Miranda Kerr has spoken about a six-year struggle with IBS and now reportedly avoids dairy, wheat, eggs, bread, rice, seed oils and sushi, while limiting certain fish and leaning heavily on meat, vegetables and a small range of carbohydrates.
It is the sort of list that can make the average kitchen cupboard look faintly accusatory. Yet for dietitian Kirsten Jackson, founder of The IBS Dietitian, the more useful story is not which foods Kerr has removed. It is whether managing IBS should require such a narrow menu at all.
The problem with turning IBS into a food blacklist
IBS is awkward partly because there is no universal villain hiding behind the butter dish. Triggers vary from person to person, which makes sweeping elimination tempting but not necessarily sensible.
“One of the biggest myths around IBS is that managing it successfully means removing more and more foods from your diet. In reality, the aim is almost the opposite: we want to work out somebody’s genuine triggers and tolerance levels while keeping their diet as varied as possible.”
That distinction matters. A diet can feel controlled simply because it contains fewer variables. But control and good management are not quite the same thing. If foods are removed without identifying the actual trigger, the result may be a restricted diet that is difficult to maintain and nutritionally poorer than it needs to be.
Wheat and dairy are more complicated than the label suggests
Two of the most familiar exclusions in IBS discussions are wheat and dairy. Jackson’s point is that the food category itself may not be the problem.
“Wheat and dairy are good examples. People often say they have to give up wheat because of IBS, but wheat itself isn’t necessarily the issue. For some people it may be the fructans, a type of fermentable carbohydrate found in certain wheat products. With dairy, it can be lactose rather than dairy as an entire food group.”
Tolerance can also depend on quantity. Someone may react to a larger serving yet manage a smaller one perfectly well. That is less dramatic than declaring permanent war on bread, admittedly, but it is rather more useful.
Eggs, rice and the cost of making the menu smaller
Jackson is particularly cautious about exclusions that do not fit the usual IBS pattern.
“Some of the foods Miranda mentions avoiding, including eggs and rice, aren’t typical IBS triggers. Unless there is another medical or personal reason for excluding them, they wouldn’t routinely be foods I’d tell somebody with IBS to remove.”
The concern is not merely inconvenience. A progressively narrower diet can reduce variety, complicate meals with other people and affect someone’s relationship with food. Jackson also points to plant diversity, including whole grains, fruit, vegetables, nuts and seeds, because different fibres support different gut bacteria.
Dairy removal deserves its own bit of arithmetic. Calcium can be replaced through suitable fortified alternatives or supplementation where needed, but removing a major source without replacing the nutrient is not a strategy. It is an omission wearing gym clothes.
Low-FODMAP is a process, not a permanent sentence
The low-FODMAP diet has evidence behind it as an IBS management tool, but Jackson stresses that restriction is only one phase of the process.
“The low-FODMAP diet is another evidence-based approach we can use in IBS. FODMAPs are fermentable carbohydrates found in a huge variety of foods, including some wheat products, lactose-containing dairy, onions, garlic and certain fruits, nuts and sweeteners.”
The crucial next step is reintroduction: establishing which groups cause symptoms, in what amounts, and then widening the diet again. Treating low-FODMAP as a forever diet misses its purpose. The useful endpoint is not a heroic collection of safe foods arranged on one shelf; it is the broadest diet an individual can tolerate comfortably.
Caffeine, chilli and alcohol may also aggravate symptoms for some people, Jackson says, but again the emphasis is on individual response rather than blanket prohibition.
Sushi fears belong to food safety, not IBS
Kerr’s reported avoidance of sushi because of parasite concerns sits in a different category.
“Parasites from raw fish are a food-safety issue rather than an IBS issue, so having IBS itself isn’t a reason to avoid sushi because of parasites.”
Jackson distinguishes properly prepared raw fish from untreated raw fish and notes that an acute foodborne infection can look quite different from somebody’s usual IBS symptoms, including severe diarrhoea, vomiting or dehydration.
That is an important piece of housekeeping. IBS can make people understandably alert to anything that might provoke symptoms, but not every digestive risk belongs in the same clinical drawer.
Before cutting foods, establish the diagnosis
The most consequential advice in Jackson’s comments comes before any menu planning. Persistent bloating or changes in bowel habits should be discussed with a doctor because other conditions may need to be ruled out, including coeliac disease, inflammatory bowel disease and, where relevant, ovarian or bowel cancer.
Only after IBS has been appropriately diagnosed does the conversation move to diet and lifestyle — and even then, an elimination diet is not automatically the opening move.
“If a low-FODMAP diet is appropriate, guidelines recommend doing this with suitable dietetic guidance. The end goal isn’t to discover the ten foods you can eat without symptoms and live on those forever. It’s to manage your IBS while achieving the broadest, most nutritionally complete diet your gut can comfortably tolerate.”
Celebrity diets have a peculiar talent for turning personal choices into public templates. The more useful lesson from Miranda Kerr’s IBS diet is almost the reverse: digestive symptoms are individual, diagnosis matters, and a successful diet should ideally leave you with more confidence around food, not an ever-growing list of things to fear.
