Just wanted to spread the news.

I'm very sensitive to lots of foods and have given up some permanently like gluten. That helped a lot with my IBS symptoms.

But I started to react to nuts, chocolate, seeds, sesame oil, and a few other things.

Recently I started taking Berberine HCL (aka Huang Lian Su) to see if it would lower my blood sugar, as we have been discussing in the Diabetes forum, but it's main function is to treat diarrhea and intestinal issues. Low and behold, my gut is happy at long last! I don't know if any other form of Berberine would work, it seems not to for the blood sugar.

I'm eating a little square of chocolate daily and so far, so good. I had 2 oz of almonds yesterday and I'll keep trying to eat them and see if I can do so without exploding.

The pills I get are tiny, 100mg. I have been taking 4, 3x daily for the blood sugar. I think for making the gut happy I could take less.

The jury is still out on whether it helps my blood sugar.

I can supply a link to where I found it online if anyone wants to try.

nancy, just wanted to know if it helped with hert burn bloating and gas...my husband has a problem with that.

I don't know, Chand, I don't have any issues with that. Gas it might, I've been relatively fart free since starting on it. But my gas issues usually go hand in hand with diarrhea, and that seems to be well controlled at the moment.

With wheat sensitivity or wheat intolerance you get a "zonulin dump" upon ingesting glutenous grain. It dumps the contents of the small intestine into the bloodstream. This immune tactic passes the roll of food digestion to the blood's immune system.

The gut's autoimmune attack can cause many digestive problems. You don't see many of those problems when your blood is digesting your food. If you stop eating wheat, you stop dumping undigested food into your bloodstream. So your digestive system is forced to try and digest foods it hasn't seen for some time.

A few weeks after stopping wheat my system became intolerant of beans, soy and nightshades ......tomatoes, potatoes, eggplant and peppers. And I have to take it easy on nuts.

Hopefully, given time, our intestinal linings will heal enough to reintroduce some of these foods.

I eat plain live yogurt, and drink purified water. I think it's helping.

Good luck.



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I've been gluten free for over 3 years now, still having problems with other foods though. Seems to be kind of common.

I'm hoping the Berberine is actually helping with the leaky gut thing.

I've been on here several days now and just noticed this subject. So glad this is here. I don't have IBS but I do have Crohn's and a lot of the issues go hand in hand. So glad you other icky tummy folks are out there - support is great!

Here's a link to what I'm using. http://www.shopsuigetsu.com/Huang_L...20lian%20su.htm

I have heard that other forms of berberine are not effective, at least for the blood sugar control, I am assuming for gastro upset too.

I am finding that while it does seem to prevent the diarrhea I am still being affected by certain foods in that my BM's are just slightly messy. But no cramping, and only 1-2 BM's per day versus sometimes a dozen or more.

It is my hope that the Berberine HCL is helping with leaky gut. *cross fingers*

Ok, well I discovered that there are limits to how well the Berberine makes me feel. I've had 2 oz of almonds daily for 3 days, and a square of 85% chocolate a day (almost every day), and finally today it's affecting my gut a bit (not too bad so far). So I guess it doesn't give me a free pass on iffy foods, but it does seem to take the residual badness away when I'm being good.

The weird thing is that I find I don't really like the super bitter chocolate anymore. I guess that was a acquired taste and because it was upsetting my tummy I must've unacquired it.