Warning about Dangers of Inulin

[Guest guest]

Below are two posts from Idol from the

Native-Nutrition list. was on another list

related to bowel problems, and witnessed inulin cause massive problems

to everyone who tried it-- yes, the stuff offered by a certain

purveyor who claims his is superior due to chain length. Below this I

will also post a recent experience of mine that I believe is related

to inulin.

________

Chris-

>Some believe FOS feeds good organisms, others believe it feeds bad

>ones even more, and others say that FOS is often conflated with

>long-chain inulin, and only the longest-chain inulin safely encourages

>the good microbes without being available to the bad ones.

An advocate of the longest-chain idea joined an SCD-related list awhile

back and pushed that idea really hard. The list-owner, who was still

active at the time, eventually responded at some length with some extremely

sound counter-arguments and citations, but the inulin pimp had been busily

working his wiles on a number of list-members offlist and managed to ring

up a large number of sales of his purified longest-chain inulin. Without

exception, everyone who tried it (perhaps a dozen or two people; I don't

remember for sure) had major flares of their various bowel diseases. I

think every single person also had bloody diarrhea, which the inulin pimp

tried to pass off as a beneficial " healing " reaction. Some people

recovered pretty quickly after stopping the inulin; others had major flares

which took weeks or longer to calm down.

-

____________________________________

Chris-

>I'll have to take a look at the science at some point-- but Duncan

>Crow didn't invent the idea himself. I've seen reviews that support

>it, and he provides citations etc. But I haven't looked closely.

The problem with the citations I've examined (and I haven't looked into

everything) is that it's very selective, examining particularly populations

or markers without looking at overall digestive health, and sometimes

relies on highly questionable surrogate endpoints. One study actually

regarded increased volume of farting as a positive!

And of course there's the small but not isolated anecdotal evidence of

everyone's disastrous experience with Crow's inulin on the Healing Crow

list. _Nobody_ reported a positive outcome from trying it.

-

_____

While I haven't tried supplemental purified inulin and frankly don't

intend to, for some reason I thought it would be a good idea to eat a

lot of garlic and onions so the natural inulin that these foods are

rich in would act as a beneficial prebiotic.

Boy was I wrong. I ate a meal with lots of garlic and onions, and had

the first meal I digested horribly since the last time I ate nuts, and

I'm still feeling the effects a little about 28 hours later.

I know for a fact this had nothing to do with the sugar in the onions,

because I can eat comparable amounts of sugar from honey with no

problems. So it had to be the fiber in the garlic and onions-- that

is, the inulin. (3 onions and a half a head of garlic, sauteed.)

I got lots of rumbling, and had the most acrid farts I've had since

before I did my two-week fast. Since the fast, and especially my

antifungal treatment, my bowel movements have had almost no smell, and

the gas, while initially increased, has decreased a lot, and never

smells bad. But after this onion-rich meal I couldn't even stand the

smell of my farts myself, and the quality of my stools the next day

went from previously great to pathetic, and I felt like there was

nasty things going on in my gut for half of today. I think the effect

is waning, but I'm certainly going to throw away or find someone else

to eat the two bags of onions I bought!

I'm also going to start juicing my garlic instead of eating the

cloves, becuase I'm convinced by the effects of the high amount of

inulin that even low doses will slow my healing down.

Just my experience-- but it looks like lots of people have had much

worse problems with supplemental inulin.

Chris

--

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