[davzie]

I also went through this for 6 years.

A guy on YouTube will help called Pain Free You. Recent studies suggest bad bacteria can continue to flourish if we are chronically stressed (which symptoms like this easily cause). Huge correlation between stress and flare ups for me.

In the short term whilst you work on the mind-body aspect, I recommend taking Digestive Enzymes with each meal along with a Betain HCL + Pepsin supplement. These are the only supplements that removed my symptoms (and trust me I’ve tried them all). They work by ensuring you have the right level of stomach acid to properly digest food, proteins, carbs and fats so that by the time it hits your digestive tract, there’s less undigested FODMAPs for the bacteria to feed off of.

There IS a light at the end of the tunnel.

Happy to chat about this and what I use since I know this can be hard to go through davzie at davzie dot com.

[ToDougie]

I really appreciate your post. I am still on this journey, and have been for almost a decade. It will not break my will. Digestive enzymes are one of the next things that I will be trying -- I noticed that small amounts of pineapple with my evening meal seem to quell some GI distress.

Anyways, I'm at work now, so hopefully my reply will serve as a nice bookmark to come back to this thread.

I'm tired of my doctors and specialists dismissing all of my attempts at curing myself. They are truly only interested in minimizing symptoms, and NONE of them believe there is a root cause to CURE.

[sersi]

Which brand did you end up using for the enzymes and supplement? It's my understanding that there's sometimes significant differences between brands because it's unregulated so I'm curious about the ones that did work for you.

I've been diagnosed with IBS for 10 years but that's hardly any help, I did notice that reducing fat and reducing wheat seems to help with my symptoms. I've tried a lot of different probiotics but they've been no help so far

[davzie]

I started out with Solgar brand. I found digestive enzymes with Ox Bile to be best and the Betaine I look for minimum 350mg Betaine HCL and minimum 50mg of Pepsin as that appears important to managing symptoms. Probiotics I found just make me feel worse.

[jtc331]

See my comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41865429

[anonymous344]

Did you fixed yourself with these? Did you try probiotics (90% of them are shit) Did you try fasting ? how about milk-gluten-sugar free diet?

[davzie]

I tried probiotics, tonnes of different types, none of them worked, most made it worse.

I tried fasting, a few days eating nothing and drinking only water with a bit of salt. It doesn't really work. The bacteria go into hibernation mode until you start eating again.

I don't drink milk anymore and I tried a low FODMAP diet. The latter helped, but I found it so hard to keep up and it was stressful.

I had every diagnostic under the sun. Chest xrays, stool samples, hydrogen methane breath tests (hydrogen positive). I am 99% convinced it was all caused by stress and the antibiotics I took was the straw that broke the camels back.

Stress triggers flight or fight mode. Chronic stress means you're always in this state which means your body isn't producing the digestive enzymes and stomach acid it needs to maintain correct bacteria levels since you don't need to digest food when you're being chased by a metaphorical tiger, better use that energy to run away instead.

The only probiotic I haven't tried that I would like to try is Symprove which is a refrigerated one that was recommended to me by quite a few pharmacists.

Once I am fully confident my stress levels are very low and I've learnt to manage them I will start to wean off the supplements and see if I get a recurrence of symptoms. I'm not yet fully cured but most importantly I'm on the right track.

[anonymous344]

Thank you. I'm also on this road. Stress, and inflammation in the body. What helped me was extra hemp-protein powder, forest-berries (=prebiotic) and keeping away from milk, gluten, oat, sugar, alcohol, CITRIC-ACID (this is everywhere! and if you google it, you find that it is causing brain fog like hangover) And quite a lot of C-vitamin. keeping down the inflammation with tea made from ginger, tumeric and other herbs. Now found out that it can be leaky-gut, and started taking slippery-elm to protect+fix the gut lining. _Should_ also chew the food slowly, but that's not possible usually

[lurking15]

Sounds like you've identified that histamine is an issue for you. Vitamin C will clear serum histamine, citric acid is bad since it's a fermented byproduct of black mold (likely triggers histamine release from impurities).

In my IBS journey I had a period where I had very strong histamine intolerance, and vitamin C (in the form of QBC vitamin, quercetin + bromelain + vitamin C) really helped stabilize me. Histamine intolerance often led to chronic insomnia, my heart just would not calm down at night.

[davzie]

Can confirm I found help in Solgar Quercetin. I’m convinced it’s all stress related though and the stress is causing imbalances in the body.

[anonymous344]

thank you and God bless! I found out about this histamine when drinking wine and after got cramps. But did not find cure for it. B12 which was one aid, normally makes my stomach bad imeadiately. Will try QBC

[lurking15]

Happy to help!

In my research trying to help myself I've come to the conclusion that histamine intolerance is really more of a symptom of a larger issue. It seems to suggest SIBO or any other sort of inflammatory process in the small intestine. Reason being that dysbiosis (of which SIBO is just one sort) has multiple synergizing effects: not only that often the bacteria associated with dysbiosis will produce lots of histamine through fermentation activity (there's a certain klebsiella type I've seen implicated) but also the dysbiosis causes a cascade of issues that degrades the gut lining which increases the amount of dietary histamine that crosses into the body.

Otherwise I've seen histamine intolerance also suggestive of Crohn's, etc. where the gut lining is chronically damaged.

Like you said wine often reveals it for people, also vinegar, aged cheese, meat or seafood. It's funny that now that I know what to look for I notice when eating with people when they get a stuffy nose right after eating that stuff.

[davzie]

Congratulations on finding stuff that's worked for you! I recognise a lot of similar things that I've tried to cut out or introduce. The body can heal, it's great at that, I think doing all this stuff can help give it the space to do so. I used to think alcohol helped (Gin) and was "killing" the bad bacteria off. But I actually think it just chilled me the fuck out for an evening. Good luck on your journey, we're going to make it! :D

[polishdude20]

Just as a counterpoint to your anecdote, I actually took a course of antibiotics for a week a few months ago and my stomach issues went away completely. Then they came back when I stopped :(

Probiotics didn't help either. Even the refrigerated ones.

Then I started drinking a half cup of unflavoured gelatin before each meal. Take half a tablespoon of the powdered gelatin, mix with half cup water, wait two minutes to dissolve a bit, down the hatch. It's helped like 75% of the way there.

Also, I started taking anxiety meds because my stomach issues get more triggered when I go out and it's early days but that may help.

[davzie]

Rifaximin / Neomycin has big impacts on it however I do believe if you have stress still, not got good stomach acid and / or not dealing with poor gut motility, it will slowly re-surface.

[throwaway-7328]

in case it helps, had a similar situation, one antibiotic helped, others didn’t. turns the one that did also had a anti inflammatory effect which seemed to be reducing a then unknown food allergy.