Crohn's disease

[Guest guest]

Dear Sarah,

Dr. Mercola at mercola.com has a google search engine

for his site. The below article was one listed under

Crohn's Disease.

Whatever else you do, I recommend considering going

off wheat and dairy for a few months and observing how

you feel. (Until your system heals, dairy can

aggravate the problem. Goat's milk is preferable to

cow.) A small pot of brown rice can serve as a filler,

and you can take a good calcium/magnesium supplement

to insure you get adequate calcium. By cutting out

wheat, you will find you also cut out most if not all

unhealthy snack foods and hydrogenated fats. No, you

won't starve to death, but you might find yourself

eating more real foods such as fruits, vegetables,

squashes, and the like. Also, bear in mind that meats

and fats take up to 12 hours to digest whereas fruits

and vegetables can be digested in a few hours. Fish is

lighter than beef or chicken.

CROHN'S DISEASE

If you suffer from a condition such as osteoporosis,

Crohn's disease, rheumatoid arthritis or depression,

you're unlikely to blame your breakfast cereal. After

all, intolerance of wheat, or celiac disease (CD), is

a an allergic reaction to a protein called gluten,

thought to affect only about one in 1,000 people.

 

But now two American clinicians, James Braly and Ron

Hoggan, have published a book, Dangerous Grains,

claiming that what was thought to be a relatively rare

condition may be more widespread than was previously

thought. Braly and Hoggan suggest that gluten

intolerance does not just affect a few people with CD,

but as much as 2-3% of the population.

 

They claim that gluten sensitivity (GS) is at the root

of a proportion of cases of cancer, auto-immune

disorders, neurological and psychiatric conditions and

liver disease. The implication is that the heavily

wheat-based western diet - bread, cereals, pastries,

pasta - is actually making millions of people ill.

 

Your doctor, if asked about CD, would tell you that it

involves damage to the gut wall, which makes for

problems absorbing certain nutrients, such as iron,

calcium and vitamin D. As a result, you are more

likely to develop conditions such as osteoporosis and

anemia, as well as a range of gastrointestinal

problems.

 

Children who have it are often described as " failing

to thrive " . The proof that you have CD comes when gut

damage shows up in a biopsy. The treatment, which has

a high rate of success, is to remove gluten - found in

rye and barley as well as wheat - from your diet.

 

But if Braly and Hoggan are right, the problem is far

more widespread than the medical profession believes.

Celiac disease, they suggest, should be renamed

" gluten sensitivity " and, in an appendix to the book,

they claim that no fewer than 192 disorders, ranging

from Addison's disease and asthma to sperm

abnormalities, vasculitis, rheumatoid arthritis and

hyperthyroidism, are " heavily overrepresented among

those who are GS " .

 

Dangerous Grains contains more than a dozen case

histories of people who have recovered from a wide

variety of chronic conditions - back pain, chronic

fatigue, the auto-immune disorder lupus - simply by

following a gluten-free diet. Both authors claim great

personal benefits from such a change. " After

eliminating gluten grains, " writes Hoggan, " I realized

how uncomfortable and chronically ill I had been for

most of my life. "

 

If you are someone who has visited a clinical

nutritionist or a naturopath, this will come as no

great surprise. One of their most common suggestions

is temporarily to remove wheat from the diet to see if

it makes a difference. In fact, so widespread has talk

of a wheat allergy become that last November the Flour

Advisory Board felt impelled to issue a statement

warning of the dangers of this idea. Professor Tom

Sanders, head of nutrition and dietetics at King's

College, London, was quoted as saying: " Unless you

suffer from celiac disease, a very rare condition,

cutting wheat out of your diet is extremely unwise. "

 

Sanders certainly represents the mainstream medical

view, but there is good evidence - such as the work of

Dr Harold Hin, a GP from Banbury in Oxfordshire - to

suggest that it may be in need of revision. Over the

course of a year, Hin carried out a blood test on the

first 1,000 patients who came to his surgery

complaining of symptoms that might indicate CD, such

as anemia or being " tired all the time " . Thirty proved

positive and a diagnosis of CD was confirmed by a

biopsy.

 

This indicated that CD was showing up at a rate of

three per 100 - 30 times more than expected.

Significantly, all but five had no gastrointestinal

symptoms. " Underdiagnosis and misdiagnosis of coeliac

disease, " Hin concluded in an article for the British

Medical Journal in 1999, " are common in general

practice and often result in protracted and

unnecessary morbidity. "

 

More recently, a large research program carried out by

the University of Maryland Center for Celiac Research

in Baltimore has confirmed Hin's findings. Scientists

there tested 8,199 adults and children. Half the

sample had various symptoms associated with CD and, of

those, one in 40 of the children tested positive for

CD and one in 30 of the adults.

 

But it wasn't just those who seemed ill who were

having problems with wheat. Far more worrying was what

the Maryland researchers found when they tested the

other half of the sample, who were healthy volunteers,

selected at random. Among kids under 16, one in 167

had CD, while the rate among the adults was even

higher - one in 111.

 

If those proportions are true for the American

population in general, this means that 1.8m adults and

300,000 children have undiagnosed CD - people who,

sooner or later, are going to develop vague symptoms

of feeling generally unwell, for which they will be

offered various drugs that are unlikely to make much

difference. Ultimately, they are at higher risk of a

range of chronic diseases.

 

There seems, therefore, to be good evidence that CD is

underdiagnosed. But Braly's and Hoggan's proposition

is more radical than that. They believe that the

immune reaction to gluten that damages the gut in CD

can also cause problems almost anywhere else in the

body. The evidence for this is a test involving a

protein found in gluten called gliadin. When the body

has an immune reaction, it makes antibodies. The test

for anti-gliadin antibodies is known as AGA and people

who test positive to AGA often have no sign of gut

damage.

 

In fact, according to Dr Alessio Fasano, who carried

out the University of Maryland research, " Worldwide,

CD 'out of the intestine' is 15 times more frequent

than CD 'in the intestine'. " Braly estimates that

between 10% and 15% of the US and Canadian populations

have anti-gliadin antibodies, putting them at risk of

conditions as varied as psoriasis, multiple sclerosis,

jaundice, IBS and eczema.

 

The idea of gluten causing damage to parts of the body

other than the gut is supported by another UK

practitioner, Dr M Hadjivassiliou, a neurologist at

the Royal Hallamshire Hospital in Sheffield. He ran an

AGA test on patients who had " neurological

dysfunction " with no obvious cause and found that more

than half tested positive. What is more, only a third

of the positive group had any evidence of CD gut

damage. In other words, while the gluten antibodies

can damage the bowels, they can also cause problems

elsewhere. In this case, it was the cerebellum, or the

peripheral nervous system.

 

So if a reaction to gluten can cause problems in the

brain, might it also be linked to immune disorders?

Braly and Hoggan certainly think so, and claim

considerable clinical success in treating patients for

conditions such as Addison's disease, lupus,

rheumatoid arthritis and ulcerative colitis with a

gluten-free diet. In fact, almost all the body's

systems can be affected (see below). So if you suffer

from a chronic condition that doesn't seem to respond

to treatment, cutting out wheat for a while seems

worth a try.

 

Are you gluten sensitive?

 

If you suffer from any of the following, the

possibility that you are GS may be worth

investigating.

 

Upper respiratory tract problems such as sinusitis,

" allergies " , " glue ear "

Symptoms related to malabsorption of nutrients such as

anemia and fatigue (lack of iron or folic acid),

osteoporosis, insomnia (lack of calcium)

Bowel complaints: diarrhoea, constipation, bloating

and distention, spastic colon, Crohn's disease,

diverticulitis

Autoimmune problems: rheumatoid arthritis, bursitis,

Crohn's disease

Diseases of the nervous system: motor neuron disease,

certain forms of epilepsy

Mental problems: depression, behavioral difficulties,

ME, ADD

The Guardian September 17, 2002

 

 

--

DR. MERCOLA'S COMMENT:

 

As many of you know, one of the key components of my

eating plan is vastly reducing to eliminating the

grains in your diet for optimal health. I am glad to

see this issue increasingly addressed in books and

other media, and want to take this opportunity to make

an announcement:

 

In the early spring of 2003, Putnam will be publishing

my first major book called The No-Grain Diet, which

will be available in bookstores throughout the United

States and beyond. The No-Grain Diet will address the

issues in the article above and more; even more

important, it will provide you with a comprehensive

and practical approach to implementing an

individualized dietary plan that, with the aid of

Metabolic Typing, leads to your healing, ideal weight

and optimal health.

 

In addition to its focus on my nutrition plan, what

will set The No-Grain Diet apart from other dietary

and health books is my focus on maintaining the

healthy habits you adopt; whether people change their

diet to lose weight, heal a disease, guard against

illness or simply improve their health, they are often

successful at the start.

 

However, as time goes by, most fall right back into

the old patterns that sabotaged their health in the

first place. This is because there was only a focus on

changing negative physical habits, not changing

negative emotions contributing to those habits. In The

No-Grain Diet, I will show you how, by using EFT, you

can eliminate those negative emotions and far more

easily maintain your healthy nutrition plan and

lifestyle for good.

 

As for the gluten referenced in the article above, it

is a protein in wheat, barley, rye, oats and spelt and

can cause problems in many individuals that are

completely independent of its disruption of insulin

homeostasis.

 

As for grains in the human diet overall, there is

fairly strong Paleolithic evidence that 10,000 years

ago most humans did not consume many grains. They were

hunter-gatherers who subsisted mostly on vegetables

and meats. Ten thousand years is a mere blip in a

biological sense for humans--over 99 percent of our

genetic make-up was in place, in fact, before we ever

started consuming grains.

 

When considered from this perspective alone, it is not

too surprising that grains can cause a wide array of

health issues: contemporary humans have not suddenly

evolved mechanisms to incorporate the high

carbohydrates from starch- and sugar-rich foods into

their diet.

 

Some of my patients ask me why, if grains " are bad, "

the Bible would reference them as acceptable. I am no

biblical scholar and so cannot comment on whether the

words used in the Bible (and translated from original

sources) actually mean " grains " or food in some larger

sense.

 

But I am not making an absolute blanket statement that

grains " are bad; " instead, I am stating that most of

us would definitely benefit by either drastically

reducing or eliminating them from our diet, and

throughout Mercola.com, and in my forthcoming book,

The No-Grain Diet, I show you why.

 

Contacts

 

University of Maryland Center for Celiac Research:

001-800-492 5538.

Website: www.celiaccenter.org

For help on starting a gluten-free diet, visit

www.inside-story.com

UK website for sufferers of coeliac disease:

www.coeliac.co.uk

A good US website: www.celiac.com

Related Articles:

 

Wheat, Gluten and Rheumatoid Arthritis

 

Wheat Can Cause Poor Head Growth and Developmental

Delay In

 

Wheat Can Cause Severe Headaches

 

Wheat Sensitivity (Subclinical Gluten Intolerance)

Linked To Repeated

Miscarriages

 

 

 

 

 

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