Inflammatory Bowel Disease

Various Bits About Inflammatory Bowel Disease

There are two diseases that are included in the term “Inflammatory Bowel Disease” – which are Crohn’s Disease and Ulcerative Colitis.

Blog re: Inflammatory Bowel Disease Maintained by Mayo Clinic

This is a terrific resource:  LINK

“MESSAGES ABOUT DIET AND IBD NEED TO CHANGE, SAYS CANADIAN RESEARCHER”

The work of Dr. Deanna Gibson of University of British Columbia, Canada, reported online at Gut Microbiota for Health, by reporter Kristina Campbell, July 31/15  LINK

Quotes (IBD = Inflammatory Bowel Disease):

• She explains, “The first thing I learned was that a high-fat diet doesn’t equal ‘evil’. It really depends on the type of fat that you are eating. A diet rich in olive oil, for example — even though it’s high fat — I found beneficial during colitis.”
• When compared to the monounsaturated fat (olive oil) diet for those with IBDs, Gibson’s research showed that a diet high in polyunsaturated fats (found in many common supermarket products) was far inferior. “When [they] eat polyunsaturated fats, omega 6 polyunsaturated fats in particular… that diet turns out to be the worst. It’s very pro-inflammatory. It’s the worst for colitis patients.” Meanwhile, a diet with mostly saturated fats fell somewhere in the middle.
• “I think probiotics have the potential to be really powerful [for IBDs] because they certainly do have beneficial properties, but clinical trials have been pretty disappointing,” she says. “Probably one of the reasons is because probiotics die in a hostile environment like one found in an IBD gut or somebody with disease: inflammation and [an] oxidized environment. They don’t really know how to compete with the native flora, so they don’t have the right colonization factors.”
• From Gibson’s point of view, the most promising future strategy for modifying the microbiota in IBD is to use a more sophisticated method of fecal microbiota transplantation. “People are starting to figure out what’s inside the feces that’s important,” she says. “[We will deliver them as] probiotics, but ‘second generation probiotics’, if you will: something that’s a bit more intellectually designed [and] very specific.”

Lee D, Albenberg L, et al. (2015) Diet in the pathogenesis and treatment of inflammatory bowel diseases. Gastroenterology DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1053/j.gastro.2015.01.007