[DoreenMichele]

I have a serious medical condition that significantly impacts the gut. Worse gas corresponds to more gut issues.

Everything I've read (or heard from other people) suggests it is not just me, that this principle generalizes.

[ianai]

It’s not a simple, linear relationship. People generally do better with whole foods which have higher fiber content. That tends to make more gas. Gas is the result of gut bacteria digesting fiber. Certainly too much gas can be a symptom of poor health, but so can too little.

[tapland]

I also do have a medical condition that impacts the gut.

It's called Crohn's Disease.

Yes, gas correlates to it feeling more severe.

That does not mean that removing the gas (by eating seaweed) is beneficial to anything but reducing gas.

It's a simple correlation causation thing. Removing an effect doesn't mean the cause is removed.

I can get gas reducing pills at my local pharmacy, I have yet to have my doctor take me off immunosupressants for- or even mention them. So I am honestly wondering if there is any evidence for this being actually beneficial for health.

[DoreenMichele]

If your mental models are largely rooted in a modern medical model where you just add drugs to treat the symptoms, then it's easy to assume dietary changes work basically like taking a different medication. But that's not what my mental models are rooted in and I've previously seen things that recommend seaweed for various issues.

I don't personally consume seaweed, so I don't recall the details off the top of my head. But I have reason to believe that seaweed does more than just mitigate gas production.

Dietary changes are inherently hard to track because you basically can't isolate them. If you eat 2000 calories a day and you introduce a new food, it simultaneously displaces some other food you were eating. So it inherently has confounding factors. Are you doing better because of the new good you introduced? Or because if removing some other food that you aren't even paying attention to?

Foods are also not one dimensional. So you may think it's helping because of X detail but it's really helping for an unrelated reason.

I started with taking supplements. Taking supplements allows you to isolate a single factor and learn how your body reacts to more of X thing while the rest of your diet stays the same.

It takes a lot of research to find a bioavailable supplement that is tolerated well by the person in question and contains only one ingredient. So no multivitamins allowed.

Then you start one and only one supplement at a time. You take it for a minimum of one week before making any other changes.

Once you've learned what impact specific supplements have, it eventually becomes feasible to say "I need more of X nutrient, so I'm going to eat more of x, y and z foods which are foods I know I tolerate well and have a reasonable amount of the nutrient I'm needing."

Anything that actually makes a difference will have side effects. With a nutritional or dietary approach, the amount one needs is a moving Target because as nutrient deficiencies are redressed, need eventually goes down, which people tend to not expect when coming from the mental models offered by modern medicine of "just add drugs (don't think about throughputs or systemic changes at all).

My initial assertion was only that it's reasonable to wonder if this might benefit human health. I stand by that and I feel this line of inquiry is tangential to that assertion. It's not actually some kind of rebuttal of that point.

[0-_-0]

Is your medical condition causing the gas or the other way around?

[DoreenMichele]

Bad gas corresponds to times when I'm more symptomatic. My condition causes serious gut dysfunction. Bad gassiness is one of many side effects when my gut is a mess.

I've spent over eighteen years pursuing dietary and lifestyle changes to mitigate my incurable condition. I have a lot less gas than I used to.

[0-_-0]

My point is, if your medical condition is causing the gas then reducing gas wouldn't help.

[p_l]

Reducing the symptoms probably help, and there are many conditions which have a reinforcing feedback loop

[belltaco]

The same mechanism that reduces the gas may also fix the underlying issue.

[DoreenMichele]

If you fix the underlying issue, you should reduce gas.

If you have a mental model as to what is going on and you try X and it works, then you infer that maybe you are on to something, which may be the best metric you have.