Ulcertive Colitis- Does Specific Carbohydrate Diet work for you?

Has anyone that's been diagnosed with Ulcertive Colitis had success with the Specific Carbohydrate diet?

I've had great success with the SCD but it's worth mentioning a few points:

- The suggested intro diet needs to be tweaked, I'd recommend the GAPS intro diet instead www.gapsdiet.com/INTRODUCTION_DIET.html. Broth soups are the perfect food for when you're flaring. It's nutritious, few people are allergic to meat/chicken, it's easy to digest, it helps rebalance your gut flora and it help your intestinal lining to heal. All in all the perfect UC food.

- The diet implies that you can eat all the fruit and honey you want. In my opion, colitis is caused by an inability to digest carbs due to an imbalance in your gut flora. I'd strongly recommend starting with a low-carb version of the SCD. ie, after doing the soup for a while move on to a diet of primarily meat and veggies. The book "life without bread" is a great read for more info on this.

- People end up converting the SCD into the peanut butter and nut flour diet... try not to. Most people on the SCD have trouble diegesting nut flours (most healthy people would have trouble eating tons of nut flour).

- Supplements help. Don't use the yogurt right away (if you have leaky gut chances are you'll have trouble with the caesin). Start with SCD legal protiotics instead. Also, digestive enzymes and Betaine HCL (if you have low stomach acid) can make a big difference.

- The people for whom the SCD is working probably won't be on this site. I was in remission for 3 years but over time went back to eating crap... I'm now slowly working my way back (it's quite a bit harder the second time)

- The www.scdlifestyle.com is a great site which has more information on tweaking the SCD.


Hope you find this helpful

Post Edited (benji369) : 9/18/2011 7:18:01 AM (GMT-6)

I agree with a lot of what benji says.
The first time (many years ago) I tried SCD it did nothing for my UC. But I was forced to give it another chance almost 2 years ago because I was faced with harsh meds or surgery. This time it worked.

I did not do the traditional SCD. First I started with going wheat-free after reading "Life Without Bread". Bleeding stopped for the first time in many many years but the other symptoms remained (urgency and D mostly). That gave me the encouragement to try SCD again. The difference is that I paid a lot more attention to my body's reactions instead of blind allegiance to SCD. I discovered that for me dairy and fruit were not good even after a year on SCD so I eliminated them (really miss homemade yogurt).

It has not been a straight line recovery. At times things seemed to seesaw back and forth, great improvement and then regression. It is not an easy diet, especially the way I had to do it because it removed even more food choices from an already restricted diet. I discovered a lot of foods that caused no problems (meat, fish/seafood, most but not all vegetables) and by process of elimination have a boatload of foods my colon just cannot handle. Some cause D and others cause C.

The long and short is you cannot take my history and use it for yourself. You need to listen to your own gut and keep notes even though sometimes there are inconsistencies. Today I can eat some previously "out" foods as long as it's not a lot. Finally I can have some fruit and sometimes ice cream.

SCD has not been perfect for me but I've tried EVERYTHING else and this is the only thing that has helped.
Supplements? I've tried most of them too and 98% have made me worse.
Rx meds? Nothing made any improvement other than mesalamine enemas.
Yoga, acupuncture, meditation, hypnosis? Tried them no improvement.

Good luck. Best wishes on getting some relief from the worst of your symptoms. I can truly understand why some people opt for surgery rather than SCD, it changes the entire way you eat. Luckily I have a spouse who likes SCD because he's into healthy eating, it would be way harder with a family and kids

I did with some modifications. IMO, her theory about no sugars or gluten holds based on recent research showing genetic similarities between celiac and IBD and also bacterial imbalance and IBD. I eat cold brown rice because resistant starch is good for colon healing.

My daughter has been on SCD for a year - not because I read a book but because I was looking for recipes that would be interesting with the foods (food diary) that did not cause her problems. Gradually I recognised that SCD legal foods could work for her except cheese - that caused mucus - checked by exclusion a couple of times and thankfully now in complete remisssion on a dairy free SCD diet.
Sue

@suenew61.

try cheddar cheese or swiss cheese. i do very well on them.