My mother suffers from IBS (Irritable Bowel Syndrome) and has tried everything under the sun to alleviate her pain and discomfort. From eating the most normal of foods, she will experience her stomach bloating out beyond her pants’ capacity, and she will have to go home and change into ones with a stretchy, elastic waistband. But that is the least of her worries. The pain and discomfort associated with IBS can be excruciating and at times unbearable.

At times she feels as if someone has taken a knife to her insides, or other times she will be so inconsistent with her bowel movements that she never knows when she’ll have to stay home for a day. Due to IBS, her intestinal walls are severely irritated and damaged. This has led her on a search for various treatments and medications, but what really saved her, in the end, was aloe vera juice. This juice from the aloe vera plant not only soothed her irritated bowels, but also healed them, thus they weren’t just a band-aid for the problem.

Aloe juice, taken orally, can be found at even such places as your local grocer sometimes. Most often it is found at a natural foods store or some other variant establishment for herbal healing. It can come in different flavors and can even come in tablet form, but tablets don’t work as well as liquid form, especially long term.

There are so many fiber treatments out there that they have sneaked into the cereal aisles at the grocery store . . . and the chips aisles and the snack, cracker, and frozen dinner aisles. It looks like someone is trying to tell us something. Maybe we have overdone the white flour explosion of products (bleached, processed, and stripped of nutrients) over the years and all of our intestines are so distraught with it that everyone is seeking a way to relieve themselves of the discomfort in their bowels and some marketer somewhere along the line, picked up on the distress call. So now we have our whole wheat options and our “Fiber Plus” options and even our liquid fiber options, to keep things moving along and maintain our innards’ happy status.

But what if you can’t eat wheat? Even healthy, fiber-filled whole wheat? The 9 grain and the 12 grain sandwich breads and the whole grain Sunchips brand snack? What if you can’t eat wheat but you want to get to live the same fiber-filled lifestyle as the rest of them? If you suffer from IBS, Celiac’s Disease, Wheat/Gluten Intolerance or Wheat/Gluten Allergy, then you need to know your possible alternatives for fiber.

Unfortunately, what is basically left: potatoes, white rice, and processed corn, don’t do so great as fiber alternatives, in fact, they can sometimes encourage the opposite. With your recommended fiber intake being from 25-35 grams per day for an adult, you need to become familiar with the alternatives. Try to discover ways to include the following: chickpea (garbanzo bean), soy, brown rice, wild rice, amaranth, quinoa, and my favorites, FLAX SEED and FLAX MEAL. Flax meal has 34 grams of fiber for one cup. All of these can in some way be constituted into a cake/flour arrangement and, actually, most of them can be found packaged as their own flour already. There are alternatives to fiber if you can’t eat wheat, you just have to do a little hunting.