Treating a Severe Flare up with Diet

My daughter has been diagnosed with ulcerates colitis and is in the middle of a horrible flare up. But one symptom she has that I don't see mentioned in anyone's post is nausea/vomiting. She will wake up at night to vomit and/or diarrhea with blood and mucus. She was diagnosed a year ago but is just now really experiencing bad episodes. Any suggestions to help would be greatly appreciated! I just want her to go back to being a healthy 20 year old young lady. Thank you!

Some of the meds we take can do that to you. What meds is she on?

I am 52 and was diagnosed with ulcerative colitis 7 weeks ago after spending a week in hospital with severe bowel pain, diarrhoea, blood etc. After a few weeks of remission, it's flared up again, but thankfully only mildly with constant stomach ache, black diarrhoea with blood. This came after eating out, not particularly heavily but clearly it's hit me again.

This site is fantastic, I'm going to try some of the some of the dietary ideas. One thing that has helped me is drinking kefir fermented milk but I have to experiment more to pin down what I can and can't eat. I'll keep you posted when/if I find anything conclusive that helps me which might be of help to other.

Diet works for some people. Not everyone.

I don't know the US system well, but in Europe the doctors are NOT funded by "big pharma" and it's not in their interests to put you on expensive drugs.

The main reason they don't promote diet more is because there isn't sufficient scientific evidence that it helps.

I have personally tried every single dietary and suggested supplement to treat my flares and none of them had any noticeable effect compared to real, drugstore-issued medicine.

me too

Oligodar said...
I still believe that diet solves only food intolerance part of equation. Inflammation part stays unresolved.

but doesn't food intolerance cause inflammation ?

TT

imagardener2 said...

Even this week I have seen improvement, this time due to stopping 2 supplements: Vitamin D 5000 and Turmeric. Although I've been taking both for some time I could tell something wasn't right so I stopped first one then the other. Yep, better BM's than before. My PCP told me that VitD can cause loose stools and that is true. I will get out more in the sun instead to get my D.

I would suggest starting with the Specific Carbohydrate Diet as I did but pay attention to your gut. It never hurts to remove more types of food from your diet than SCD allows. I have been back and forth with the SCD yogurt but do better without it. My sig. explains what I eat and I am pretty hard-a** about it most days. But being human I allow some cheating with not much payback now that I have healed.

Lately I've paid attention to sulfites (eliminating them) and that is a good idea for my gut. No wine, for example. On SCD they allow hard liquor but I can't figure out what to mix vodka with cause I can't drink juice or soda and can't deal with "straight" (yuk). Vodka and carrot juice? :-(

I really feel in control of my life and my bodily functions unlike the first 10 years of UC. My GI doc doesn't even hassle me about getting a c-scope anymore because I am doing so well. I think she keeps waiting for me to regress and is surprised that I haven't (I'm guessing most UC patients are on a spiral of ever stronger drugs).

Princesa has good ideas about diet as does Babe in the Woods.

This is the first time I've ever heard of someone benefiting from stopping turmeric/curcumin. One time I tried stopping all supplements for a month (curcumin, vitamin D, fish oil, ashwaganda, boswelia) and got noticeably worse almost right away. Inflammatory markers went up as well.

I too did not feel SCD yogurt ever seemed to help me unfortunately and if anything resulted in looser BMs.

There are dietary studies but they are often inconclusive because it's so complicated (everyone eats different things...everyone has a unique gut flora). There is funding at university level. Obviously not from drug companies.

My UC is severe and refractory. Failed all meds. Only prednisone makes a dent in it.

I've had success downgrading my condition by working with a really awesome naturopath in Australia over Skype. Unlike other natural health practitioners I've worked with, this one knows what he's talking about and has IBD himself. By analyzing my gut flora, he figured out which foods I should avoid in order to stop feeding hydrogen sulphide producing bacteria (like the proteobacterium e. coli), and which foods I should eat to increase butyric acid producing bacteria. The sulphur producers weaken the gut barrier, and then once you start bleeding they feed on the blood, and the problem becomes a vicious cycle. The colon is supposed to be an acidic environment but in UC patients it becomes too alkaline. You can't fix this just by eating acidic foods. You have to eat the foods that the acidifying bacteria eat. Then they produce the short chain fatty acids that keep the colon acidic.

I went from refractory pancolitis, 60lbs underweight, severely anemic, and on 40mg of prednisone to now I am down to 2.5mg and tapering, body weight 5lbs under and getting my life back, all within a few months. I think the future of treating UC will be related to each person's unique gut biome, which is why modern medicine is failing. They don't do custom tailored treatments, they do one size fits all and if it doesn't fit you, then, well, it's surgery or bust.

The gut biome is key to the whole thing.

Post Edited (VanJordan) : 6/16/2020 8:20:36 AM (GMT-6)

i don't think modern medicine is failing - it is just one method of treatment, that in many cases, is relatively effective -

the reality is that some folks don't wanna mess around - they just want a pill that's gets them back to living life -

it's nice that we have options to deal with this sh!tty disease -

I agree modern medicine has its uses. You need to suppress the inflammation while you figure out the underlying imbalance. Modern medicine is good at that.

But then once they give you biologics and immune suppression, they don't tell you to do anything else. They don't tell you that you can't just eat whatever you want anymore and expect your bowel to heal. They don't collaborate with the natural health world.

So if you fail all the western meds like I have, you have to look at other means to solve root causes.

I think suppression is an important part of recovery. It's hard to look at root causes when you're having 23 BMs a day and losing weight like crazy. Once the inflammation isn't killing you (and modern medicine is OK at getting most people to that point), you need to consider other things.

Somebody said...
but doesn't food intolerance cause inflammation ?

TT

I believe that a food intolerance does not involve immune system reaction.

https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/food-intolerance/