Is it possible to absorb nutrients from greens?

Short answer is yes.

Longer answer is that humans do not digest the cellulose from plants. But we do get what we need from them. Just because you see them in the toilet bowl, it does not mean it is not digested.

Jan

I can't eat any lettuce, & only certain vegetables and fruit  without  pain.  No it doesn't digest but I'm glad to hear from Jan that some nutrients are not lost.  I started to take a powder mix of veggies and fruit in water or juice to get vitamins.  I still have more bowel movements with this but not the pain because it's not solid.  I try smoothies too.  You have to get your vitamins how u can and what's the best for you.

tf posted:

I can't eat any lettuce, & only certain vegetables and fruit  without  pain.  No it doesn't digest but I'm glad to hear from Jan that some nutrients are not lost.  I started to take a powder mix of veggies and fruit in water or juice to get vitamins.  I still have more bowel movements with this but not the pain because it's not solid.  I try smoothies too.  You have to get your vitamins how u can and what's the best for you.

The only thing I definitely can't eat is corn. Whenever I've eaten it, even if I chew it the best I can, it gives me pain in the area where the ostomy was and I'm convinced it would cause a serious blockage there if I were to be stupid enough to eat a lot of it and not chew it, for whatever reason.

Lettuce I don't know about because I don't eat it because I don't like it anyway. It surprises me how many fruits and vegetables I actually can eat, that I thought I wouldn't be able to. Surprisingly, I can actually handle baby corn and water chestnuts totally fine. Just have to be sure and chew them well, of course. 

I had a kale salad for lunch today. It’s definitely very coarse and has to be chewed well. But I think Jan is right and the analogy you might want to use is soup. If you threw kale in chicken soup and let it cook in the crockpot overnight and then threw out the stewed greens when you strained and consumed the soup broth, would you derive any of the nutrients from the kale? Answer is of course- they would be in the broth. Similarly your digestive system “stews” the kale and what it spits out is the “strained” skin, the nutrients having been strained out of it. Your body is making soup. It’s a mobile crockpot- that is how you should look at it. 

CTBarrister posted:

I had a kale salad for lunch today. It’s definitely very coarse and has to be chewed well. But I think Jan is right and the analogy you might want to use is soup. If you threw kale in chicken soup and let it cook in the crockpot overnight and then threw out the stewed greens when you strained and consumed the soup broth, would you derive any of the nutrients from the kale? Answer is of course- they would be in the broth. Similarly your digestive system “stews” the kale and what it spits out is the “strained” skin, the nutrients having been strained out of it. Your body is making soup. It’s a mobile crockpot- that is how you should look at it. 

I kind of get that, but I still wonder if it stays in long enough when you don't have a colon.

Melissa-

You do realize that nutrients are absorbed in the ileum whether you have a colon or not, right? What difference does not having a colon make? Your transit time of food through the ileum is what counts, and it is only marginally less with a J pouch than with a colon. Your colon functions to absorb water and break down the waste. Without the colon, the transit time through the ileum is only shortened to the extent of the shortening of the ileum for the J Pouch. And to the extent that motility is increased after surgery, for which a category of drugs called anti spasmodics exists to neutralize any excessive motility.

Given the only marginal diminution in transit time through the ileum, nutrient absorption should be the same.

The reason you see the kale crapped out whole is that the colon had bacteria that would have broken it down into crap. Since the colon is gone it doesn’t get broken down into crap but instead what comes out is the “stewed” kale, see the soup analogy of my prior post. The fact that it looks like a veggie rather than shit doesn’t change the fact that it passed through your ileum where nutrients were absorbed.

I eat salads constantly...I just have ways of eating them...I tend to eat the chicken with the lettuce without the bread or carbs...that way I seem to digest things better.

When I eat salad with both carbs and proteins I tend to have digestive difficulties...

Other than that...no problems...I cannot tell you what I absorb or don't...just that I enjoy it and tend to eat for pleasure and not just for nutrition.

Sharon