garylouisville said...
I think the problem, even for the experts, is that no one really knows what has gone wrong, or at least the cause of what has gone wrong. As I stated in an earlier post, this original post is the very first time I have seen one theory stated as the sole and only reason for what UC is - our immune systems attacking good bacteria in our colon, allowing bad bacteria to proliferate. They talk as if this has been nailed down as a fact, whether the rest of the medical community agrees with this or not is another issue. Let's assume for the sake of arguement that this theory is correct - our bodies are attacking and killing off good bacteria in our colons - causing inflammation. I am not a big believer that diet is the cause of that for a number of reasons:
1. most of us have not changed our diet. What we were eating at the time of diagnosis is pretty much the same as what we were eating for the years prior. If so, then why did we all of a sudden come down with UC when that very same diet did not bother us before?
2. some people who came down with UC were "health nuts" before coming down with UC and came down with it anyway
3. if a diet change at the time of diagnosis happened, in many cases it was someone who had been eating unhealthy and changed to a healthy diet and then came down with UC. Most people don't eat a healthy diet for years and then all of a sudden give it up and decide to eat McDonalds every meal.
4. even though there are many who got better by eating differently after a UC diagnosis, there are still many who tried eating healthy after diagnosis and did not get any better at all.
5. Many people, like me, actually know what triggered their UC and it was not diet. In my case, and the case of many others, it is directly linked to antibiotic use. There is a lot of evidence along these lines, although it can't be attributed to EVERY UC case. Many colitis cases attributed to antibiotics are often eventually diagnosed as C-Diff infections but there is a whole lot of evidence that antibiotics are associated with causing UC and it has nothing to do with C-Diff. The intricate details of this connection are not understood but a theory (like in the original post) is that somehow our immune systems have been tricked by the use of antibiotics into attacking the good bacteria in our colons, causing inflammation and UC. It could be that our immune systems are just tricked into attacking the good bacteria (which will never stop) or it could be that the antibiotics have caused our good bacteria to mutate and since the immune system does not recognize this "good bacteria" anymore due to this mutation then it attacks it. This will probably never stop either. More than likely our bodies are only attacking one particular strain of good bacteria in the colon. Unfortunately if we reintroduce more of that one bacteria it would probably make us worse and if we eliminate it altogether then we are missing a vital bacteria that we need for our proper balance. Hopefully the answer in that case would be to replace the problem good bateria with a different bacteria that could do the same job. Unfortunately, we probably eat foods all of the time which have this one good beneficial bacteria and that bacteria is proabably ingested through eating "healthy" foods. I think it would be very helpful if we could identify the bacterial balance in our colons and see if there is a connection to UC. Then again, this whole scenario could be a pile of dog poo.
What kind of antibiotics were you using?
I know the exact reason I got UC was because of diet. I ate ice cream from a resort in Cancun which I'm 100% certain it caused myself to get severe d in the night. I went to the bathroom about
15 times and then next day I had full blown UC.
So I started doing some reason on this and I found these links about
sodium nitrate which is used in the preservation of food sources ie meat and milk.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8259637
I then googled Sodium Nitrate and found that it was introduced somewhere between the 1800-1900.
My opinion is that the human body cannot process milk/milk products or processed foods in general, properly. Once sodium nitrate is increased and includes contamination, they body attacks the source and kills the good bacteria while fueling the bad ones.
Post Edited (Shan2013) : 2/8/2013 3:22:17 PM (GMT-7)