I’m sorry you’ve got Crohn’s, but glad you finally have a diagnosis – at least that can be some relief.

Try not to worry to much about the decisions you make. Short of having surgery, any treatment you decide upon can be changed. Besides, stress will only exacerbate your condition. The last flare I had back in 2004 was caused entirely by stress.

For what it’s worth, I just put up a post that you might find useful. It helped me to think about all the treatments for Crohn’s and make my decisions feel more solid. Here’s the link: http://eatingscd.com/2009/12/16/a-decision-tool/

Regarding question 1:
Actually, I only have met a few people with IBD and the only people on the SCD that I “know” are on the internet. I have no idea what the success rate of the SCD is. I don’t think there is any way to tell. It may be helpful to find out what the odds are for the different Crohn’s drug. Are they better or worse than the SCD, for instance.

Regarding question 2:
I can’t say. I don’t take any drugs for my Crohn’s, but I didn’t before the diet either. I have read enough of people’s experiences to know that it varies from using medications all the time, to weaning off of them to not using medications any more. In addition, some people may need occasional medications to deal with flares. I think most people on the SCD are hoping to minimize or eliminate medications.

Regarding question 3:
Probiotics are key to the SCD. Have you read “Breaking the Vicious Cycle” yet? If not, you need to. The basic idea of the diet is to alter your gut flora. Consider this: the average adult carries one and a half pounds of bacteria in their gut. At first this is staggering when you consider you can’t even see the little buggers with the naked eye. Your flora constitutes a range of different bacterial strains. The SCD aims to change the ratio of the different strains and that is where the probiotics and specific carbohydrate restriction come into play. To oversimplify: the probiotics add good bacterias and the lack of specific carbohydrates reduces the bad bacterias. The diet does not eliminate all carbohydrates, only specific ones, hence the name.

Regarding question 4:
I’m not familiar with that complication. I know that the SCD can be done vegetarian, but that is outside the scope of my experience.

Good luck with your colonoscopy. I’ll be thinking of you and hoping it goes well.

-Paul

I have been well, thank you. I tried going off the diet, but found it didn’t work for me – I had to go to the bathroom too much.

I’m glad to hear your last 5 months have gone well. I don’t remember how long the diarrhea lasted for me and I suppose it depends on how you define it. If you define infrequent loose stools as diarrhea then that persisted for years. To this day I can induce loose stools if I overindulge in salads or citrus or coffee, but I don’t consider myself to have diarrhea anymore as I can control it by what I eat. I figure it took me about 2-1/2 years to become symptom free.

Cheers, Paul

I have been well, thank you. I tried going off the diet, but found it didn’t work for me – I had to go to the bathroom too much.

I’m glad to hear your last 5 months have gone well. I don’t remember how long the diarrhea lasted for me and I suppose it depends on how you define it. If you define infrequent loose stools as diarrhea then that persisted for years. To this day I can induce loose stools if I overindulge in salads or citrus or coffee, but I don’t consider myself to have diarrhea anymore as I can control it by what I eat. I figure it took me about 2-1/2 years to become symptom free.

-Paul

I just came across your site for the first time. After 18 years of living with off-and-on cramping, adhesions, mucous diarrhea and more, FINALLY I have a diagnosis: Crohn’s. I’m hoping this is the beginning of a journey toward wellness, not the beginning of toxic drugs and worsening health. I’m really worried about making the wrong decisions since I know so little.

Here are my questions:

1. One medical dr. online says that for every person he’s met who does well on SCD there are 3-4 who don’t get better on it. Over the years, you must have met many other people with this. Do you think those are the odds?

2. Do you or most people you know with this still take the standard medical drug treatments? (Forgive me if you said this somewhere. I’ve been skipping around your site — could have missed it.)

3. Do probiotics play a role in your plan? I figure that if bacteria has gotten out of hand, then good bacteria should be helpful. But then again, they probably need carbs to keep them alive. Can you help me figure this out?

4. After all these years of inflammation, my kidneys have stones and cysts. They have even bled during really bad flares. I know lots of protein is hard on kidneys. Have you heard of this complication? Any ideas?

Okay, that’s alot to ask in one post. I am so grateful to have someone to ask. Heading into more tests this week. Colonoscopy just hours before Christmas.

- Kathleen

Sorry to hear you are dealing with UC.

I am not an elite athlete though I do play hockey once or twice a week. I suffer the most from not being in as good a shape as I could be – a result of a character flaw, not a lack of energy due to the SCD. I don’t know any elite athletes on SCD, but I don’t think I suffer a lack of energy when I’m on the ice. I don’t have a sophisticated understanding of diet as related to sports, but do know a few things about carbohydrates.

It will take you some experimenting, but try using SCD legal fruits like grapes and spotty bananas in place of the pre race pasta for your carbs. I may very well be wrong, but I suspect they are easier to digest and therefore less work for you body than pasta, et al. You could even experiment with honey as your carb source. If I remember right, the honey will take virtually no effort for your body to use as fuel. You can even find honey in sticks which you may be able to use during your rides as terrain permits.

When I play hockey, I use a 50/50 mix of legal white grape juice and water as part of my hydration routine. You can also make your own legal electrolyte drinks: http://pecanbread.com/p/tanya/electrolytedrink.html or some SCDers use E-Lyte Sport which appears to legal: http://www.elytesport.com/ Additionally, smartwater by Glaceau contains electrolytes and appears to be legal.

-Paul

Regarding probiotic on the SCD, my understanding is that the probiotics (yoghurt or other) are important. I believe the bacterias we do want provide for some competition to the bacterias we do not want and so help speed the healing. Of course, if you find that they are making you sicker, than that isn’t any help at this time.

I went to http://www.vsl3.com to discover its ingredients but could not, so suspect that it is illegal on SCD.

It could be that you are not yet healed enough to tolerate the goat yoghurt. I would advise you to keep doing what makes you feel better and then sometime in the future try to introduce goat yoghurt as per the pecanbread website or pill form probiotics. I’ve learned that reactions to foods can sometimes take days, so you could be particularly cautious when introducing goat yoghurt by trying a very small amount (1/8 tsp) then waiting many days to see if it affects you, keeping careful track of you symptoms.

See this pecanbread page for more info on probiotic pills: http://www.pecanbread.com/p/probiotics1.html

Here are instructions for starting slowly with probiotic pills: http://www.pecanbread.com/p/slowprobiotic1.html

The yoghurt is preferred over the pills because they are a better delivery device than the pills. The dairy protects the probiotics it contains to deliver them farther along your digestive track than the pills can. This way more of the good stuff gets to where it’s needed most.

Any way you go about it, it is important to get your gut flora back in shape.

Take care and keep up the good work.

-Paul

Thank you for adding this comment. It’s great to get some insider information for the reasons we do things on the the SCD.

-Paul