I was diagnosed with Crohn's disease when I was 13. I was on various 3x-daily anti-inflammatory medications; doctors said I would be on them the rest of my life.
I started going to therapy as an adult and made a lot of progress in my mental health. I went off my medications 5 years ago and have been healthy since without intervention - I give a lot of credit to this work. I don't think we fully understand the role of the mind/emotions in health; my advice to anyone suffering from IBS and the like is not to forget the mind component to overall health. When you're suffering in your head, it can sometimes manifest in your body.
I also have Crohn's, been on anti-TNF and doing well for the past 12 years.
I think it's absolutely universally accepted that stress is a major factor in autoimmune and inflammatory disease. Reducing stress by working on mental health definitely has the potential to reduce inflammation levels in some people to the point where you need no medication.
But like everything it's not a silver bullet.
Another weird/fascinating factor for me at least is that less convenient access to a toilet seems to correlate with less symptoms. When I'm hiking in the mountains I never seem to have a high frequency of needing to take a dump. I've often wondered if there is something of an explanation there for the rise in rate of Crohn's diagnosis in countries as they develop.
> Another weird/fascinating factor for me at least is that less convenient access to a toilet seems to correlate with less symptoms. When I'm hiking in the mountains I never seem to have a high frequency of needing to take a dump.
Not Chron's but a related disease. For me the symptoms are strongly correlated with how embarrassing it would be if I had to go. So hiking in the mountains is pretty relaxed (unless it's a date or something), just find a spot off trail. In the chair at the dentist with instruments in your mouth and a bib on? All of a sudden I've gotta go.
Not to dismiss your observations but to supply an alternative explanation for your belief about them: Do you remember your embarrassing experiences vs the not embarrassing ones equally well? A selective memory can give the illusion of correlation. Moreover once you have some belief you may become better at finding and remembering confirming evidence for that belief.
Is interesting. I wonder if this is because in absence of stress, less chortisol is released and the body accumulates less "toxics" by that, at a level that can still manage to clean with common periods of rest. When people sleeps it cleans garbage chemicals from the brain, chemicals that may trigger inflamation. When people with Crohns wake up naturally in Sunday or sleep one hour more, their symptoms for the day would improve? If they drink all night and go to bed at 6hAM on a Saturday, those symptoms would be worse?
Just a speculation that came to me after reading the article. I could be wrong, but I would make a interesting test probably IMO.
> Another weird/fascinating factor for me at least is that less convenient access to a toilet seems to correlate with less symptoms. When I'm hiking in the mountains I never seem to have a high frequency of needing to take a dump.
AFAIK I don't have Crohn's or any inflammatory issues, but boy is this an accurate description of me. My theory has always been that my need to use the bathroom was strongly correlated with coffee and food. When I'm home I'm constantly drinking coffee and snacking, when I'm away from home I'm not.
I don't have Crohn's, but I and many people I know experience "not having to take a dump" for various reasons; for me, traveling. The first few days of a trip I usually don't need to go.
It's pretty obvious to me that asthma and colitis ulcerosa are stress-related. I had asthma for as long as I remember. I'm allergic to pollen and dust, but one of the triggers is high stress situations as well.
I started having symptoms of colitis ulcerosa when I was 18 and had final high school exams. I was under tons of stress. I started to care much less about such things and had years-long remission. There were only 2 other flare-ups - when I was passing driving licence test, and when I had the first big series of exams at university.
Basically every time I drove myself very hard I had another episode. And it's not fun to suddenly shit yourself in public transport let me tell you :/
It's been over 20 years since last time I had colitis ulcerosa flare-up. But, in the meantime I was also diagnosed with autoimmune liver disease (PSC), and I'm not sure this one is stress-related. It seems to me it just ticks away at my liver and even very relaxed lifestyle doesn't help. I'm very hopeful about new drugs for this, as the only alternative seems to be to wait for inevitable liver transplant later in life.
As a counter-example (and not at all to doubt your story), I had my first (and worst) UC flare when I was literally the happiest and most content I've ever been in my life. I had my second, a few years later, when I was on a religious retreat, and under absolutely no stress whatsoever!
My UC is entirely diet related.
A doctor friend and I think we have - as amateurs, mind: his specialty is very far from GI, but he reads and shares with me every UC paper that's published; I have no medical training, but am a motivated auto-didact on this subject - identified three or maybe four etiologies which are lumped together as "UC". The best gastro doc I've seen kinda shrugged, and said (roughly) "probably so, but they all respond to the same drugs in the same ways, so there's not much motivation to draw distinctions".
I'm not quite sure what to think about that answer. I do think it's good for patients to identify their own triggers.
There's definitely a lot of autoimmune type diseases that have mental and/or physical components.
Your endocrine system, sympathetic nervous system and central nervous system are all wired up together so of course changes/disfunctions in one can cause symptoms in another.
And there's lots of pathogens that cause "flu-like" symptoms, so it makes sense there could be multiple things that cause "UC-like" symptoms.
As mentioned in another comment my step moms UC is likely stress related. My crohns doesnt seem to be; but sport helps me a ton. Something thats interesting is that even with MC and also PSC there are multiple "forms" of it.
My doc says my crohns is inflaming the whole end part of my colon somewhat consistently; my small intestines are fine. Many other patients of hers have inflammations at specific parts that are more severe, and also sometiumes the small intestines are affected.
And then my PSC seems to (so far) only affect my small ducts; which doesnt mean it cant get more severe but so far is "less damaging" then "normal" PSC. No one seems to really know if these are the same disease, related or entirely different. Its kinda crazy tbh
Practicing yoga seems to help my UC. Aerobic exercise and weight training don't (although are obviously good in and of themselves). You can call it "woo", if you like, but I believe there's something to integrative practice that aligns the endocrine and sympathetic / para-sympathetic nervous systems. It at least seems to damp down my particular inflammation reactions in ways that other kinds of exercise do not.
Oh, also nicotine. I don't like being addicted to my vape pen, but a steady dose of nicotine gives me a much wider margin for error with my diet. Curiously, this connection was pointed out by my first, and best, gastro doctor: the two groups who present UC much less frequently than others are smokers and Ashkenazi jews. He told me that (prefaced by "I'm a doctor, so I can't really recommend this, but...) some of his patients found cigars helpful, and are fairly low-risk, as smoking goes. I used cigars for years to kill sub-clinical flares, before getting tired of the smell, and the time-commitment and hassle, and worried about the blood-pressure spikes they induce. Vaping is superior in every way, and I have made the cost-benefit wager that whatever (fairly low, so far as we can tell) health risk that comes with vaping is less than the risk and consequence of colon cancer from less-controlled UC.
That is, by the way, one of the big clues to varying etiologies: some people's UC is exacerbated, not helped, by nicotine. (My understanding is that Crohn's is always exacerbated.) My doctor friend and I believe we understand the mechanism behind why it works for my particular case.
I appreciate what you’re saying, but when the time-linear correlation between a stress event and a GI reaction is very direct and reliable (and often bidirectional) it’s hard not to recognize a connection.
My (non-bio) mom has UC and her one big flare up in life was high school exam time she said (she still has nightmares about that time). Since then only small episodes easily treated with prednisolone, but often easily attributed to stress as well. Like days before an important work event: problems. Team members being ill and she has to cover: problems.
I personally have Crohns and PSC as well, and I think less stress helped; but I am on Rinvoq (INN-Upadacitinib) and eat psyllium husks and still have occasional diarrhea, what helps A TON however is sport. I skateboard (and whenever I find the time I go HARD), and 1-2 days after I am always good, colon wise. When I dont skate for a week and eat slightly fatty i have problems, but when skate on a friday and then order opne of those disguting cheap pizzas from that greek place i am still good (i dont do this often but it happens).
Why I have these autoimmun diseases is also an interesting question. My biological parents are both good in that regard, so is my extended family. However I do know my bio-mom smoked while pregnant, and i passively smoked in the household up until I was 12 (and then started smoking at 14, quit with 18)
Exercise is also a big one. It can be difficult to exercise when you lack energy, but it's critical for your long-term health, both physical and mental. The bidirectional gut-brain axis is poorly studied but seems incredibly powerful compared to the importance that medicine has traditionally given it.
I recommend being careful with Maté. He's worth listening to inasmuch as he has unique experience and some clearly legitimate grievances with the medical establishment, but he also seems indifferent to the limits of his own knowledge. In my (layman's) opinion he tends to be too credulous toward fringe theories/therapies and to make sweeping, radical generalizations that don't comport with the broader evidence base. For instance, his views on ADHD were called "worse than wrong" by Russell Barkley, who is arguably the leading expert on ADHD [1].
Can you speak more about the type of therapy you undertook? I have a few non-threatening but otherwise annoying autoimmune disorders and my bloodwork, diet, and exercise are all good but have wondered if there is some underlying stress that could be exacerbating things. I’ve considered therapy but honestly have no idea where to start as there are a lot of different modalities and each are expensive (both in money and time) to spend 12-26 weeks exploring with sufficient depth before determining whether or not it “worked” and then trying another.
After reading Pollan’s “How to Change your Mind” I have wondered if Psychedelics could be the answer to resetting pathways.
I think you have to actually try out a modality or two before landing on the therapy that works best for you. Somatic trauma work was truly incredible for me because I was so locked in my mind - but it’s less evidence-based than say CBT which is proven to work for all sorts of mental health.
Pollan is great! I’d be happy to chat more with you - send me a PM.
Regulating your immune system can mean many things. Gabor Mate and Robert Sapolsky for example just talk about how too much stress can affect your immune system and if you have the genes, you may be more susceptible than others.
The good news of all this is that immune therapies are entering their golden age. Hopefully that means in the future you can be cured of these immune based diseases as we find the immune cell culprits like macrophages here.
For auto-immune diseases, the question is always whether suppressing over-activity will cause more disease than it prevents.
In this case, the pathway affects macrophages, leucocyte activation and migration, and production of 3 inter-leukin's and other cytokines -- which doesn't offer much hope at avoiding off-target effects. As they mention, this gene is shared as far back as other proto-humans, so it's likely essential.
And they didn't really need this finding to consider targeting (toxic) MEK at macrophages using antibodies, particularly since GI drugs can be made relatively non-absorbable, further reducing off-target effects. But since these are chronic diseases with wide variations between patients of severity and tissue involvement, and since macrophage activity is relatively acute, the narrow therapeutic range of a MEK-based drug is far from ideal: too much opportunity for overdose.
So I hope this stimulates more investigation of the ETS2-mediated pathways, but I don't hold out much hope for a MEK + Ab drug for IBD.
God I hope something comes out of this. I have IBD, and it's very difficult to put into words people can relate to how debilitating, uncomfortable, inconvenient, embarrassing, and painful these conditions are.
My son has Crohn’s disease. He was very thin and underweight and under height compared to his peers. My wife and I tried to understand what we did wrong raising our son. Did we feed him too much cheerios. Did we give him too much sugar, bread. Somehow the modern diet is not suiting my son. I feel very guilty for giving the chronic disease to my son with the food choices I made as a parent.
Nothing in this research appears to indicate fault of any kind; rather, a genetic cause.
> Lee’s research team “stumbled” on the discovery after investigating a “gene desert”, a stretch of DNA on chromosome 21 that does not code for proteins, which has previously been linked to IBD and other autoimmune diseases. Writing in Nature, they describe how they found a section of DNA that behaves like a volume control for nearby genes. This “enhancer” was seen only in immune cells called macrophages where it boosted a gene called ETS2 and ramped up the risk of IBD.
As parents we make plenty of real mistakes; blaming ourselves for unavoidable stuff isn't worth adding to the pile.
There are millions of kids out there eating nothing but toaster waffles who don't have Crohn's. Your son's disease is not your fault — it's bad luck. It's certainly possible that eating a specific way could help manage his symptoms, but that's different from his diet (past or current) being the root cause.
I have IBD. Any sensible doctor will tell you that there seem to be no link between diet and IBD, apart from certain food possibly aggravating symptoms.
No use whatsoever to blame oneself for something like this.
The idea behind there being no link between diet and IBD is nonsensical and patently unscientific.
From a layman's point of view, IBD is a single disease. However, in reality, it's an umbrella term for a disease with a common set of symptoms and histological changes that can have a variety of underlying etiologies. Some people are more genetically susceptible, with family histories; others with no family history can undergo changes in gut microbiota composition, genome methylation, among other environmental factors that influence development and progression of the disease.
There are a bevy of peer-reviewed studies that show links between better diets/exercise and an increase in SCFA-producing microbiome components, which are known to suppress inflammatory cytokines and improve innate immune mucosal defense systems and free radical scavenging, promoting gut healing. On the flip side, plenty of people with poor diets and a lack of fiber are at a far higher risk of developing IBD or some other autoimmune disease (like SLE or RA), even certain cancers. It's why one of the most common strategies to address mild IBD and IBS cases is to begin an elimination diet and see which foods are triggers for inflammation.
You are correct that for many, diet isn't the reason why people have IBD. But it does play a huge role in symptom burden and the overall severity and prognosis of the condition. This isn't even considering the effect of environmental contaminants (such as PFOA and BPA) on IBD development, which has been well-known for over a decade now.
Ignoring science for a bit, just from the perspective of common sense, the idea of what you put in your body not affecting you is absurd and ridiculous. It's an idea pushed by gastroenterologists who don't want to risk upset patients who would rather not change their entire diet and lifestyle to mitigate their disease, for a small portion of whom the changes will not work anyways due to an underlying genetic component to the disease. Still, there's nothing to lose and everything to gain from adopting a healthier lifestyle.
IBS is a common set of symptoms. IBD is short for inflammatory bowel disease, and it's an umbrella term for Crohn's disease and ulcerative colitis (UC).
My point seems to have flown over your head. Obviously it's a given that I know that, I'm a histologist. My point was that IBD is marked by histological changes within gut epithelial tissue that suggest chronic inflammation and elevated TNF-a and cytokine activity. However, it doesn't mean that the causative agent of IBD is the same for everyone.
If this was the case, and IBD was a purely genetic illness with no environmental component, then it would be literally impossible to study it. In labs we force mice to ingest dextran sodium sulfate (DSS) which produces persistent colitis by degrading the gut mucosa. It's impossible to really tell without sequencing someone's entire genome whether their IBD comes from genetic factors or environmental factors.
Both IBD and IBS respond to changes in diet, as both diseases involve degradation of the gut mucosa. Obviously IBD is marked with inflammation as well, while IBS is marked only by dysbiosis and abdominal discomfort.
I'm sorry your son has Crohn's disease. You did nothing wrong. I don't enjoy how people immediately blame themselves or others for "eating wrong foods" when they encounter a new disease. Some diseases will be caused by diet (or viruses, or bacteria), but many others are not. Metabolic versus genetic causes. Consider Celiac's disease: genetic or metabolic? It's a genetic deficiency exacerbated by a metabolic pathway.
Also watch for lactose intolerance, it's easily controlled but can cause discomfort when eating (I'm not saying your son has exclusively this, but rather in addition to).
I have Crohn 's disease and it's never occurred to me to fault my parents. It is a genetic disease, and I can only hope that the doctors you've worked with have helped you to understand the basics so you can educate yourself and help your son.
There's been a lot of really encouraging progress in the 15+ years since my diagnosis, but there are still a lot of unknowns. I got very little support in the dietary side of things other than the infamous elimination diet approach. It took a while for me to dial it in, but I did and am very rarely sick these days, now that I've discovered my own food sensitivities.
As much as you may want to solve this problem for him, it will take an immense amount of maturity on his part to want to discover and understand his limitations and to create and stick to a sustainable lifestyle.
Don't feel bad there are huge corporations and even the government pushing some foods. And the risk gene is rare, like less than 2%
Have you tried getting your son off all milk products for a few weeks? And really try and avoid non organic wheat, as it is harvested with roundup which is implicated with leaky gut syndrome.
"More than half a million people in the UK have inflammatory bowel disease, the two main forms of which are Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis, with at least 7 million affected globally" - either "at least" is doing a lot of work, or something is going on in the UK.
"Crohn's disease is found in all racial groups worldwide. However, historically, the highest prevalence rates have been reported in white populations, particularly those of North America and Europe, with significantly lower rates seen in black and Asian populations within these or any other foreign country"
What about Arthiris? There's some link between UC and RA. I get both flare up at the same time, and I use the same medication (Azathioprine) to keep both in remission.
It sounds like ETS2 for sure has implications for spondylitis, although unclear to me whether it's a direct link or just because a lot of people who have IBD also have spondylitis. If it's the former, then my guess would be that there's a link to other types of arthritis as well.
I was diagnosed with UC in my mid-30's, am in my early 40's now. I used to deal with flare-ups about twice a year that always coincided with allergy season (May and October/November). I was living in Colorado at the time and was drinking lots of heavy craft beer quite regularly. Three years ago, I cut out about 98% of alcohol from my life, and when I drank, I only drank clear things - hard seltzers and gin. But only once or twice a month at the most. I hadn't had a flare-up in that entire time, until this last holiday weekend when I drank whiskey and was hit with horrible UC symptoms immediately. As someone in the throes of a flare-up right now, I have to say that research like this is promising. But yeah, for me alcohol, primarily darker alcohol like whisky and red wine, are an absolute trigger for me.
I was diagnosed with colitis in my early 20s. Since I was 13, I had been using an acne medication containing benzoyl peroxide daily. Once I stopped using this medication, my symptoms drastically improved. While I can't prove it, I believe the acne medicine may have triggered my colitis.
Doesn't seem like that far of a stretch given that Accutane (another acne medication) has been linked to IBD as well. There are a lot of drugs that interfere with the gut microbiota, of which its dysbiosis is often linked to the development of IBD. We're still in the infancy of understanding the pharmacokinetics of drugs as far as they relate to the gut and the ability of drugs to modulate the microbiome.
Isotretinoin and benzoyl peroxide are not remotely similar drugs. They have completely different mechanisms of action. That they both treat acne is essentially a coincidence.
I went down a rabbit hole looking for something I could take now that would influence this pathway and came across a study suggesting a particular flavonoid, cumaroyl, might work; if I'm interpreting this right it appears in ginko leaves, so I'm going to see if they have any effect.
> Lee’s research team “stumbled” on the discovery after investigating a “gene desert”, a stretch of DNA on chromosome 21 that does not code for proteins, which has previously been linked to IBD and other autoimmune diseases. Writing in Nature, they describe how they found a section of DNA that behaves like a volume control for nearby genes. This “enhancer” was seen only in immune cells called macrophages where it boosted a gene called ETS2 and ramped up the risk of IBD.
> Through gene editing experiments, the scientists showed that ETS2 is central to the inflammatory behaviour of macrophages and their ability to damage the bowel in IBD.
Partly. The "model" for inflammation that confirms a causal relation doesn't look like it's ever been used before.
> To directly confirm that ETS2 was causal, we used CRISPR–Cas9 to delete the 1.85 kb enhancer region in primary human monocytes before culturing these cells with inflammatory ligands, including TNF (a pro-inflammatory cytokine), prostaglandin E2 (a pro-inflammatory lipid) and Pam3CSK4 (a TLR1/2 agonist) (TPP model; Fig. 1d and Extended Data Fig. 2a–c). This model was designed to mimic chronic inflammation16, and better resembles disease macrophages than classical IFNγ-driven or IL-4-driven models17 (Extended Data Fig. 2).
i.e., gene editing (by whatever means) is not really a win any more than changing bits in memory is. The win comes from having an in-vitro model that replicates the in-vivo disease, or from correctly identifying the relevant genes (e.g., here ETS2 is the furthest gene considered, and could easily have been excluded).
> i.e., gene editing (by whatever means) is not really a win any more than changing bits in memory is. The win comes from having an in-vitro model that replicates the in-vivo disease
I take your point, but this would have been a challenging, expensive endeavor before CRISPR-Cas9. Likely, the perturbation would not have been done in the same paper as the announcement of the locus due to the challenge of deletion work before CRISPR-Cas systems became readily available
Honestly IBD is one area where we've made massive progress in the past few decades. We went from having zero biologics (which means your only options were mediocre oral meds, long-term steroid use, or various -ectomies) to having dozens of biologics that each target one of a handful of major inflammatory pathways. Remicade was the first holy grail :)
I started on Remicade, but sadly I was one of the few who didn’t see results and I managed to get a lot sicker while waiting for it to do its thing. I got put on Upadacitinib and so far I feel a lot better, if it keeps working this well then I’m very happy to just have a pill to take daily. It’s pretty new, but from what I’m hearing it’s very effective.
Fingers crossed for the new pill! I've also heard that JAK inhibitors work wonder for a lot of people who didn't get results from TNF inhibitors. And it's probably way easier to tinker with the dose if need be :P
i often thing such claims are progress updates from research groups dependent on government grants for funding, so they need to assert they will still need a next round of funding.
> There is no clinical evidence that the carnivore diet provides any health benefits. Dietitians dismiss the carnivore diet as an extreme fad diet, which has attracted criticism from dietitians and physicians as being potentially dangerous to health[1]
> By completely eliminating fruits, vegetables, whole grains and plant-based proteins, diets like these simply can’t provide consumers with the nutrient-dense pattern of eating associated with health benefits — including decreased all-cause mortality, heart disease, overweight and obesity, type 2 diabetes, and some cancers. In fact, dietary patterns characterized by high intakes of red meat are associated with detrimental health outcomes.[2]
First of all "dietitians" just spout the conventional wisdom and are not known for their acerbic wit.
And yes, I recommend eliminating fruite, vegetables, whole grains, and plant-based proteins. All the nutrients you need are contained in animals. Beef liver, eggs, and sardines are the three most nutrient-dense foods on Earth.
Anyone can simply try this diet for themselves (please give it at least six weeks, but ideally 12 weeks). I promise you that you will thrive.
This is irresponsible advice. Some people find that meat alleviates their symptoms while other people find more relief from going vegetarian. Recommending a single type of diet (especially a "fad" diet like the carnivore diet, rather than one with some type of scientific basis like low-fodmap or specific carbohydrate diets) as a panacea is not going to work for most people. People can and should try elimination diets instead, where you eliminate all but the most basic of foods and slowly reintroduce foods over time to see which ones are triggers.
It's entirely possible you or someone you know saw great success with a carnivore diet, but others trying it might not see the same results and need one tailored to their specific gut microbiome.
Beef-only is the ultimate elimination diet. You literally eliminate absolutely everything except beef.
And beef contains 100% of the nutrients you need in order to thrive in life.
There are people who have literally eaten nothing but ribeye steaks for over ten years now.
Also, consider the fact that agriculture is only about 12,000 years old, but human beings have been living on Earth for about 200,000 years (in our current form -- a couple million if you include Homo Erectus and the other variations). We were basically 99% meat-eaters for the vast vast majority of human history.
I follow a diet that is basically 100% beef, eggs, salmon, and milk (planning to cut out the milk) and I can assure you that it is the easiest possible diet for your digestive system. (For one thing, you completely stop farting.). You have never known poops so small, easy, and quick (because 99% of what you eat is simply absorbed - this diet has no fiber).
Note that there is no truly satisfactory "literature" on ANY diet, because double-blind randomized controlled trials that are of a long enough duration and over a large enough sample size are basically impossible to conduct. The human body is the most complex thing that we know of in the universe.
However, you can follow the work of Dr. Ken Berry or Dr. Shawn Baker to learn more about the carnivore diet -- they've been neck deep in it for years. And the anecdotal evidence is becoming overwhelming -- check ou the success stories at the carnivore.diet website.
Both of those doctors have had their medical licenses revoked, and are the exact type of guru-grifters I was referring to in another comment.
> Also, consider the fact that agriculture is only about 12,000 years old, but human beings have been living on Earth for about 200,000 years (in our current form)
Classic "appeal to nature" fallacy, with no real evidence to back up. If humans were healthier before 12,000 years ago, surely it'd be easy to prove that they had lower mortality rates and longer life expectancy?
First, Dr. Ken Berry has not had his medical license revoked.
Second, Dr. Shawn Baker got involved in a dispute with a hospital system because he began curing people through the carnivore diet rather than through extremely expensive surgery (he is an orthopedic surgeon). This led to the hospital system losing a lot of money. They insisted that he stop curing people, but Dr. Baker refused. They retaliated against him by getting a fraudulent fellow to badmouth his work and get his license revoked. He then went to court and won and his name was cleared completely.
As for your claim that there is no evidence to back up the fact that humans were healthier before 12,000 years ago, what about the fact that they were taller and had fewer dental caries and larger brains? Also, my point was not that humans were healthier then (although they were) but that the carnivore diet was the diet that human beings literally evolved on.
Yup. The diet endorsed by Jordan and Mikhaila Peterson, the 2 biggest grifters alive today? The diet with zero scientific backing or evidence of efficacy? Let's not forget about the Liver King, who it turns out was completely lying about his health, diet, and medicinal intake.
Not to mention that the purported benefits of the carnivore diet are often very similar to those claimed by staunchly vegan folks.
Or look for a dietary pattern that helps your IBD but isn't atherogenic and doesn't require you to dismiss the science on saturated fat and CVD like Shawn Baker / Revero.
Please read The Big Fat Surprise by Nina Teicholz to get the "science on saturated fat and CVD". You will find that it supports my perspective. Phenomenal book -- deeply researched over ten years and well-written.
It's better to attempt elimination diets rather than a single type (low-fodmap, specific carb, carnivore, etc.) What works for one person may not work for everybody.
The carnivore diet is the ultimate elimination diet. The strict version (in which you eat nothing but ribeye steak) is nutritionally 100% complete and there are people who have been thriving on this diet for over a decade now. Meat is the food that human beings evolved on. Just try it and see for yourself.
Maybe it's cured or other processed meats that are worse? It was thought that red meat was linked to prostate cancer but it turned out to be all due to processed and cured meats. Perhaps the high salt content.
Please stop suggesting this in such a definitive way. You’re not a doctor, more importantly you’re not a GI doctor, and most importantly you’re not their GI doctor.
There is currently zero credible research that shows a carnivore/keto diet will reduce inflammation in patients with IBD. The Mediterranean diet has some research showing potential improvement in patients, so if anything, suggest they talk to their doctor about that one. But don’t position it as a cure. There is currently no cure for IBD.
This is an extremely complicated disease and recommending that people try “cures” you heard about on podcasts is not helpful and potentially dangerous. It’s the same line of thinking that lead to people eating horse paste to cure their COVID.
The best thing someone with IBD can do is to find a good GI specialist that they trust and feel comfortable discussing potential medications and lifestyle adjustments with. Then when someone online recommends ”cures” like carnivore diet, they can take it to their doctor and discuss whether or not it might be worth trying given their specific medical circumstances.
If I was desperate and suffering from something as serious as IBD, I would be happy for people to casually suggest trying something that has shown to work for others anecdotally. Especially given the context of this very article, which shows we don't entirely understand it .
We don’t entirely understand it which is precisely why it’s important to have a specialist you can discuss this type of thing with. That specialist has access to your full medical history as well as the ability to run tests against any things you may decide to try. Legitimate medical and scientific breakthroughs don’t get leaked in conspiracy theory forums or on podcasts. Blindly trying something a Joe Rogan guest swears is a natural cure that Big Pharma is suppressing is a bad idea. It’s the kind of decision making that can cause something manageable to become significantly worse… look at Steve Jobs.
Don’t really disagree with the rest of your post but as a sufferer I’ve dealt with dozens of doctors now that casually dismiss your very real symptoms or say stuff like “it’s just stress” rather than drilling down to the core of the problem. People become desperate and will try anything in this environment, so it isn’t really unwelcome to a sufferer to hear tips like this other than when people say dumb stuff like “have you tried identifying a trigger?”
No, I haven’t ever thought of that, I just shovel whatever crap down my gullet and dump liters of blood out my ass without a second thought. of course I’ve tried identifying triggers and if I already knew the trigger I wouldn’t be suffering, would I?
Please don't attack another user like this, and please don't perpetuate flamewars on HN, no matter how wrong someone else is or you feel they are. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
So you built an entire Reddit forum where many people presumably suggest their treatments, "cures" and other remedies for handling crohns/UC, but here you are strongly and rather self-righteously criticizing someone who casually did the exact same thing? It was just a suggestion, not an insistence or a promise of a cure-all. Nor were they selling anything for that matter..
Yes, various alternative and experimental treatments were discussed with a strong emphasis that anyone considering them should first discuss them with their medical team. And people who posted with definitive language about cures were either downvoted into oblivion and chastised in the comments or permabanned if it was clear from their post history that they were commenting with an agenda. The person I replied to on here would have had their ass handed to them in the comments of the subreddit and then probably would have been banned since they’re clearly only spouting their talking points and not interested in creating a discussion around the topic.
If you keep starting and/or perpetuating flamewars on HN, we will ban you account. We've warned you about this repeatedly already, and what you did in the current thread was practically arson.
I feel that what often happens is that I make a non-flame-war comment, and then someone comes in and uses passive but extremely aggressive language against me, and then I am forced to either retreat or to hold my own.
I look like the bad guy, but the other guy is actually the unreasonable one.
You are a world-class moderator so I have no problem with your judgment!
Yes, it's worthy of a ban, because you kept perpetuating a religious flamewar after I'd just asked you to stop doing that.
The other user was also at fault, and I've asked them not to do that in the future.
The reason I've banned you while merely warning the other user is not that I'm taking their side. Rather, it's that we'd warned you multiple times, including recently. That is not the case with the other account. Also, your account has a longstanding pattern of doing this over and over again. HN is not the place for this sort of generic flamewar, whether about diet, religion, or anything.
My advice to you would be to get off your high horse and maybe learn something for once. You are also not their doctor, so I don't understand why you think you should contribute to this discussion.
If you want evidence that the carnivore diet (I don't promote the keto diet) will reduce inflammation in patients with IBD then I can point you to a dozen stories of people who have cured their IBD through a carnivore diet. But you are just going to dismiss the evidence as anecdotal (nevermind that the anecdotes are endlessly accumulating) and not credible because you already have your mind made up.
If I were you I would actually try a carnivore diet for 90 days before making any more pronouncements, because I can assure you that YOU ABSOLUTELY DO NOT KNOW WHAT YOU ARE TALKING ABOUT.
The fact that people have been so brainwashed into thinking that eating red meat is by definition a bad thing is a severe problem in our society and it is people like you who are contributing to our epidemic of chronic disease.
I honestly find it hard to believe that you would post that comment with such confidence. Who do you think you are?
Hum, omnivore diet has less toxins... and some types of toxins are attracted to fat. I wonder if a supply of fat could --hypothetically-- drag some type of toxins from the surface of the intestine, acting like a duster basically and alleviating a crisis? or not?. Would be also an interesting experiment.
Eating only meat for some days would reset the pesticide intake suddenly to zero (as long as is not also in the tap water, that is much more difficult to avoid). If one or several chemicals are the problem it definitely could help (as long as is not a permanent change to avoid the cons of this diet also).
I started going to therapy as an adult and made a lot of progress in my mental health. I went off my medications 5 years ago and have been healthy since without intervention - I give a lot of credit to this work. I don't think we fully understand the role of the mind/emotions in health; my advice to anyone suffering from IBS and the like is not to forget the mind component to overall health. When you're suffering in your head, it can sometimes manifest in your body.
Gabor Maté talks a lot about this connection: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1fPQ7Oc44SU