very skeptical that if 7 servings of fruits and veggies a day is great/ideal hen 17 or 27 or 77 servings a day with nothing else at all must be 10X, 100X, no a million-billion times better and anything that is a normal amount is by definition useless and not even worth the bother.


I agree, people really overdo and that's not good for my gut health either. There are times when I can't get a therapeutic dose from a whole food though, but in that case, I've been using that food as a supplement. Examples: naringin, curcumin, ginger... If the theory of juicing is that you're overloading on vitamins, that's great, but it can be done in smaller steps.

There is also this:

"From the current understanding of the physiology of
fructose absorption presented above, there is potential
for the efficiency of fructose absorption to be influ-
enced by alterations in the functional capability of
GLUT5. While GLUT5 is polymorphic, genotype-phe-
notype correlations have yet to be made. The expres-
sion of the GLUT5 gene has a diurnal variation and
is influenced by several factors as outlined in Table 2.
Most notably, dietary fructose and sucrose can induce
greater expression of the GLUT5 transporter, and
presumably of its functional capacity. "

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17217453

Though you may have already seen the article, I read that to mean: if you don't expose your gut to fructose and sucrose, it will stop expressing the gene that produces one of the transport mechanisms for it. How sensitive you are to this particular sugar may be due to many things, but one of them is how much fructose you've been eating recently. I think this is why Dr. Terry Wahls is so focused on epigenetics. (Simply put: Ok you have billions of genes... which ones will this cell express today? Turns out, those decisions are inherited when the cell divides.)

Our bodies respond to our environment and attempt to be come as efficient as possible in any circumstance. Maybe we just overdid the fructose to the point where our bodies couldn't keep up anymore, but it might be good to keep in mind that the body is capable of healing and responding better to a normal amount of it in the future. At least it keeps hope alive.

I appreciated your thoughts on "Hammerhead Bob" behavior among strict dieters.


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## Kathleen M. (Nov 16, 1999)

Well usually megadosing of anything (and at megadoses most vitamins are essentially taking a drug, not a vitamin, IMO--like with niacin at doses to have the effect of a statin you have a high risk of side effects and need the same monitoring as a statin) either most of it goes out in your poo as there is a limit to how much a body can ever possibly absorb, or you immediately flush it out making your kidneys work harder....or for some you hit the toxic limit and start causing problems. And there is the what are you unintentionally dosing yourself with to get more vitamin C, etc.

It isn't just how much you dump down, it is the bio-availability (can you use it or get it to the right body art) and what range does the thing do what you expect it to do. Like with some of the antioxidants. At normal dietary doses and proportions they seem to be acting as anti-oxidants but something funny goes on when you give someone a lot of one or two of them that seems to increase cancer risk even if a diet high in natural amounts of antioxidants in their usual proportions generally seems protective.

Now I do know some people that could never manage to eat a diet with a wide variety of fruits and veggies (either don't have the time, or won't eat them whole) that find juicing is a good way to at least get their servings in. I just find that people around here for some reason don't seem to be of the all juice all the time is the only thing that cures or even barely maintains health.


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## yzi2424 (May 1, 2014)

I am on board with frozen vegetables. Less reactions there. The canned I abstain from because of the sodium. I also find that eating low-fat diet helps. Of course this is going against all the newer diets that are promoting "healthy" fats.


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## Nojokeibs (Apr 14, 2014)

There's a good reason why a low fat diet helps some people. It lowers the burden on your pancreas and does not cause as much release of bile. In D type illnesses of the gut, it is always recommended because of the less likelihood of setting off another bout of D. Also I've been reading some recent research showing that fats cause a temporary opening of the tight junctions in the gut, possibly making a leaky gut worse. Just make sure you're getting the good fats like omega-3, it's not hard to fit it into even a low fat diet. Gut issues are very individual.


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## BQ (May 22, 2000)

yzi2424 Canned veggies do usually have alot of sodium... but you can still use them if you wish to! Whenever I use them I just drain the can and rinse them a few times and then use my own seasonings.


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## yzi2424 (May 1, 2014)

All good advice. Thank you all!


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