Customer Reviews

The IBS Low-Starch Diet: Why Starchy Food May Be Hazardous to Your Health

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I tried this low-starch diet for my Ulcerative Colitis but it didn't quite do enough to fix my horrible symptoms. Low-starch is just the beginning for me. I also found, by keeping a food journal and paying incredibly close attention to my gut, that other foods needed to be removed as well.
My "bad" list: grains (all kinds not just glutens), most dairy, all sugars including most fruits and juices, all starchy foods including potatoes, winter squash.
What has cured my UC: high protein meat/fish/nuts (no soy), lots of non-starchy veggies.
Sounds a lot like the Paleo Diet but I came by mine the hard way, kind of what Carol the author did, by finding the foods my gut liked vs. hated.
UC and related diseases like Crohn's and AS seem to be very individual and the food that works for me may not work for the next girl/guy.
Thank God for almond flour and honey so I can make yummy desserts.

I salute Carol for her book but suggest to people who try it and don't quite get their cure to keep tinkering with your diet, listen really hard to YOUR gut, keep a food journal and you WILL find your own personal cure. Doctors and drug companies will not help you do this, there's no money in it. They want a lifelong customer who comes back month after month year after year.

Discover your own cure, no one else is going to do it.

The book I recommend: Life Without Bread-no recipes but a scientific explanation why carbohydrate are bad for our bodies

[[ASIN:0091912865 The IBS Low-Starch Diet: Why Starchy Food May Be Hazardous to Your Health]
This book has literally saved my life. I suffer from severe destructive ulcerative colitis. I was not able to tolerate any of the medications I was given for this disease. I was told to try a diet for Celiacs, which I did. I had one of the worst flares of my life from the disease on the celiac diet. Also, at that time, I developed terrible swelling in my joints and pain so bad that I was only averaging 2-3 hours of sleep a night. I then found this book that stated that perhaps starch may be the culprit in my digestive disorder, that would explain my severe reaction to all the gluten-free flours I was consuming on the Celiac Diet. I went on the diet immediately and I can tell you that within a few days I was sleeping through the night, experiencing very little pain and no bowel pain. I just had my latest colonoscopy and for the first time in years was completely without ulceration! I have done nothing else that could explain this remarkable development but follow this wonderful diet. Yes, I had to do some work to get organized. There are not a lot of recipes in this book, and yes I researched the starch content of foods and made my own list of low-starch foods, but I am the master of MY fate. I did not and never have expected anyone or any one book to hand me my life and health on a silver platter. So far, I am feeling better than I have in years. I am sleeping and walking and going shopping again without worrying about where the nearest bathroom is, that is a miracle. So if you ask me if you should buy this book I will say , 'Buy two, and squirrel one away in case you lose your only copy." I did. For those of us with IBDs this book may save your life. Trust me it is worth a try.

I suffer from Ankylosing Spondylitis, and bought this book to learn about controlling the disease through the No Starch Diet (NSD). Carol is a good writer, and it's a fairly fun read; not dry or anything. It's "delightfully British" for those of us on the other side of the lake. The recipes are very tasty and easy to make. There is a good variety of food. I eventually gave up dairy, but Carol includes a large number of lactose-free recipes as well. And does the diet work? Still the million-dollar question. I am in the 5th month of the diet. I've noticed my digestion is definitely better. It also knocks down my pain levels by a couple points. It certainly has not "cured" me, but when I cheat on it, I definitely have more stiffness the following mornings. So the diet has not replaced medication, but does complement it well and improves my quality of life.

It would be unfair to have benefited from this book and to not write a review for the benefit of others. In short, I have Ankylosing Spondylitis, I was on NSAID's and had been told by my rheumatologist that the biologics were my future. I decided to try the no starch diet. It worked. I have no pain, and take no more meds. Side effects of the diet? Lost weight. Haven't gotten sick with a flu yet. Read the book for more information! I;m so happy I found it. This short review doesn't express how grateful I am for this book, but I hope it encourages someone to give this diet a try.

When I ordered this book I was sure it would include a (long) list of a wide variety of starchy foods - common vegetables, grains and fruits - and how much starch they contain (percent). It does not and I am not satisfied.

Pall

This book along with Elaine Gottschall's book has been extremely helpful to me in trying to figure out what foods are causing me problems. I started a low carb diet when I found out I have mild diabetes. After being on that diet for a little while I began to notice starchy foods seemed to cause me problems other than with blood sugar, even in small amounts. So, I did a lot of reading on the Internet and found books such as this one about starches causing health issues. I looked at some Internet sites such as coolinginflammation.com that discuss the link between diet and inflammation and many different health problems. My most painful problem is depression. I have had major depression three times, the last bout lasting a year before I began to get better. After that last one I have tended to get depressed moods very easily. Depression is no picnic. In fact it's pure Hell. So, I have been experimenting with diet to see if I could become more resilient. I think it's working. I was having insomnia all the time before the low carb diet. That has improved considerably due both to low carb and practically no starch. I believe that the starches somehow mess with my mood. Maybe it's inflammation. I don't know. The third group of foods which list many cooked vegetables, has been very helpful to me in figuring out what might be bothering me. In some ways the cooked vegetables seem to be worse for me than the grains. At a time when I was feeling let down by doctors, it was a life saver to have something to give me hope that I could improve. Another book which is interesting and helpful along this line is "Life Without Bread" by Allan,PHD. and Lutz M.D. This explains how too much carbohydrate in the diet can cause many health problems, and restricting carbs can bring definite improvement. Anyway, I am glad I found "The IBS Low-Starch Diet" book.

Following this book to some extent really helped my health problems. You can adjust the advise for your own body. I have used the advise from this book for 2 years. This is my second copy, lost my first.

My doctor said this diet concept is very healthy the way I was doing it. It significantly helped my heath issues for REAL. It's good reading even if you just want to satisfy your ciuriosity.

I don't have AS (Ankylosing Spondilitis), but I do have a long term chronic gut infection of overgrowth of klebsiella-- the kind of bacteria AS folks also suffer from. According to Sinclair that means I might have 'pre-AS', an underdiagnosed condition, as 80-90% of people with pre-AS never get AS but might have mild chronic gut problems or muscle/joint pains, and that was valuable also to know from this book. Anyone with chronic intestinal problems should have a stool test done, and if they have too much klebsiella, consider doing this diet to reduce it by essentially depriving the klebsiella of its sources of food. I'm doing it, and it helps reduce my gastrointestinal symptoms, mostly intestinal cramps and inflammation causing much insomnia. This is the definitive book on the diet, it's not the easiest diet to do without any information, so the book explains many essential things on how to do it, how and why it works, and the science behind it in a very understandable way. It also gives you crucial pointers like sucrose sugars and lactose dairy which normally could be a problem to eat are ok to eat when frozen, meaning you can have ice cream, that is very helpful when maybe you can't have other sweets or dairy. Believe me that is a huge morale booster and pleasure when you're avoiding lots of things you used to relish. Other crucial pointers include which kind of sugars are ok to eat anytime (very helpful!) and what to look for in little known or hidden possible sources of starch. I'd criticize a little bit some of the approach of the book in that at times it's confusing or not laid out as clear as I'd like so that I have to re-read it a few times to get things or go back a chapter, but she does make the effort to make it reasonably well organized and it's a pretty easy read. There's also a bit of promotion here like 'anybody' could benefit from the diet, perhaps that's true but I think she oversells it, and she makes it sound easier than it sometimes may be & maybe that's necessary for motivation given that this diet can be challenging at times, especially for example when eating out. But she does help make it much easier to do by giving you a 3 stage method of implementing the diet where if your symptoms are gone/reduced, you don't have to go to the more strict 2nd or 3d stage unless you start flaring up again, and that also gives you an easy to understand plan of how to gradually put in this diet. If you have a klebsiella infection, and haven't gotten enough relief, get this book, it's worth it even if you don't do the full diet, you can do some aspect of the diet and/or you'll learn a lot about your condition and what flares it up and how to start feeling better.

The low starch diet is a great start. I have had Crohn's and AS for 20+ years and through my own trials found that eliminating gluten and dairy helped tremendously and got me off of drugs. Now I have only eliminated starch for a week so far, but starch is definitely a problem for me. I am feeling great without it. One thing you will need to do is the iodine test on your foods. This diet is not easy at first because starch is hidden in lots of foods. Test everything. It is winter time and almost every fruit and mellon (except honeydew) I tested are starch due to the cold packing and shipping these unripe. Even at the local co op market the apples and pears are starch--and lots of it. My symptoms reappeared and it turned out to be cantaloupe that I ate. I tested some and it was very starchy. This was a draw back for my symptoms but it proved that starch is a problem not a placebo effect because I thought I was starch free and was upset until I figured out the problem.
As for this book, this is one persons solution and you may very well need to eliminate more or less. We are all chemically different. One thing I would like to point out here is that I discovered ten years ago that carbonated drinks flair my AS like nothing else. It takes a day or two for the symptoms to appear so it is a tricky one to figure out. It is the carbonation--NOT-- the sweeteners or sugar. I tried all kinds as a test. She drinks cokes, I would die if I drank coke.
Just stick it out and figure out your personal combination. A food log is a pain in the butt, but it is the way to go if you want to solve this faster. Life is full of challenges and this is your biggest one. Using diet to control a "disease" is satisfying. Getting off of drugs that make you sick and will kill you in the end is even better-believe me those side effects really happen. This is your chance to take control of your own life. Good health isn't for sissies. Nobody can do it for you and nobody is going to give you a magic bullet. You are going to have to work for it.

For those of you looking for alternatives to expensive and potentially harmful western medicines that treat auto-immune diseases like AS, the low-starch diet is a place to start. And the foreward by Ebringer is well worth the cost of the entire book. However, this diet fails to understand the science behind the disease, as many of the recipes have buckets of sugar in them. This undermines the entire polemic of why low or no starch diets work. Be wary, this author is not a doctor. There are many better books out there that understand the relationships between what you eat, and why your body reacts. I recommend digestive wellness by lipski to start your journey to better health.