Hello, Jonathan:

I appreciate Your observations and opinions. I have not yet (26 years and counting) found anything that is direct evidence against the germ cause of AS and especially the germ Klebsiella pneumoniae. The obfuscating factors are usually easily explained and I used to invest a lot of time and hand-waiving in this for the edification of our members. Today, however, I just rely upon time to show the wiser.

Keeping in perspective that the digestive tract is a very dynamic environment and there are many factors which affect this environment, it is possible to make almost any observation at any given time. If You can assign meaning to Your observations and synthesize a new theory, I would love to help You articulate it, but please understand that I have had irrefutable results on the basis of Ebringer's work.

The acronym S I B O actually implies that any bacterium growing within the SMALL INTESTINE is not a "normal" situation; we use beneficial bacteria to implant "good," and perhaps displace "bad" bacteria in the large intestine. A TRULY low-residue diet should not feed the (large) lower intestinal bacteria, but nearly all starches reach the lower bowel intact in quantities large enough to cause problems for people with AS. I really haven't found any technique that would reduce starches to sugars early enough to avoid becoming a substrate for our nemesis bacterium.

Because there are so many different gut residents, I am not very interested in keeping them happy: I just wiped the slate clean and started over after I got rid of my number one problem!

AFTER I got rid of most of my gut flora, I found a few good yoghurts and supplements and reimplanted flora that I knew and liked.

HEALTH
John