How much damage does diet do?

[Saralr]

I know that certain foods can make Crohn's symptoms worse. I don't completely understand how it affects you in the long run.

If I drink milk or eat broccoli, I know my tummy will not be happy. Beyond that will it have other effects? Does it damage my colon? Or will it cause flares? Or if I'm in remission, will it have any effect?

 

[Lisa]

The food itself would not cause the damage per se, it is the resulting irritation/imflammation that would do that....then continuing inflammation and irritation will eventually cause more problems if not treated, so avoiding foods that are a trigger or are known to cause problems is a very good idea.

If you are in remission, you could still experience problems when eating trigger foods - in some cases just the food itself could trigger a flare. This happens with some but not all people.

A lot of the diets that people are on are by trial and error - and knowing specifically what causes an issue is extremely helpful in reducing the number and severity of flare ups.

 

[hugh]

I'm a believer in diet, but there is a huge difference between the foods that are 'uncomfortable' when we eat them and the foods causing the disease......
The following is from a series of articles by Paul Jaminet and i beleive he is spot on the mark.

"These diseases probably develop through a hierarchy of causes:
- Food toxins damage the intestine and make it leaky to gut bacteria and bacterial proteins.
-Malnutrition impairs the immune response to toxins and slows the healing of intestinal injuries. This makes the intestine even more leaky and damaged.
-Damaged immunity allows bacteria to penetrate the gut mucosa and infect intestinal cells, and to enter the body and create systemic infections including intracellular infections of immune cells. The immune response to these infections creates an inflammatory environment which makes the gut even leakier. The infections also weaken the ability of the immune system to heal the gut.
- Entry of toxins and bacteria into the body leads to autoimmunity. Food toxins conjugate with human proteins and provoke antibodies against the human protein; bacterial proteins that are ‘molecular mimics’ of human proteins engender antibodies that strike both the bacterial and human proteins.
-Autoimmunity leads to further damage to the gut and to other tissues, like the thyroid, which are important for immune function and wound healing. Hypothyroidism, for instance, promotes disease progression.
-In its early stages, development of the disease may be accelerated by a long course of antibiotics or an infection that causes severe diarrhea. These kill healthful gut bacteria and facilitate their replacement by pathogens.

If we prioritize these in terms of damage caused, then ulcerative colitis is an infectious and autoimmune disease, since these two factors do the most severe damage. It is generally unclear which is doing the most damage. Food toxins and malnutrition continue to be secondary sources of damage.

On the other hand, if we prioritize chronologically in terms of the original causes, the disease is originally caused by food toxins and malnutrition and sometimes antibiotics, which cause intestinal damage and infections, followed by autoimmunity."
http://perfecthealthdiet.com/2010/07/ulcerative-colitis-a-devastating-gut-disease/

 

[Too Many Bum Steers]

I think of it this way..

1. If you have true Celiac, then the damage done by diet is well defined and direct. Ingest gluten and your vili are blunted.

2. If you don't have true celiac, some people are simply sensitive to certain foods, or even just allergic to wheat or other foods. This allergy can still blunt the vili. It has been observed to have the same effect without the gluten being the culprit. But since no single agent is responsible for a well defined group of people, we don't have a name for that effect except "food allergy."

3. If you eat a contaminated food that contains pseudomonas or clostridium d. maybe... those germs are known to excrete toxins that cause harm to you. Since 99% of the prokaryotes (bacteria that lack a nucleus and often live in community with eukaryotes - those that do have a nucleus and are better studied) are not even classified or discovered, our "flora" might at any moment be causing toxicity and we wouldn't know it. What you eat could cause any number of effects on these flora, it's a complete unknown.

RE #3: What is known is that IBD's often occur after a food poisoning incident and may persist for years if not the rest of the lifetime.

Some background reading that discusses the role of bacteria:
http://www.direct-ms.org/pdf/ImmunologyOther/Pathogenesis IBD Nature 07.pdf