Gastrointestinal Health: A Self-Help Nutritional Program to Prevent, Alleviate or Cure the Sympt

Chronic gastrointestinal problems--heartburn, gas pain, constipation, diarrhea, irritable bowel syndrome, hemorrhoids--afflict 80 million Americans, who usually resort to the medicine cabinet in times of need. But wouldn't it be more logical to treat these disorders through diet, since eating the wrong foods probably caused the trouble? That's the sensible premise of Peikin ( The Feel Full Diet ), who heads the Digestive Disease Servicesic at Thomas Jefferson University Hospital in Philadelphia. The author lays out a ``self-help nutritional program''--a high-fiber, low-fat, balanced diet that he claims has provided prompt relief to his own patients suffering from a wide variety of GI maladies. Emphasizing that such a diet needn't be monotonous, the book offers 75 pages of recipes. Elsewhere, Peikin describes in detail the many ills remediable from altered diet, and takes the reader on an instructive tour of the GI tract. We learn that both regular and decaffeinated coffees stimulate unwelcome stomach-acid secretion, that fiber is now thought to aid in ulcer healing and that true food allergies are rare in adults. Also discussed are prescription and over-the-counter drugs and the roles they can play in treating certain conditions. (June)