Fructose Intolerance And "leaky Gut"?

[Laura Wesson]

I just found out I'm fructose intolerant!

I went on a low-fructose diet - my fructose intake has been about 30 gm/day.

Before I was having many bowel movements per day. Like 5 or more. And I had a tendency to loose stools.

On the low-fructose diet, I'm suddenly only having 1 per day!

It seems I had a bit of irritable bowel syndrome and it was caused by fructose!

Now I'm wondering if fructose intolerance is why I've kept on developing new food sensitivities even on a gluten-free diet. I mean by "food sensitivities", reactions to a particular species of food. For example, I recently found I can't eat poppy seeds any more - I eliminated them for a week, then tried some again, and I got sick.

IBS is associated with "leaky gut". So it seems that fructose causes "leaky gut", if you're fructose intolerant and it causes IBS for you.

I just wonder ... It seems like calming down one's gut can only be a good thing for "leaky gut syndrome".

I'm also allergic to Candida on allergy skin tests, and it seems possible that eating a lot of fructose could have increased my Candida population. Especially true if you aren't absorbing fructose very well, as I may not be, so the fructose sits around longer in the intestine than it should.

I've been gluten-free for 6 years.

Laura

[Ms Jan]

The many bowel movements when you eat fruit could simply be due to the high water content in fruit which make fruit a very rapidly digested food, which therefore tend to create bm. In itself it's not a bad thing, as 3 bm a day is considered the most healthy norm.

I don't know too much about fructose intolerance, but clearly with an irritated gut, ingesting any irritant will only make it worse and disturb the healing process, and thus it could very well add to the number of intolerances.

I'm not sure what you mean by 'candida allergy'? None of us can deal with an overpopulation of candida, but if you have actual allergic reactions to candida, I'd imagine you need to be on a regime to eradicate it fast. And fruit sugars are known to feed candida, so here at least you have one clear connection.

If you want to give your guts a break from stress, you might want to read up on the Specific Carbohydrate Diet (SCD), which is particularly aimed at healing the gut. There are several strings of information on the diet in this forum, or look at Open Original Shared Link

good luck!

[dtgirl]

I rarely ever eat fruit and very little veggies. I have a very difficult time with starches as well. However, in my case, fructose and sucrose cause major constipation. I will go days without a BM when I ingest them.

[Laura Wesson]

The many bowel movements when you eat fruit could simply be due to the high water content in fruit which make fruit a very rapidly digested food, which therefore tend to create bm.

Noooo ... getting more water does not cause diarrhea, it simply makes you pee more.

I'm not sure what you mean by 'candida allergy'?

It's part of allergists' skin testing. Allergists have told me I'm not allergic enough to Candida to have to modify my diet for it, but they could easily be wrong. Medicine doesn't know much about food sensitivities. Yes, a high-fructose diet can cause Candida overgrowth or dysbiosis in general. There is a whole ecology of bacteria and fungi in there, and feeding them fructose definitely can cause dysbiosis, according to researchers. It may also cause "mucosal biofilm", and upset how one's gut works.

So yes, this has been a whole insight for me, that possibly I've been contributing to my problems with food sensitivities by a high-fructose diet.

The standard "anti-Candida" diet includes eliminating fructose, and this is sensible since a lot of people do malabsorb fructose, so it makes it past the small intestines and feeds bacteria and fungi in the large intestine.

It is probably quite unnecessary in the anti-Candida diet to eliminate refined starches and glucose. As a doctor pointed out, those foods are absorbed very quickly by the human body and shouldn't be feeding any bacteria or fungi in the large intestine - or probably, the small intestine either.

If you want to give your guts a break from stress, you might want to read up on the Specific Carbohydrate Diet (SCD), which is particularly aimed at healing the gut.

The SCD is actually quite irrational in that regard. Honey, which has a lot of fructose and causes GI problems for me like diarrhea, is OK in the SCD. But high fructose corn syrup, which is similar to honey in the fructose/glucose ratio, is not.

A lot of these alternative-medicine things, like anti-candida diets and the scd, work at least for some people, because some element of the approach is valid. But it takes medical research to sort out exactly what works and what doesn't. There is a lot of medical research showing that the body doesn't handle dietary fructose very well, and specifically restricting fructose looks like it's an important element.

Laura