Fructose intolerance/sensitivity
 

I have a life long struggle with mood swing, fatigue, sugar/carb craving, and weight. About 10 years ago I went on Atkins just for the weight loss and it worked well, I lost between 10 and 12 lbs a month without trying, I ate 'till I was satiated, no more carb cravings ( after the first 4 to 5 days of withdrawal ) after about a month I noticed that I didn't feel tired all the time, I had energy :) , then I noticed the mood swings went away, I felt happy :) , when I got down to about 155 (I'm 5'10") I was still eating a lot but was still loosing weight so I decided to add more carbs, good stuff not my old friends from the junk food community, well that was my down fall, the mood swings/foggy mind returned.

10 years later something happens to get me back on track, I go back on Atkins , but now I have the Internet. Was it all carbs or just a few offenders ?, After a lot of research I found Dogtorj's site and decided I was gluten sensitive and just for good measure I eliminated the big 4 and started on the "Eat right for your blood type" diet, which for me is a vegetarian diet very little or no meat. Things seemed to be going OK, then I would have some days of pretty bad depression or anxiety, I would re-check what I was eating and taking as supplements , as a last ditch effort I stopped taking all supplements ( omega3, zinc, vit-c, magnesium, B12, etc.) and within a day I felt a whole lot better. I forget what it was but something urged me to Google sugar sensitivity which led me to Fructose intolerance and sensitivity, after reading from the links below I looked at the ingredients on my "NOW" brand sub-lingual B-12, the first 2 are fructose and sobitol. Can it be just that small amount can set off these symptoms ? Maybe that and the fruit I was eating . I don't know, but it seems to me there's a connection,



" Symptoms

This condition is common in patients with symptoms of irritable bowel syndrome. A small proportion of patients with both fructose malabsorption and lactose intolerance also suffer from coeliac disease. "




http://www.answers.com/topic/fructose-malabsorption

http://www.foodintol.com/sugar.asp#diff

http://www.bu.edu/aldolase/HFI/

Like so many other assumptions I've made I thought it was just sugar in general (excess) that was the problem , I had no idea that fructose in particular was a culprit and in some cases fatal.

What do you think ?

Excellent reads! Thanks for posting. Those will be very valuable for a lot of other people to consider.

Refined sugar and its replacers are known for wreaking different types of havoc on the body. It makes perfect sense that this could be a specific problem for some, if not most people.

Sounds like you might be on the right track. I ran into someone else, on a lowcarb message forum, that is sensitive to fructose.

Fructose involves the liver have you had your liver checked recently? I think a CBC blood panel tests it.

Hmmm... now that I think about it, maybe I should have a few days of meat & veggies and no supplements to see if I can shake this blah feeling I've been wrestling with.

I know a group of people with a peculiar autoimmune disease do much better avoiding all starches (they test their food with iodine). It seems like maybe the human race really isn't evolved to eat constant sugar and starch all the time.

This from one of the web sites

A very small percentage of people have hereditary Fructose Intolerance (less than 1 in 10,000 people.)

Fructose Malabsorption is less well understood. But may be somewhat self-imposed by our modern diets. Humans have not yet evolved systems to cope with such high sugar consumption.

Like with celiac and other particular sensitivities and allergies like peanuts, its curious how just one little molecule can cause so many problems.

Kim, I read your post on the elimination diet , I think the bottom line is, ( I'm gonna go out on a limb here LOL ) , the best diet is the one that works for "you" , it just takes time to find out what that is :) .

:D That would be true. :)

However, people don't really know HOW to go about figuring that out. Or the way they WANT to do it is one food at a time, which doesn't give clear results or a faster improvement in their quality of life, if they are reacting to more than one of their most common foods... which seems to be the majority of the time. :(

So, IMO, the most effective way (speaking to both time and results) to isolate your best and worst foods, is to do a Total Elimination Diet... which naturally leads you into a good rotation diet... which will allow you to refine your diet more easily at a later date (identify new offenders and bring in new foods that you want to try again to see if you've healed enough to tolerate them).

Kim, I agree. I left out a lot of info, for the last 3 months or so my diet has been very simple, broccoli , cauliflower , some chicken and three fruits so it was pretty easy for me to isolate the culprit, oh and one of the fruits was pears which is on the avoid list but I hadn't eaten them for a few days. I guess I've been lucky in one respect (only one) when I went on Atkins and now the BTD, I stuck to it religiously, no cheating at all (really lol) , and my symptoms cleared up fast, as is with this fructose problem.

HI Bob,

Thanks for your post here. I am similar to you 8 years ago Protein Power, 2 yrs later BTD 6 years later gluten intolerant- but before discovering GS, my blood sugar was on a roller coaster and has been up until yesterday just fine and stable.

Then yesterday without warning or symptoms it crashed while I was driving. In the ambulance the sugar, an hour after breakfast was 62. Reading these reports you have posted, has me thinking about fructose.

I am of the red meat eaters so I get plenty of protein, but I don't do well with a lot of fruit- never have, feel very awful with honey- which I always thought was a mold issue- but looking at the rest of the list, I am not good with any of the fruits on that list. I generally eat more veggies than fruit. But that morning I had some raisins and a piece of apple with my breakfast- it was handy and I was headed out the door

My liver on the other hand doesn't have healthy albumin or globulin levels and while all my other stats have improved, this one has actually gone down .1 every year for the past several years. It is well below normal.

I see the doc on Tuesday so welcome to the forum and thanks again for your post.

Leslie

Raisins, like any dried food... is concentrated in all aspects... including sugars.

I guess that goes without saying, at this point.

What an alarming situation! I hope you are okay! :(

Hi Kim and all,

I am ok, but a little peeved at the docs who said they think it was an anxiety attack, but couldn't give an explanation for the low blood sugar except maybe that the anxiety shot it down that low. Is that possible? My question was this- is it possible the low blood sugar cause an anxiety attack,- as I would be more inclined to think that. No blood work was done except that which was done in the ambulance.

After reading the lengthy, but very informative and interesting series of posts begun by Jen from Austrailia, I have many of those head things/ear things going on and that is exactly how it began. A sharp pinching in my left ear, then a pain in my left shoulder followed about 7-10 minutes later by a tightening across the back of my head as well as bridge of nose and finally uncontrolled spasmic shaking of my right arm. I asked the emergency doc if it could have been a seizure and he said he didn't think so because I could remember the incidence pretty well. But I see my regular gp on Tuesday and I am not willing to let this rest until I get a more definitive answer.

Can all that really happen with anxiety?

Leslie

Thing in what I just read might be useful.

(not a spelling error, it is refering to a different level of sugars and it is fucose)

This was from http://www.glycoscience.org/glycosci...?FILENAME=D002

It's interesting stuff.

It makes sense to me that fructose would be a common sensitivity in active Celiacs. My ds2 when he was having the daily bouts of diarrhea all day long went through the following stages 1)mucousy diarrhea, 2) more, 3) bile frothy diarrhea with acid burn rash on his tush, 4) pure liquid bile and exhausted from crying. THis was breastfed by the way.

Introducing foods created more havoc. And apple juice was horrendously wrong for him, any fruit.

Thinking now back to the intestial flora required to break down food and sugars, he had none! He had diarrhea'd those out a long time ago and there was no time in which he had a chance to recoup those lost flora.

He had trouble with Lactose too, all dairy really, so yogurt to get those flora back was out of the question.

Food for thought.