A few years back I began having some pretty disconcerting symptoms of blood in my stool. At first it was pretty minimal so I ignored it. But it continued to worsen at a pretty quick rate, so I went to the doctor. Initially they thought it could be hemmoroids, which was ruled out after a quick check. I was then told to go see a gastroenterologist. I'll skip the gorry details here, but after a variety of uncomfortable tests, I was diagnosed with ulcerative proctitis. This is similar to ulcerative colitis, but just lower in the GI tract. When I was talking to the doc about whether he wanted to know what my diet consisted of, he said that wasn't necessary.... WHAT?? Doesn't it seem like a good idea to consider what's going in when you're having bleeding on the way out?? He just said to take a prescription med called Asacol.

So, I followed the doctor's orders and the condition seemed to disappear. After a number of months, I went back for a check-up and the doctor said I could start weaning off of the Asacol. Once I did this, the bleeding returned. The doctor then told me I should just plan on taking Asacol for the rest of my life and that will be fine. WHAT?? When I asked him what the Asacol was doing, he explained to me that it basically just put a waxy coating on my intestines so no bleeding would occur. The intestines were iritated and coating them would stop that. That just sounded pretty wrong and begged the question - what was irritating my intestines?

I decided to go to a naturopath who specialized in the GI tract - he teaches the subject actually at Basty University in Seattle. He immediately asked the questions I wanted the other doctor to ask - what's your diet like? After an extensive review of my family history, my life, diet, stress, etc., etc. he recommended that I look into a book called Breaking the Vicious Cycle. In a nutshell, this book discusses a variety of conditions that can be addressed with "the specific carbohydrate diet" or SCD. Once you start looking into this, you'll discover a whole movement of dedicated people who swear by this. Here's what the basic theory was in my case - in my intestines an inbalance had occured where my 'bad' bacteria had become so dominant that my 'good' bacteria couldn't do the job it is intended to do. So, the SCD basically starves the bad bacteria by eliminating most starches and processed sugars and has you eat a lot of yogurt to repopulate the good bacteria. That's a very simplified version. The SCD is used to treat a number of intestinal conditions - crohn's, irritable bowel syndrome, colitis, etc. I went on this diet for a year and it completely fixed me up. I'm no longer on any prescription meds and the bleeding has disappeared. It's also taught me a new way of understanding the effects of the foods I'm ingesting.

SCD is also being used as a treatment for autism which I found pretty interesting. Here's a link to the book if you're interested in checking it out -- http://www.breakingtheviciouscycle.info/book/the_book.htm