WGN Radio Chicago Interviews Heather - The Business of Food with Steve Alexander

I just had a terrific conversation with WGN Radio's Steve Alexander in Chicago.Steve asked me all about my IBS story. It's not a pretty one but it has a happy ending.

Listen to Part 2 above…

Eating isn’t supposed to hurt. But it does for millions of people who suffer from the pain, cramping, bloating, gas, diarrhea, constipation, and more, from Irritable Bowel Syndrome.

At age nine, Heather Van Vorous was playing in the yard when she doubled over with tummy pain and passed out. Her parents rushed her to the pediatrician, who couldn’t find anything wrong with her and told her to quit whining.

In this interview, Heather tells WGN’s Steve Alexander how that that moment led to her becoming, decades later, the the founder of HelpForIBS.com and CEO of Heather’s Tummy Care.

Full Transcript:

Heather:

My name is Heather Van Vorous. I am the founder and CEO of Heather’s Tummy Care and the author of two books about dealing with the disorder.

Steve:

What are the names of the books?

Heather:

Eating for IBS and The First Year IBS

Steve:

How did how did you get into the peppermint tea business?

Heather:

The company was founded to help people manage the symptoms of IBS, and the peppermint tummy tea is the direct hit for heading off things like pain, spasms, cramps, urgency, bloating, and gas. And I basically fell into the business because I’ve been a patient. I’ve had IBS since I was a child, about nine years old, and was not really given any help for that at all, and wasn’t diagnosed for a very long time as well. In the end, when I figured out what would help me and realized that it would help other people as well, that expanded into emails to people way back in the ‘90s that became books and finally to a website that became the Heather’s Tummy Care company dedicated to helping people manage IBS and live successfully and happily by being able to manage the disorder.

Peppermint Tummy Tea is a key part of that, particularly if people are prone to the pain and spasm side of IBS. By huge coincidence, the best peppermint in the world actually grows in my own backyard—or just across the mountains from where I live in Seattle—in eastern Washington. We have the Columbia River Valley with its volcanic soil and the right climate that produces the highest menthol and other volatile oil levels of peppermint in the world, so that makes it particularly helpful and effective for the symptoms.

Steve:

What’s your personal story with IBS?

Heather:

Well, it was unfortunate. I was nine years old when I had my first attack and I was a happy, healthy little kid playing on a beautiful summer day in the neighbor’s garden and all of a sudden was doubled over in pain so severe I couldn’t breathe, actually blacked out from it. I thought I was dying. My pediatrician couldn’t find any reason for it and basically told me to stop whining.

From that point on, I continued to suffer, and it was really more than another 10 years before I even had a rough diagnosis, and even then I didn’t have help. Even once I had a diagnosis, it was just sort of “Here you go, now good luck. Hope you can figure out a way to live with it.”

It took another 10 years for me to figure that out what I could eat and what I couldn’t and what would set it off and what were my safe foods and trigger foods. So I decided to try to help other people who suffer and not just give information but give them the products to help and physically manage the symptoms

Steve:

Tell me about what your company is like now.

Heather:

Oh my goodness! What started as a little operation out of a one-bedroom apartment in Seattle’s Capitol Hill neighborhood where we had to haul things up three flights of stairs and the boxes filled the bedroom has turned into a 25,000 square-foot certified organic manufacturing facility that is robot-driven, highly automated it looks like Willy Wonka’s factory in here. It’s crazy. So yeah, I turned literally something that started as an email list to people 25 years ago and became a little website into this.

Steve:

This is a common disorder. What are your thoughts on why so many people suffer?

Heather:

It’s such a common chronic disorder, so often undiagnosed or misdiagnosed or people just live with it. But I know about one and five Americans are walking around with IBS. A lot of people out there need help. They don’t really know the underlying cause at this point. Some people seem to be born with it and some people have an insult to the gut and they can point to what triggered it, such as food poisoning abdominal surgery. Some people just developed one day out of the blue, but it’s very common and it’s a disorder. It’s not a disease. It’s defined by its symptoms. It’s not just a garbage can disorder that you should be dumped into if they can’t figure out what’s wrong with you. But they don’t really know the underlying pathology details at this point, there’s a lot of research still to be done

Steve:

And you were dealing with your symptoms, basically using trial and error determining what you could have and what you could not have or what made you feel better and why didn’t?

Heather:

Yes, a great deal of years of trial and error, often times a painful learning experience and then just a lot of reading and research on my own to try to figure out what was going on with me and particularly what the tie was with foods. Why were certain food making me sick, why were other foods my safety net, things I knew would help me? Trying to understand, underlying nutritional reasons for that, and that became my goal, realizing over the years, there were very clear logical biological reasons why certain foods would trigger symptoms and other ones would help prevent them and that took me down the road into things like soluble versus insoluble fiber: One is a stabilizing force, and one is a possible likely trigger in the G.I. tract. Stimulants, for a lot of people with IBS, irritate like caffeine or coffee, artificial sweeteners, soda pop, carbonation, a lot of things that people with IBS need to eliminate to regulate the gut. You’re trying to keep motility stable, rhythmic, calm. You’re trying to gently force your gut into normal motility, and that became my goal with what I was eating every day. How do I eat things that keep my gut functional, normal, stable and how do I avoid the things that disrupt that, and then how do I take that information and eat really well and have really good food and recipes? I’m someone who lives to eat so I gotta have good food, but I don’t want it to make me sick. And that was my jumping off point and it took like I said about 10 years for me to put all that together for myself and thinking the whole time I was the only person in the world with this, having no idea there were other people out there going through the same struggle.

Steve:

There’s so much more information on your website about ways people can calm their guts and you do stress the importance of not trying to self-diagnose IBS.

Heather:

No, it can not be self-diagnosed. Medical tests must rule out other illnesses. But symptoms can be self-managed.

Steve:

How did you find out there were other people suffering?

Heather:

That was a total surprise, yeah, very early on in the late 90s. There were some support group websites that popped up for people with IBS, and at that point I had figured things out for myself and had a recipe collection and knew what things I could buy that would help me or hurt me, so I just started posting that on the sites and saying, you know, email me and I’ll tell you what helps me. I don’t know if I’ll help you. I hope it will but here’s the guidelines and here’s what you know you should eat and what you should need and how you should eat as well because that affects your gut not just what you eat. And people wrote back with questions. The email grew to a 200-page plain text file and started crashing people’s email servers, so I had to put it up as a website and send people a link, and the website literally grew into the books. I had such a huge response from people who had not figured it out for themselves and had no idea that this information was out there. I was learning in return that there were so many other people out there with the same problems I had, and they weren’t being given this information from any other source. And that frustrated me and upset me and eventually came to enrage me, and that was when I became determined to get this information out there and then to get the products out there for people, as well, so that they have some concrete help can help real help in their hands that they could put in their guts that would make them feel better.

Steve:

What are some of the products other than the peppermint tea?

Heather:

Yes, peppermint is actually my personal favorite and it really is, I think the best peppermint tea in the world, very high oil and things like menthol in it which physically help relax the gut, calm down pain, spasms, cramps. We also carry a high volatile oil fennel, which is a great carminative for people who have the bloating and gas side of things or who have heartburn and can’t always use peppermint, so fennel is their safety net. Anybody who is helped by things like high oil peppermint and fennel probably is going to get even more success with the peppermint oil capsules that we have. Those are the super-duper tummy taming version of your tummy teas, much more potent, but you have to use them as a preventative, always on an empty stomach. They will work better to head off pain, spasms, cramps, bloating, gas, so those are things you’d use on an empty stomach before you eat last thing at night before you go to bed to head off morning problems.

Steve:

What about people suffering from the things most of us don’t want to talk about: diarrhea and constipation?

Heather:

Those are the folks who have to use something like the Tummy Fiber. That’s a pure, soluble fiber if you want a prebiotic, slow fermenting soluble fiber that will regulate bowel motility from either extreme. That’s something that’s key for just about everybody with IBS trying to stop the diarrhea the constipation to keep us from flipping from one to the other and getting that motility under control. That’s where something like our Tummy Fiber, which is a certified organic Acacia senegal that’s quite special and is a perfect fit for people with digestive in orders like IBS. Sometimes people need one thing more than another. Sometimes they have to throw everything against the wall. It’s really up to the person and their specific symptoms.

Steve:

It seems like sufferers will have to give up a lot, if not most, of the foods they really enjoy.

Heather:

That’s another frustration, but there are a lot of substitutions you can make so you’re not feeling deprived, ways to minimize trigger foods, and ways to make adjustments, up your soluble fiber to keep your gut calm in the face of the trigger. I always like to tell people, don’t think you have to give up all your favorite food, you might just have to modify them a little, but you can certainly work around that. You don’t have to live a life of boring or bland or depressing foods at all, and you don’t have to eat weird meals and make the rest of your family eat them, too.

Steve:

What’s the science behind your products?

Heather:

Everything is based on managing symptoms because there’s no cure at this point for IBS, for the underlying pathology, but you can manage the motility of your gut with dietary management and adding things like Tummy Care products. In the gut peppermint is a powerful antispasmodic, a smooth muscle relaxant. It really affects both the brain and the gut in terms of pain and there’s a wealth of clinical studies on this. Peppermint oil capsules have actually been called the drug of choice for IBS, even though they’re obviously not a drug at all, There’s great scientific research behind soluble fiber as a motility regulator, and behind peppermint and peppermint oil as an antispasmodic painkiller. Then the fennel tummy tea as a carminative to help reduce bloating and gas has really good research on it.

Steve:

Regarding fiber, we’re always hearing we need to get more fiber in our diets. But you say that depends on the type of fiber?

Heather:

You want to be focused on soluble fiber, being careful with insoluble fiber. It’s very well researched as a G.I. stimulant, whether you have IBS or not. It’s going to set off your digestion, speed it up and if you have IBS, maybe cause spasms and cramps you. Mitigate that so it’s a combination of different things that you want to target to your symptoms. You want to focus on regulating that motility and I would add you only want to use things that are going to be helpful and gentle and coax you along. You never wanna try to beat it into submission with IBS. There’s nothing that you can detoxify or get rid of with IBS that’s going to force your bowels to behave. You have to be kind and gentle to it.

Steve:

Well, I guess that rules out the colon cleanses and other detoxs that people often try. Diarrhea and constipation are chronic problems for a lot of people.

Heather:

People really struggle to get those under control and there is no good way to do that overnight or in a few days, you can absolutely do it with your Tummy Fiber, but it might take several weeks, even several months, as you gradually work up your dose. That’s where you gotta start heading down the road in the right direction and just keep going. You’ll see improvements along the way, but that is a frustration: there’s no such thing as overnight relief for that with IBS. There’s no magic pill.

Steve:

Is IBS hereditary?

Heather:

There is a genetic component. It does tend to run in families. Researchers don’t have anything black and white like genetic testing for it and it’s not perhaps 100% genetic they know they can be an environmental component for sure the people who have the insult to the gut that set up IBS may not have a genetic aspect at all, so it’s kind of combination. You may have a genetic accessibility. It might take an environmental trigger to set that off. There’s still so much research to be done

Steve:

What is some of the feedback you’ve gotten from people?

Heather:

Oh, phenomenal! I am brought to tears a lot of times by the letters people send me — day in and day out, stacks and stacks, notebooks full of letters. They’re so grateful to have someone who can give them helpful guidance and dietary information and there’s a cheat sheet that people can download for free. People have told me how the products have changed their lives, like I can’t even tell you how many people have told me that they were housebound and now they’re not; they couldn’t work and now they can; they couldn’t go to school and now they can; people who have children with IBS that are really struggling. I hear from nurses, teachers, I hear from cops, I hear from truck drivers about how much of a drastic difference it has made for them to have products they can turn to that actually work and give them their lives back and that’s not an exaggeration. You really you can lose your life to IBS and the tummy care is a way to get it back.

Steve: There’s so much more information on your website HelpForIBS.com about ways people can calm their guts.

You are not alone.

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XOXOHeather

Heather Van Vorous Over 40 years dealing with IBSGet full help for IBS here