Life-changing leads
There’s hope these new discoveries herald a breakthrough for people with IBS.
Sufferers of gut disorders such as irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) may need to do some repair work before they can eat the kinds of foods their microbes crave. In The Clever Guts Diet Recipe Book, Mosley recommends a two-phase programme.
This involves first removing gluten, refined grains, dairy, pulses, alcohol and fibrous vegetables such as broccoli and cabbage and eating a diet of quality proteins; bitter-leaf salads with vinegar and citrus; polyphenol-rich foods, such as dark chocolate and nuts; fruit; and non-dairy fats, such as olive oil, coconut oil and avocado. After about four weeks, the original foods can be gradually reintroduced (while you keep an eye out for symptoms) along with lots of prebiotics and fermented foods, such as live yoghurt and sauerkraut.
“Irritable bowel syndrome is basically a basket in which you chuck stuff when you don’t know what’s going on,” says Mosley, who believes the medical system is failing a lot of sufferers of common gut conditions. “People are told they don’t have a problem. The fact they feel depressed and have gut pain and diarrhoea is somehow dismissed. But there’s clearly something very real going on in a significant number of people.”
Mosley draws a comparison with stomach ulcers, which were widely held to be caused by stress until Australian scientist Barry Marshall proved the trigger was a previously unknown bacterium called Helicobacter pylori by swallowing it, then curing the resulting symptoms with antibiotics.
Mosley hopes this new research into the microbiome will be as transformative as Marshall and his collaborator Robin Warren’s Nobel Prize-winning discovery. “That changed the lives of tens of millions of people; it eradicated a disease that was incredibly widespread. So there are these occasional revolutions in science that do change everything – and I suspect this may well be one of them.”
“Irritable bowel syndrome is basically a basket in which you chuck stuff when you don’t know what’s going on.”