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I would like to know whether kimchi, the fermented Korean side dish made of vegetables with a variety of seasonings, also known as kimchee or gimchi, can generally be considered low FODMAP.

This might not be a straight answer as there are many varieties of kimchi and the dish in itself contains many different types of vegetables, but if we remove garlic and onion, and reduce its definition to the main ingredient which is usually fermented cabbage, can we say that Korean style fermented cabbage is a low FODMAP dish?

Common cabbage and red cabbage (but not Savoy cabbage) feature as low FODMAP in the Monash University FODMAP app, but sauerkraut, which is fermented white cabbage, is not.

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According to Alittlebityummy.com (a website maintained by some dietitians), both sauerkraut and kimchi are high-FODMAP, because during fermentation, some carbohydrates are converted to mannitol, which is a polyol.

A different reasoning from BodyEcology: Both sauerkraut and kimchi are already fermented, so they are no more fermentable by the intestinal bacteria, and could therefore be considered low-FODMAP. They do not say anything about mannitol, though.

Kimchi has not been tested for the FODMAP effect, as far as I know, so the above reasoning may be just a theory, which leaves you with "try and see."

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