Don't let your Crohn's win. Beat the Crohn's.

Friday, December 21, 2012

A Cure/Cause of IBD?

Finals are finally done! Which means I have time to write another post. Today, I had the fantastic opportunity to talk with Dr. Steven Gundry from California. He's done some really amazing research, and I'm hoping to summarize his explanation of his theories about the cause of IBD.
Dr. Gundry first was a transplant surgeon, and apparently one of the best. He first began with the joke about how most people stop an elevator from closing with their hands, but surgeons stop it with their heads, because it's the least important part of their body. Joking aside, he took me throughout the timeline of his research. Dr. Gundry and his partner would do heart transplants, and several times it happened that the patients would develop coronary heart disease. They attributed it to the fact that those patients did not have healthy hearts before the transplant, so the same occurred with the new heart. However, the same thing began to happen when they did heart transplants on otherwise healthy kids.
Down the road, Dr. Gundry met a man who cleared his arteries in six months, with diet and supplements alone. This is a crucial part of his journey. He told me that you cannot see anything unless you go in with your eyes open, and without preconceived notions. Many researchers tend to already have theories about what should work, and that's what they end up seeing. Dr. Gundry saw that this man was clearly better, so for a year he tested this diet on himself and other humans. He thought that it worked, but wasn't sure how.
Dr. Gundry began to suggest this diet to his heart patients. His patients had amazing results. What couldn't be completely helped through medication was gone with this diet. Patients with other diseases said that they were even feeling no symptoms from the diet, which made sense because it was anti-inflammatory. People's arthritis was no longer bothering them, and Crohn's patients, who could never get rid of some symptoms no matter what treatment they tried, were symptom free.
At this point, Dr. Gundry looked at what exactly the diet was doing, whether it had more to do with what patients were eating, or what they weren't. What he realized, was that all the foods he had taken out of their diets included the protein lectin. This is a protein similar to gluten, but he has found that it plays a bigger role in autoimmune diseases. When on a gluten free diet, people tend to eat foods that are made from rice or corn, but corn contains 40 proteins that are very similar to gluten, so that explains why a gluten free diet may help, but it usually doesn't completely take away the symptoms of the disease. Lectin is contained within the seeds of certain plants and the genes of American cows (which is why people shouldn't eat cheese or drink milk from the United States).
This is how he explained how lectin is the problem. Plants are smart, a lot smarter than we give them credit. They can make matter from sunlight, which we have not been able to do yet. However, animals are their predators. In order to keep from being eaten, plants will put proteins (which act as poisons) within their seeds (or babies), in order to keep reproducing. Most animals, once they become sick from eating this plant, will stop eating it. He says that humans are pretty dumb; we think that we can overcome these poisons and take tums or immodium instead of not eating the foods that sicken us.
Lectin is contained in plants that were not originally eaten by our ancestors (if you are from European descent, possibly others as well), such as corn, potatoes, and seeds of fruits. At the beginning of human life (about 30 million or billion years ago), we only ate plants with two leaves. Although they also contain a poison, we had a long time to adapt and be able to digest them. Up until we were introduced to different foods (roughly 10,000 years ago), there is no evidence of arthritis in the skeletal remains of humans. As well, before that time period, most humans averaged to be over 6 feet tall. After then, humans shrunk to an average of about 4 feet, 10 inches (roughly 8,000 years ago). It took only 2,000 years to feel the damaging effect of eating poisons their bodies weren't used to. As he said, 10,000 years is merely a blink of time compared to the 30 (million/billion) years that we've had to evolve to be able to eat green, leafy vegetables.
The Kitavan society from the South Pacific eats no grains, and its only starch is from the taro root. They live well into their 90's with no modern medical care; they have no strokes, heart disease, or many other diseases of the modern world. And they smoke.
Italians refused to eat tomatoes until about 300 years ago because they believed the seeds to be poisoned. Irish people refused to eat potatoes until they had a famine 150 years ago because they believed them to be poisonous.
People with autoimmune diseases have a hyper-sensitive immune system. Dr. Gundry explained that when our immune system sees these toxins in our body, they attack more heavily than they do in a normal person's body.
Dr. Gundry also said that most people with IBD can relate the start of their symptoms to a certain event in their life, one that is usually related to stress or taking antibiotics. This is because our body relies heavily on the bacteria within our gut. There's about 5 pounds of bacteria in our gut, but they contain more genetic information than the rest of our cells combined. If these are messed up, such as by antibiotics or stress, it can start the onset of IBD if we are genetically predisposed to it.
 
I know this post isn't super well organized, but I'm still processing all of this as well. I was never a big believer in diets; throughout my 10 years I've been on tons of different diets, and none (except for liquid) have made me feel any better. However, I've been trying this diet (cheating a little bit now and again) for about 2-3 weeks now, and I had my first day of no loose bowel movements in months, if not over a year. I've gone through years of no remission, but I'm finally hopeful.
 
If you're interested in the diet here's what you can't eat:
Fruits
Corn
Grains
Dairy products from the U.S.
Sugar
 
What you can eat:
Nuts
Green, leafy vegetables
Meats (preferably organic)
French cheese or milk
Sheep and goat milk/cheese
 
If you have questions, feel free to message me!

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