• Effectiveness

  Moderate (for abdominal bloating)
• Effectiveness

  Moderate (for abdominal cramps)
• Effectiveness

  Moderate (for constipation)
• Effectiveness

  Moderate (for irritable bowel syndrome)
• Side effects

  None (for Overall)
• Adherence

  Always
• Burden

  A little hard to take

Dosage: Daily

Advice & Tips: It took me quite a long time to adjust to following a strict, low-FODMAP diet. Making it a comfortable and workable part of my daily and weekly routine involved many challenges. For instance, whenever I wasn't sure whether a certain food or recipe ingredient was relatively low in FODMAPs (and, hence, safe for me to eat), I would have to look it up on the Internet. Luckily, it was easy to find one or more (usually more) lists that contain the foods I have tried to look up since I embarked on this diet. But if I wasn't sure, then I simply opted out of trying the food. Also, I occasionally found I had been eating a particular food for quite some time, thinking it was on the low-FODMAP list and therefore OK to eat, but when I happened to come across that food, perhaps months later, I discovered it was not on the low-FODMAP/safe-to-eat list, so I had to quit consuming it. Once this made for a rather disheartening experience, when I found out I could no longer drink coconut milk or use it in my recipes (at least not in the large quantities I had been). It was one of the few beverages left to me that I really enjoyed, so it was quite a sacrifice to give it up. I had already started making my own hemp milk, but some time after I stopped drinking coconut milk I realized I could make my hemp milk creamier, and thus a little more like the coconut milk I was already sorely missing, by adding one or two spoonfuls of peanut butter to every batch. I also used to use cashews, including making homemade cashew milk and cashew butter, until I found out that was unsuitable to consume on a low-FODMAP diet, too, so I switched to peanuts (and I use sunflower seeds, walnuts, and pumpkin seeds as well, often making various blends of nut and seed butters). Another major challenge arose due to the tremendous amount of time I needed to spend preparing my foods and beverages on an essentially daily basis...not to mention packing what I needed to eat at work each day! Over time, I made periodic adjustments to my food-prep routine, and now it feels quite manageable in comparison to when I first started the diet. I think I should also note here that the experts of the low-FODMAP diet (like Kate Scarlata) have written that it only needs to be followed for a certain period of time (like a few weeks, I think) and then other foods can be reintroduced gradually. But I have found that whenever I have gone off-diet, that is, when I tried to reintroduce foods that were not on the low-FODMAP list, my symptoms returned with a vengeance. So I resigned myself to staying on the diet for life, because it has made me a much happier man to find the power to reduce my almost debilitating chronic gastrointestinal symptoms with "just a little" extra work in the kitchen. I compensate for the nutrients I may be missing by taking a wide variety of suitable nutritional supplements on a daily basis.

Cost: $200+ monthly