More than half of IBS sufferers appear to have a form of atypical food allergy. Irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) is a chronic gastrointestinal disorder that affects about one in ten. You may have heard about low-FODMAP diets, but they don’t appear to work any better than the standard advice to avoid things like coffee or spicy and fatty foods. In fact, you can hardly tell which is which.
But most IBS patients do seem to react to specific foods, such as wheat, dairy, soy sauce, or eggs. Though when you test them for typical food allergies, they may come up negative on skin prick tests. But what you want to know is not what happens on their skin, but inside their gut when they eat them. Enter: confocal laser endomicroscopy. How cool is this? You can snake a microscope down someone’s throat into their gut, and drip on some foods, and watch in real-time as the gut wall becomes inflamed and leaky. You can actually see the cracks forming within minutes. But it had never been tested on a large group of IBS patients––until now….