When you love to cook, and someone you love finds out they have SIBO (Small Intestine Bacterial Overgrowth), the list of allowed ingredients seems like a fun challenge. At first.

But once I wrapped my head around the SIBO-specific Food Guide by Dr. Allison Siebecker, ND, MSOM, LAc, and realized that many of the “tried and true” recipes I’ve been cooking for years were no longer “legal,” dinners started getting monotonous.

Within a month, it felt like repeat performances of meat with tomatoes, eggplant, and red peppers. Over and over again.

Sure, I found a few SIBO recipes on the internet, but most of them were either too basic (fried eggs, bone broth, vegetable juices), or they incorporated ingredients from the middle-to-high FODMAP* categories of the SIBO Food Guide (like lettuce, cauliflower, beets, avocados, and rice).

Meanwhile many recipes called for garlic-infused oil, which we had to avoid: garlic caused us significant digestive problems long before we ever heard the term “SIBO.”

I needed help knowing what to cook for dinner—using only those ingredients that were in the legal “green” column / low FODMAP end of the Guide—at least during the first few months of gut healing.

So I struck out on my own, experimenting with the legal / low FODMAP ingredients in the Guide’s “green” column, and making lists—of legal flavor combinations, menu ideas, successful “this tastes great!” dinners, and eventually… recipes.

When the lists got too long, this blog was born. I hope you’ll find it helpful on those days you need to cook dinner and your brain is a deer in the headlights. 🙂

A Note About My SIBO Recipes

ALL of the recipes on this blog use ONLY ingredients from the green column of the SIBO Specific Diet Food Guide—the legal / low FODMAP ingredients that promote maximum gut health.

Because diabetes runs in the family, I tend to avoid higher glycemic vegetables and fruits like bananas, sticking to lower-sugar fruits including strawberries, raspberries, blackberries, cranberries, and blueberries where possible. Likewise I almost always avoid the use of honey, even though clover, raspberry, and alfalfa honey are technically “legal” FODMAP—up to 2 Tablespoons. And we’ve never wanted to use man-made sweeteners, no matter how natural those TV ads might look. 🙂

Most of these recipes call for coconut oil, simply because we love the flavor and nutritional benefits. You are welcome to substitute olive oil, sunflower oil, walnut oil, ghee, butter… anything except soybean oil (which is considered “illegal” in the SIBO Specific Diet Food Guide).

I personally believe in using only organic ingredients from the most local sources possible, either direct from the farmer / at our neighborhood farmer’s market, or from our local grocery co-op. Your choices and mileage are entirely up to you.

Most of these recipes, unless otherwise noted, are portioned for 2-3 people.

*Learn more about FODMAP here >