"All Disease Begins in the Gut" - Hippocrates

Here is the next part of our story. The book arrived and I read it in a day. Elaine's book spoke not just of eliminating Laurel's symptoms, but of actually healing her- healing her intestines to cure her Celiac disease. I had never heard such a thing. With wide eyes I read story after story of children who were able to return to normal eating after a few years on a special diet. Clearly this was not the just gluten free diet we were already on. After three years of pretty strict adherence to it, Laurel still had regular run-ins with contamination, was sensitive to dairy and many other foods, and was no where near being able to return to "normal eating." 

I was hooked. I started telling Laurel that I wanted us to try this kind of crazy diet in order to heal her. Her initial reaction was, "Sure, of course I'll try it." I realized that it was easy to make that commitment when the diet was an abstraction. I dove in to figuring out what it was all about. These are the basic tenets of the Specific Carbohydrate Diet (SCD):

1. Eats fruits, vegetables, meats, fish, eggs and nuts.
2. Do not eat anything that is canned, processed, or preserved.
3. The only sweetener you can have is honey (no sugar, maple syrup, agave, stevia). 
4. Eat only lactose free dairy (including yogurt that has been cultured for 24 hours in addition to certain hard cheeses and butter)
5. Eat no grains of any kind, and limited legumes and seeds.

On a very basic level, the philosophy behind the diet is that what the body consumes and cannot properly digest causes harm. The book uncovers what seems to be a great conspiracy about the gluten-free diet, namely that the original treatment for Celiac disease was to remove all cereal grains from the diet, which proved to be very effective for many years and was adopted by physicians all around the world. However a research study published in the 1950s that looked only at the effect of the elimination of wheat gluten from the diet gained popularity and momentum and quickly became the diet of choice due to its relative simplicity compared to the grain free diet. 

Though the gluten free diet is effective at eliminating most of the symptoms of Celiac disease, it is not able to cure it, nor does it cut out all the foods that cause damage to the gut wall. Armed with this illicit truth and a handful of SCD recipes, I set out for the grocery store and a path towards healing. 

Diving In

It all started with a baguette. I was supposed to be discussing setting up a bookkeeping system for my friend's new business. In between bites of baguette and cheese, we both kept remarking how exciting it was to eat this forbidden food. You see, in our houses, there are no baguettes. Both of us live with partners who suffer from autoimmune disorders. My partner, Laurel, has both Celiac and Grave's disease, so we follow a strict gluten free diet in our home. So even though we had set out to discuss bookkeeping, we kept coming back to our individual journeys to help heal our partners through food.

We had both tried various diets and food philosophies. My fall back was and had been for several years the anti-inflammatory diet recommended by naturopaths and acupuncturists. Recently we had tried the Abascal Way diet (also anti-inflammatory) and before that, Dropping the Acid to address Laurel's acid reflux problems. At this meeting, my friend and I exchanged recommendations for food blogs and one that she directed me to was comfybelly.com. When I got home I poured over the recipes on this site, finding many of them appealing and safe for Laurel. On the "about page" I read that the author followed the "Specific Carbohydrate Diet" in order to heal her son who had Crohn's disease.

I had stumbled on references to this strange and scientific sounding diet before while checking out recipes and advice on gluten free food blogs late at night, and had wondered what kind of people followed such a diet. Those people must have really serious health problems, I would think to myself. This time, reading about it again after two years of feeling powerless to help and yet terribly impacted by Laurel's intestinal turmoil, dizzy spells, acid reflux, various aches and pains, weakness and fatigue, I was curious. This time, I thought that we might be exactly the kind of people who would follow such a crazy diet.

I went straight to the source, the website of Elaine Gottschall, the woman who created the Specific Carbohydrate Diet many years ago to help her child who was suffering from another intestinal disorder. I checked out the website a little, reading a page on how to make a special kind of fermented yogurt. From what I could tell, the diet seemed restrictive, not hugely different from how we already ate, and like a big commitment. From the statements about the "high success rate" of healing intestinal disorders (such as celiac) I felt a glimmer of hope. I ordered the book. And couldn't wait for it to arrive.