Curious: Meds vs. Food adjustments

Hi folks,
(Please Vote above after reading through and posting your thoughts, too.)

New member, living with Crohn's 2 years, just recently had my worst episode and have finally been reading, researching, compiling lists, sources, diets, medical warnings, etc. Should have done all this research 2 years ago.

My question is, I had been reading alot of posts on this forum, and a vast majority of people speak only of the medication and medical procedures to help our condition, but I have not heard anything about food adjustments to achieve the same results. Why aren't alot more of us with Crohn's researching and using natural ways to heal ourselves rather than the negative Meds and Surgeries?

The reason I ask is because I found alot of information and personal testament to diet changes, which help eliminate symptoms and live almost completely free of our condition. I am referring to The Specific Carbohydrate Diet, by Elaine Gottschall in the book Breaking The Vicious Cycle. When I read this book, along with many others, I became very hopeful and optimistic about its results and I am currently starting the diet and making a commitment to this new way of eating.

Now, please heed that I am a mere Crohn's patient looking for less intrusive and harming ways of healing myself or at least minimizing symptoms, avoid surgery, and minimize medication, especially the harmful TNF meds. I am simply looking for input from you all, as to what you have heard, researched, tried, and if you believe there is a natural way of achieving health.

Please feel free to discuss things in this thread, hijack it, that's ok. I want to try to spur a conversation on this aspect of treating ourselves.

P.S. I highly recommend getting a copy of the book I mentioned, its easily understood and very logical. Gave me hope I could do something about this disease.

Post Edited (chewbacchi) : 9/10/2008 2:43:07 PM (GMT-6)

Thanks for the warm welcome.
I hope to get more feedback about the SCD diet and other special diets people try. None of us are exactly alike, so I don't expect to have one person's experience duplicated if I try the same process. I am, however, hopeful about the restrictive diet after my cramps and pains go away, and I get back on solid food.
Currently I am back on Pentasa, Doc gave me a new one;Prednisone, and I am taking Vicodin for pain. Since I am still so swollen after the blockage episode I am keeping on a liquid diet, pre-digested meal shakes, called AbsorbPlus. These are flippin' expensive!!! But I'll do it for a few days and find something more affordable in a local health food store.
Cros your fingers for me, and I am praying for all of you.

Welcome chewbacchi! We chose to go the diet change/probiotics route and it has made all the difference. I understand it's not the answer for everyone, though.

I know that AbsorbPlus is expensive, but I bet it is a good formula! I hope it works for you! It may take longer than a few days, though! Our doc told us up to 6 weeks...but that would totally depend on your situation, of course!

I hope you feel much better soon!

SCD is something that has been discussed on this forum at great length. In fact it is the fifth bullet in our resource directory. Unfortunately, this disease is highly individual, and what works for one person may not work for another. I tried SCD, and ended up in the hospital for bleeding that I needed several transfusions to fix. Others have had great success on SCD. I encourage you to try whatever you think will work for you. While you have pointed out a negative connotation that is associate with meds and surgery, it is an unfortunate reality for those of us that have exhausted all other possiblities. Please do not be rough on yourself if you do end up needing meds.
We have several members that use natural products to assist in their IBD treatment.
Good luck with SCD, I hope it really works for you.

I think that the reason that diet varies so much in its results is because the disease itself causes more food allergies when it is active. The rationale is as follows: Inflammation and gut infections both increase gut permeability and impair digestion. Improperly digested food entering the gut can then pass through the mucous membrane and trigger an immune response (the same is true of gut bacteria, which are harder to manage than diet). Thus, cronnies can have a food reaction that causes inflammation for ANY food. The only things that you can be absolutely sure about being safe are pre-digested foods that won't reach the intestines. The diets that work generally are a radical departure from normal diets and may work by removing trigger foods that are the usual foods that you eat. There is another possibility - the change in diet may alter the gut bacteria strains by removing the normal foods that support bacteria that have caused an immune response and inflamed the poor gut. This might not work, depending on which bacteria are the troublemakers - the change in diet may provide more food for them instead.

i had to vote diet has an impact but cannot cure the disease cos if research is correct, and it is genetic, then the only thing that can cure it is correcting your genetic code.

i do firmly believe diet has a profound impact on symptoms. i am a testimony to that. i feel symptom free right now, but who knows when things might flare up again. i plan to live for a good many more years so that chance is always there and quite frankly, as a realist, i know it will flare up some time in the future. hopefully it will be a long time down the road and be mild and it wont happen very often.

i think we turn to meds and surgery cos as a western culture that is what we are programmed to do and that is what our docs are trained to do. they get paid to prescribe drugs which mask symptoms so we have to continually see them which gets them and the drug companies paid and surgeons always want to cut something out cos that is what they get paid to do. granted these are sweeping generalizing statements so take them in that context. most of us when we ask our docs about diet they are clueless or say it has no effect. boy did i prove my docs wrong on that one.....

I missed the poll, but I would have to vote for the second item. It has been demonstrated that the problem arises from an immune system reaction to normal gut bacteria. This happens because of gut permeability which lets gut bacteria through the mucous membrane where they cause the immune response. The genetic component determines the severity of the immune response and the ease or difficulty in stopping the inflammation. The initiation of the process is likely to occur for most people. The difference is that in Crohn's, the immune response does not extinguish itself properly. Even if the immune response can be brought under control, the immune cells in the blood retain the fingerprint of the gut bacteria that triggered the inflammation. Thus, if at any future point you do something to increase your gut permeability again, those bacteria will trigger another immune response. If the picture that I have painted is accurate (current research supports all of it), it is not strictly accurate to call Crohn's and auto-immune disease. The gut bacteria are not strictly host tissue, even though we may be stuck with them for the long haul. This does not apply to a host of related Crohn's-caused diseases including RA, pancreatitis, skin disorders and many others.

Thanks folks for all your response and opinions. Keep them coming. I will research more post on this forum, apparently I had missed the SCD posts before. I am very passionate to control this condition through diet rather than radical medical treatment, although, I do understand we gotta do what we gotta do, and I may be looking at surgery and heavy meds anyway.
Here's to this wonderful, unknown disease, and hopefully we find a highly effective way of treating/curing it.

I believe that the symptoms of Crohn's can be controlled by diet, for the most part. The catch is that if the gut is actively inflamed, avoiding things that inflame it will not cure the problem. Gut inflammation is self-perpetuating in Crohn's without some intervention. There are alternatives to the usual drugs offered, but be it drugs or alternatives, the inflammation must be controlled. Probiotics have some anti-inflammatory effects, but a more effective agent from the point of view of reducing inflammation is turmeric. It is a well-known material and has been a part of the Indian diet for centuries. For more on its action, see:
http://medind.nic.in/ibi/t05/i3/ibit05i3p141.pdf
Following is a quote from the article linked above:
Curcumin was found
to inhibit arachidonic acid metabolism, cyclooxygenase, lipoxygenase, cytokines (Interleukins
and tumour necrosis factor) Nuclear factor-κB and release of steroidal hormones. Curcumin
was reported to stabilize lysosomal membrane and cause uncoupling of oxidative
phosphorylation besides having strong oxygen radical scavenging activity, which was
responsible for its antiinflammatory property.

You can find turmeric in capsules at health food stores. I've even seen it at Wal-Mart and Target in the supplement section.

Keeper, you said, "The only things that you can be absolutely sure about being safe are pre-digested foods that won't reach the intestines."

Just because a food is pre-digested, I don't think that means that it doesn't reach the intestines. It means that it is almost fully absorbed as it goes through the intestines therefore leaving little residue.

Are you talking about parenteral nutrition (TPN), which bypasses the digestive tract completely?

As for the SCD, it's been around long enough to be thoroughly researched and, testimonials to the contrary, in clinically controlled research trials it has been found ineffective in maintaining remission over the long term.

Still, there must be a subset of patients for whom it provides some relief and for that reason it is always worthwhile exploring the possibilities of diet manipulation to ease symptoms. They key though, and I think MMnavy eluded to this, is not to become so invested in "curing" your crohn's through "natural" methods that you A) live in denial about the level of disease activity you are dealing with and B) that you don't beat up on yourself if you don't achieve the results you want through diet alone.

After living with crohn's for 30 years, during which I have tried naturapathy, dietary supplements, diets, and -- mostly -- force of will, to forego taking medications. I have finally made peace with the fact that I need medication to slow the disease's incidious assault on my bowel. For years I deluded myself, thinking I just had a "little case" of crohn's. That I was one of the "lucky" ones. That I could "manage" my symptoms with only minimal medication.

All the while this disease was at work building up scar tissue until my bowel closed completely, not once, but twice. Now I am permanently disabled -- and taking the medication I need to slow down the disease's next assault on my bowel. I eat as healthfully as i am able, given my compromised gut. In fact that is now my goal. Not to get well, or to be cured, but to keep working at being as healthy as i can be. Mostly, it means living with my reality and being ok with that.

All the best in your search for what works for you, but don't assume that the rest of us on this forum have never "been there and done that".

I don't mean to imply that diet alone can replace meds. I do think that by carefully choosing naturals that do the same function that the meds do, you can minimize the need for medication. For instance, turmeric is a well-researched product with a known anti-inflammatory effect as well as an antibiotic effect. It may be able to replace asacol, which is not saying much since asacol is quite limited in effectiveness. I do want to stress that the inflammation has to be controlled by whatever means necessary. The related problems of RA, pancreatitis, dermatitis, gall bladder problems and a host of others all derive from uncontrolled inflammation. My take on the role of diet is that it can potentially change the factors that maintain inflammation. It may be that impaired digestion allows certain types of food to pass into the intestines in a form that is not absorbable. That food is then consumed by gut bacteria. There is a known relation between the types of bacteria in the gut and diet, so altering the diet to prevent the growth of those bacteria may help. This depends on the bacteria that are responsible for the immune reaction. If diet starves the trigger bacteria, then it should help. If different bacteria are responsible for the immune reaction, then diet may not make any difference. The same is true for probiotics. If probiotics can competitively displace the trigger bacteria, probiotics will seem wonderful. If different bacteria that are not competitively displaced are the problem, then probiotics are marginally useful. This rant is based on recent research that has determined that the immune globulins in the blood are targeting common gut bacteria and not host tissue. The immune reaction in Crohn's is abnormal and is not easily terminated, resulting in chronic inflammation, unless some intervention is made. Controlling the gut's bacterial population would seem to be the best way to avoid trouble, but the inflammation has to be brought under control or the resulting gut permeability will just cause new bacteria to generate a new immune reaction. Given the ease of causing gut permeability (stress alone can do it), it is necessary to maintain inflammation management.

belleenstein - about the predigested foods, I meant foods that can be absorbed by the intestines. If you don't use predigested foods, digestive problems may allow partially digested food to reach the intestines and increased gut permeability would allow the undigested protein chains to pass through the gut wall and trigger an immune reaction. After that, that food will cause inflammation every time you eat it.

Post Edited (Keeper) : 9/14/2008 3:20:27 PM (GMT-6)

Well, turmeric is HOT. You have to take the capsules on an empty stomach 15 - 20 min before eating. If you are suffering D, it may go through too fast and cause burning. Sorry, I should have warned about that before.....