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Chronic Inflammation of the Intestines
A chronic inflammation of the intestines is a very debilitating condition. Healthy intestines are neccessary for the proper digestion and absorption of nutrients, minerals and vitamins. Regular medicine regards most chronic inflammations as auto-immune diseases. Auto-immune means that the immune system of your body is attacking your own healthy cells.

Regular Treatments
Regular treatments are focused on stopping the destruction of the intestines. This can be done by:
Lowering the immune system activity (ie Prednison)
Taking away the weapon of the immune system (ie Remicade)

These treatments all have in common that they don’t fight the primary cause of the chronic inflammation. They only try to decrease the damaging effects. By using any of the regular medications, you are willing to agree to a compromise. You loose some health on one side (imagine a TBC or other infection disease when your immune system isn’t functioning), and gain some on the other side. Alas, it’s often experienced that the doses need to be increased and eventually the medications don’t work anymore. As a last resort, one can take away (operatively) the inflammated tissue.

New Treatments - SCDiet
The new treatments are focused on taking away the primary cause of the chronic inflammation. The Specific Carbohydrate Diet is very effective in doing this. According to the SCDiet theory, the chronic inflammation is caused by a vicious cycle. In short: You keep feeding the bad bacteria the foods you can’t digest anymore, while these bacteria keep on destroying the intestines. The intestines can digest even less because of the damage caused by the bacteria. As a result, even less foods are digested and the bacteria eat even more.

Probiotics

Bad bacteria can be slowed down by following a low carb diet like SCD.  Home made Yogurt, which is part of the SCD diet is a wonderful probiotic if it’s tolerated.  Many don’t tolerate the Yogurt well.  Another great natural probiotic is SauerKraut.  I must stress though that you must purchase raw (not pasturized) SauerKraut.  Just a spoonful or 2 with meals.  Remember too much of a good thing is not healthy.  Other probiotic formulas that have been very successful for SCD users include Primal Defense and Culturelle.

 Fiber

Psyllium is another great thing to add to the diet.  It regulates to keep the sytem running smoothly.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 22nd, 2007 at 8:18 pm and is filed under Alternative Medical Ideas. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.