How to Heal From Crohn's Disease

This four-page quick guide is a complete strategy to induce and maintain remission from Crohn's disease using diet and supplements.

Crohn’s disease impacts one to three percent of the population, and first-degree relatives of people with Crohn’s disease have a ten- to 20-fold risk of developing it in the future.

While most people are diagnosed between the ages of 15 and 30 with the peak in people between the ages of 20 and 29, young children can develop Crohn’s and many people are diagnosed between the ages of 50 and 80.

Thus, if you have a first-degree relative with Crohn’s you should certainly be looking after your own digestive health to avoid developing it in the future, no matter how old you are.

Crohn’s causes abdominal pain, diarrhea, weight loss, and fatigue.

Medical management of Crohn’s can involve surgery, but surgery intrinsically damages the microbiome, and not everyone’s microbiome recovers from it. The relapse rate after surgery is over 80%.

It can also involve medications such as immunomodulators, steroids, and biologics, most of which are monoclonal antibodies to TNF-alpha. These medications come with an increased risk of respiratory infection, psoriasis, neurological problems, and symptomatic immune responses, and the jury is still out on whether they increase the risk of cancer.

Once you go on a biologic, the relapse rate is extremely high if you even try cutting the dose let alone going off of it.

On the other hand, the power of nutritional healing is extreme.

This can be seen starting at birth: babies who are breast-fed for one year or more have an 80% lower chance of developing Crohn’s compared to those who are only breast-fed for three or six months.

Crohn’s is strongly associated with industrialized economies, hinting that processed foods and their additives may be almost necessary for Crohn’s to occur.

Exclusive liquid formulas are just as effective as the most powerful medications in inducing remission, but most people are three times more likely to discontinue these diets than they are to discontinue steroids because they hate them, and because they experience heartburn, flatulence, diarrhea and vomiting.

In fact, exclusive liquid formulas are made from trash ingredients and have been shown to hurt the microbiome in a manner that predisposes to relapse as soon as people start reintroducing solid foods.

Many diets, such as the Specific Carbohydrate Diet, the low-FODMAP Diet, the IBD-Anti-Inflammatory Diet, the Crohn’s Disease Exclusion Diet, the Gronigen Anti-Inflammatory Diet, low-carbohydrate diets, high- and low-meat diets, high- and low-fiber diets, and low-microparticle diets have been evaluated in some form or another for efficacy in Crohn’s disease.

But the literature is a mess. Interpreting it properly requires dozens of hours of work, an understanding of trial design and statistics, and mechanistic expertise in the causation of Crohn’s.

I therefore have synthesized the most efficacious of the tested diets and the tested supplements with mechanistic research on what is required to optimize the microbiome, metabolic contributors to Crohn’s, and mechanical tension in the intestines to produce a four-page protocol for inducing and retaining remission.

This is educational in nature and not medical or dietetic advice. See terms for additional and more complete disclaimers.

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