Welcome to your weekly video. Today, I want to talk about fructans. Fructans are one of the four main FODMAP groups but it's the more complex of the groups. They are oligosaccharides and they're in fruits, vegetables, and grains. The fructans are a way for plants to store carbohydrates. Humans don't have the enzyme that breaks down fructans so it's malabsorbed in the small intestine and then it's fermented by gut bacteria. And those of us with IBS feel this much more acutely than somebody without it. And that's what causes the symptoms of bloating, diarrhea, pain, et cetera.

Examples of the fructans in vegetables are the classic ones we mostly know about which are onions and garlic, but they are also in many others and in fruits like nectarines and plums - they have fructans. And grains - wheat, barley, and rye - they're the main ones. So if we were to limit those foods, we'd have a lot less trouble with our guts. But that is only one of the FODMAP groups. The amount of fructans in our food varies according to how it's being cooked or processed. For example, sourdough bread has much less than normal bread. And that's because the yeast uses up the fructans in the fermentation. And in sourdough bread it's fermented over a long period of time, and so most of them are gone. We still have to limit ourselves, but we can definitely have more sourdough bread than a normal non-sourdough bread.

So, during the elimination diet, we have to eliminate all the high-fructan foods. And during the introduction stage, it's not like with fructose and lactose where you can test one food and you know for the whole group, you have to actually test various different ones. In particular, test wheat to see what your tolerance is to that, and that test would be a slice of bread. And then you could take that to two slices of bread, and you'd be able to see where your tolerance level was for wheat. The same with perhaps garlic, just test it at a small amount, see if you get away with it and then test at a higher amount. Again, you're just calculating where your personal, individual level is. And then you could test onions as well. And then take each of the fruits and vegetables with higher levels of fructans, single out those that you really enjoy and would like to add back into your diet and test those individually to see if you can do that, or whether they're out for good.

What we have to be aware of in processed food is that more and more now, the manufacturers are adding in fructans. Because processed food is naturally low in fiber, they're adding the fiber back in, in the form of fructans like inulin. So you do have to look out for that. The very best thing of course is to avoid processed foods completely and you won't have that problem. But, if you do buy something off the shelf that's been processed, look very carefully at the ingredients list and make sure it doesn't have any inulin, chicory root or any other fructans that could be added. Thank you for watching and goodbye.