UC probably more hormonal and not food related.

Hear me out and keep an open mind.

Why do we say it's food related? There's about 2-3 posts from women on the main page stating that their symptoms and the disease started right after pregnancy or while pregnant suggesting hormonal changes.

And for that matter, why do you some people get diagnosed like at age 60+ when they never changed their diet for all those years.

As for why some people respond to diet mods. My explanation is as follows. The diet is so spartan that it removes anything inflammatory that can agravate the situation. So no complex carbs, no difficult to digest items helps with the disease.

Now, the reason why some people don't change the diet and they go in remission anyways is simply because, the disease untriggered at that moment.

This is, imo, the best theory about the disease and it's not food related per se. It responds to food in some cases simply because normal diet aggravates the situation.

There is no other reason that I can think of why some people get it later or really early, why some respond to diet and some don't. It's basically some sort of hormonal change.

So simply put, food does not cause the disease and it's really not the cure. This reminds me of my dad's friend. He has stomach ulcers caused by that bacteria H. Pylori. All his young teen, he was on a strick diet and it controled his condition, only to discover years later that it was caused by some bacteria. Now he eats like a normal person.

 

Me too. My first symptoms, right after I started on the pill. First bad flare when I became pregnant. Second bad flare, when I tried birth control pills again. I am scared to death to hit menopause.

i don't think guys have hormones - they are only for the girls

I'm not really understanding, have never heard of women getting UC symptoms at the exact time they become pregnant being particularly widespread. Roughly what % of women how have IBD are diagnosed at this stage?

I agree with the general direction of your thoughts on UC cause. Perhaps rather than hormonal it could be stress which screws with hormones. Many people talk about stress being a factor too. Isn't cortisol a hormone? I know Vitamin D is and many UC'ers are low in D and should supplement it (I don't need to).

I had both hormonal and stress factors, not pregnancy but menopause changed my hormones although I never took synthetic hormones.

I agree with your food arguments. I know that my UC diet is one that my gut can handle. I tested negative for gluten-sensitivity and lactose but removing both of these foods made my symptoms much better.
My diet however is not spartan, not difficult to follow. It makes my gut happy and that makes me happy, besides it's healthy to eat veggies, eliminate gluten and most dairy and use very little sugar.

Diet mod. makes a huge improvement in my UC symptoms and I don't have to take strong drugs. Big plus IMO.

Hormones, stress, overuse of antibiotics and getting gut bad bacteria are what I think caused my UC. Multiple factors were needed because I was a very healthy person pre-UC.

"Multiple factors were needed because I was a very healthy person pre-UC."

And there you have it. You were great before and something changed. Could be like you said, stress, hormonal, antibiotics...in any event something changes in there, mutates ,kinda like cancer.

All it needs to fix this, is something to untrigger.

Once it's untriggered you can go back to eating, doing whatever you were doing prior and you should be ok. I also theorise that even if you were to re-do the exact same things it might still not trigger it back.

These are the following treatment solutions:

- Keep a spartan/limited diet and hope your sypmtoms are in check.

- Take meds for an underminate period and hope your symptoms are in check

- Do absolutely nothing and hope your disease un-triggers for a certain period of time.

Neither of these solutions offer a permanent state of inactive disease. Any moment and at any time you could reflare.

The permanent ones are:

- Surgery, where the problem location dissapears.

- Or some sort of miracle cure where it's possible to revert the mutation.

 

I could explain in depth why your theories are very circumstantial and what is actually happening in the body beyond hormones at all the points you referenced.. But I'll just leave it at... Autoimmune diseases are multifactorial illnesses.. Genetic polymorphisms, colliding with pathogen, toxin, stress, poor food choices, environment, detox pathways, etc to set us up for chronic disease.

I don't think we humans give enough thought to how much of our world is dominated by bacterial life. And how that bacteria is trying to dominate it's environment as much as we humans are.

The bad bacteria that is very likely the cause of our UC (as they discovered that stomach ulcers have a bacterial cause) is using our guts. The fact that we (it's host) have miserable symptoms is irrelevant to the bacteria. Few of us die from UC and the bacteria has a great place to live for as long as it's host lives.

I hope I am alive when the right antibiotic treatment is created to cure UC.
I'd like to show them the door and say "Die You miserable bacteria, Die."
In the end I think bacteria owns this planet and we are outnumbered.

Does anyone ever worry that the nature of the for profit pharma industry make a cure less likely?

Lots more money in maintenance medication than in cures therefore research is likely to be focused on maintenance.

"Does anyone ever worry that the nature of the for profit pharma industry make a cure less likely?

Lots more money in maintenance medication than in cures therefore research is likely to be focused on maintenance."

Of course, I could go as far as to say that even if they were to discover it, it would be kept classifed and not available. However this is conspiracy theories, outrageous stuff. Who the f... knows.

It's not one single thing that causes UC and I'm sure it's different reasons for different people. For me I know it wasn't food. Hormonal maybe. I was dx'ed after I had my kids. I am also an x smoker and UC is in my family. Who the heck knows. I don't think they will ever figure it out. It's all so individual.

Jonny_Murray said...
Its not really a conspiracy theory though.

We live in a capitalist society - its a market! A market that has been vigorously exploited to maximize profits and we are talking about hundreds of billions of pounds.

Sometimes I think what if they came up with a low cost effective cure for cancer? These massive pharma companies would literally fold overnight. There share price would plummet within minutes of the news breaking and they would go from multi billion pound enterprises to nothing. The board of directors and COE's must have nightmares about it!

But the cure would likely open up new industries, like real food, lifestyle medicine, etc.. So the gap would be redistributed into a new era of complete person medicine.

"Higher secretion of certain hormones during pregnancy could be the trigger for flaring in women with UC"

No no, let me re-write this.

Higher secretion of certain hormones during pregnancy could be the trigger and the development of UC in some women.

Prior, the women never had UC, no nothing.