I had the opportunity to attend a session at the Yale New Haven Health’s Irving and Alice Brown Teaching Kitchen. While I’m not a chef, I am the one who cooks (and bakes) in my household, so I was curious about what new information I could learn there.
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People with inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) are no strangers to fasting prior to procedures. Or, in some cases, to manage symptoms. How people cope with this time ranges from not wanting food anywhere near to them to binging cooking shows. But why?
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IBD is not a condition that is easy to diagnose or treat. People who live with Crohn’s disease or ulcerative colitis have needs that include guidance on nutrition. Diet is notoriously difficult to study but some research is starting to be done. Dannielle Jascot, MS, CNS, CDN, certified nutritionist and IBD patient talks over the recent results of the DINE-CD study, which compared the Specific Carbohydrate Diet and the Mediterranean Diet.
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What should people who live with inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) eat? What diet plans are available? Barbara Olendzki, the Director of the Center for Applied Nutrition and an Associate Professor at the University of Massachusetts Chan Medical School, helped developed the inflammatory bowel disease anti-inflammatory diet (IBD-AID). The IBD-AID is currently being studied in pregnant people in the MELODY Trial. Barbara gives the lowdown on the IBD-AID, the MELODY Trial, and how and why she got started in the nutrition field.
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People who live with inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) often have questions about what should and shouldn’t be included in a diet plan. There’s not one single diet for every person with IBD, which presents challenges for patients. Diet is difficult to study because there are so many variables. While more data and research on diet is clearly needed, there are some general guidelines that health care professionals can offer their patients.
Continue readingMy first gastroenterologist came to me by circumstance. I was referred to a different physician in the same practice, but when I needed to get in sooner, he was the one that had room in his schedule to do my colonoscopy. He was the one that diagnosed me with ulcerative colitis, and sweated over my case in those early days when I was struggling to hold on to my colon.
It might not be everyone’s favorite, and it’s certainly not health food, but I still love them.
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At some point after we’d managed to turn things around and I finally stopped bleeding, I came in for a follow-up to his office. I’d been on a low-fiber diet for quite some time, because that’s how treatment went in those days. I’m sure I felt deprived at times but I remember mostly being grateful that I could eat at all. In the hospital I received nutrition through an IV and could eat no food, so even soft low-fiber foods were a step up. I’m sure I wanted a green salad, but a steady diet of turkey and mashed potatoes was the thing that was going to put the 20 pounds I needed back on my body. Continue reading
I hadn’t given too much though to my relationship with food until recently when it occurred to me that my experiences with IBD have influenced my diet since diagnosis. In the IBD community people often share ideas about diet and nutrition, and what we eat is all very different. It has taken me a very long time, but I’ve come to understand that IBD has probably had a strong influence on my relationship with food — and not in a positive way.
When my ulcerative colitis was at its worst, raw fruits and vegetables were not in the picture.
Image © Tanya Hall
Diet has become a major topic of discussion for many people in the Western world. Most of us are overweight. We develop diseases from being too heavy, and yet many people spend a lot of time and energy dieting or thinking about how to lose weight. Since getting a j-pouch, having 2 children, and turning 40, I find myself amongst those that have to pay close attention to diet in order to avoid gaining weight.
In the IBD community, diet is discussed a lot, but there is no real conclusion. People with IBD can be anywhere on the spectrum of “diet has no effect on my symptoms” to “diet is how I keep symptoms from coming back.” The biggest problem is that you don’t know where you fall on this spectrum until you try different diets. And there are so many to choose from: no milk, no carbs, no meat, no animal products, no cooked foods, no gluten. Which one, or which combination, will have benefit for you?