Iritable bowel syndrome is a chronic gastrointestinal disorder that affects about 1 in 10.

You may have heard about those low FODMAP diets, but they don't appear to work any better than the standard

advice to avoid things like coffee and spicing fatty foods.

In fact, you can hardly tell which is which.

But most IBS patients do seem to react to specific foods such as wheat, dairy, soy sauce,

or eggs, when you test them for typical food allergies, they may come up negative on the skin-prick

test.

But what you want to know is not what happens on their skin, but inside their gut when you

eat them.

Enter con-focal laser endomyroscopy.

How cool is this?

You can sneak a microscope down someone's throat into their gut and drip on some foods

and watch in real time as the gut wall becomes inflamed and leaky.

You can actually see the cracks forming within minutes, but it had never been tested

in a large group of IBS patients until now. Using this new technology, researchers found that more than half of IBS sufferers have this

kind of reaction to various foods, what they call an atypical food allergy, that flies

under the radar of traditional allergy tests.

Exclude those foods from the diet, and you get a significant alleviation of symptoms.

But outside of a research setting, there's no way to know which foods are the culprit

without trying your own exclusion diet.

And there's no greater exclusion diet than excluding everything.

A 25-year-old woman had complained of abdominal pain, bloating, and diarrhea for a year,

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