The one tweak to ease irritable bowel symptoms

There could be one simple dietary tweak that eases the symptoms of irritable bowel disease (IBD)—eat very little for five days.

This mini-fast when you eat just plant-based food allows the body to reset, and this improves symptoms and biological markers of IBD, researchers from Stanford University have discovered.

Sufferers who went on the five-days-a-month mini fast said they felt better, and there were measurable reductions in inflammation in biological samples.

For the study, researchers tracked 97 patients with mild-to-moderate Crohn’s disease.  Of these, 65 participants followed a fasting mimicking diet, while 32 continued with their usual eating habits as a control group, for three months.

Those in the fasting mimicking group reduced their calorie intake for five consecutive days each month, consuming roughly 700 to 1,100 calories per day, and on these days they ate plant-based meals. For the rest of the month, they returned to their normal diet.

Around two-thirds of those who followed the fasting mimicking diet reported an improvement in symptoms, although some suffered from headaches and fatigue.

Earlier studies had found that fasting can reduce levels of the C-reactive protein, a marker of inflammation which is also seen in IBD.

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