IBS for dummies

The only useful sections for me were the practical tips for day to day living with IBS, because the sections about medical treatment are from 2005 and no longer current.

I found the naturopathic sections very problematic because of my history of eating disorder (orthrorexia). There was lots of use of the word “toxin” and much fearmongering about MSG (with the racist term “Chinese restaurant syndrome”), GM food, sugar, dental fillings, vaccine preservatives (which save lives by preventing vaccine contamination and sepsis), and combination vaccines. They mentioned thiomersal by name (“thimerosal”) despite that it hadn't been used in vaccines for decades. They expressed belief that live virus vaccines (which contain a modified weakened virus, or a manufactured virus containing only the surface proteins) or combination vaccines can trigger long-term inflammation in people without autoimmune disorders or immunocompromization from the immune system being “overwhelmed”—a claim that is not supported by science or immunology.

There was even a positive reference to Andrew Wakefield's now retracted and thoroughly discredited Lancet paper that galvanized the “vaccines cause autism” movement, though the authors mainly focused on “vaccines cause colitis” and “thimerosal is toxic.” I do not excuse this because though the paper wasn't retracted by the Lancet until 2010, when this book was published Wakefield had already been exposed for the serious ethical and conflict-of-interest problems with the paper.

The authors used the word “chemicals” in a vague sense of “substance that I think is harmful in any amount without regard to how toxicology and biochemistry work,” and valorized what would today be called “clean eating” as inherently superior.

This book spurred me to learn about the metallurgy and chemistry of dental fillings, and the history of MSG being maligned. In summary: dental fillings do not cause detectable mercury levels after 72 hours, removing them causes much higher acute exposure than receiving one, and the mercury and other metals form a structure that holds the mixture together. Re: MSG: the letter to a medical journal that got titled “Chinese restaurant syndrome” was revealed by the letter writer himself as a hoax as soon as it was published, but the hoax had already caught on due to bolstering Sinophobia in society. MSG is naturally occurring in mushrooms, tomatoes, many cheeses, and exists in cuisines all around the world, including those of western Europe and the Mediterranean. If tomato sauce and mushrooms don't give you symptoms, MSG is not the cause of the symptoms.