If you are familiar with Breaking the Vicious Cycle or the previous edition, Food and the Gut Reaction, you may find it odd that this is the book I read right after reading the 432-page monster Bread, which is all about baking and eating complex carbohydrates, but such is life. I’ve recently had a good reason to learn a lot more about the Specific Carbohydrate Diet, and Breaking the Vicious Cycle is the source of that diet.
The Specific Carbohydrate Diet is a diet intended to help heal the Inflammatory Bowel Diseases Crohn’s Disease and Ulcerative Colitis, as well as Celiac Disease, and perhaps autism. The theory is that people affected by these diseases have trouble properly digesting complex carbohydrates, and undigested complex carbohydrates feed intestinal bacteria that shouldn’t be fed, which wreaks havoc in the digestive tract, so, by eliminating all carbohydrates other than simple glucose from the diet those bacteria, (which aren’t really desirable), have nothing to eat and die off and the digestive tract is able to heal itself.
I first heard about the SCD diet years ago and have seen it work for people, but I never fully educated myself about the theory behind it. It was really interesting to finally see why the SCD diet is thought to work instead of semi-blindly following instructions.
If you or someone you know is struggling with IBD or Celiac Disease, I highly recommend looking into the Specific Carbohydrate Diet as a natural way to help manage your disease. It may not help you, but on the other hand it may.
