Thank you everyone for sharing your ideas and experiences. This is turning into a great
thread.
My own background involves a long illness, several years of antibiotic therapy, and the medical doctors despairing that I would live more than a week or two. If I did survive, I would be a cripple for the rest of my life... which is partly true, I do have damage from the infection that makes many daily tasks impossible. However, I can walk, I can write, I can cook, I can garden, I can care for my livestock, I can breath. I can do many things that they said I would never do again. It's been a decade since they gave up on me and I heal a little bit more each year.
What made the difference for me was diet. I had always eaten healthy by modern standards. I didn't eat at fast food restaurants. If I was making spaghetti, I would open a jar of sauce and add lots of vegetables to it. That sort of thing.
But after I'd been sick a while and they started talking about life expectancy in weeks, I changed all that. I realized I didn't want to die just yet, but there was very little I could do. No medicine was working, there were no treatments available. The only thing I could do was change what I ate, so I did. I started making everything from scratch. But even then, some foods were better than others. Then I discovered that many ingredients have long ingredients list (my unbleached, no additive flour in the cupboard has 7 ingredients plus wheat). It was many of these additives that were causing symptoms. So I had to learn where the ingredients were processed and how to source ones without certain additives. For example, many packets of cinnamon sold in Canada contain soy - but ones packed in the EU, don't. It's been a long learning process and I would like to share some of the things that have worked for me.
Cleanse your gut - What antibiotics do is they help your body to kill bacteria. As these bacteria die, they become toxic in your body and your waste system (gut, kidneys, liver, &c) has to work hard to cleanse them from your body before it starts to damage you (
which can trigger a Herx reaction). This is why you often feel worse on antibiotics before you feel better. In some cases, in some treatments and for some illnesses that have left the patient weak, the herx reaction can cause more damage than the initial infection.
It's good to have foods that help your waste management system. Lots of water. Medical charcoal or chlorophyll can help. IF (that's a huge if) your system can take it, soluble fibre in the diet can be a real bonus for cleaning the gut - however, for many people with illness and/or stressed out waste management systems, large amounts of fibre can be harmful or deadly - if you go the fibre rout, make certain it's soluble fibre (like in favas and chickpeas) and increase the amount slowly each day.
Know your food sensitivities - Everyone (in my opinion) has foods that they digest better than others. When your body is stressed from something like an illness or antibiotics it dosen't want the trouble of digesting difficult foods. These wrong foods (I don't like to call them bad foods like most people) can increase inflammation and reduce healing time. If you know your food sensitivities, avoid foods that bother you. If you don't know them, maybe you do know them in a way - what foods did you avoid as a child? I've noticed that often these are the same foods we develop sensitivities to later in life. Failing that, fall back on a neutral diet of rice, steamed veg, and a protein that doesn't come from soy (unless it's fermented in the traditional way - ie, not processed in North America).
Another possible way to discover your food sensitivities is to look at your ancestry. My theory is, like plants which adapt to their environment over a few generations, people too have genes that influence their physical make up. A person of European decent have ancestors who lived primarily on grains such as wheat and barley, as their main source of calories. Those who couldn't digest gluten seldom survived to reproduce - like a plant with no drought tolerance won't live long enough here to produce seeds or pollen. We have been selected over several hundred generations to survive on a specific diet. That diet is different depending on what part of the world your people come from. But I've noticed in the small sample size I've observed that quite often food sensitivities follow genetic history. So if you are from Japan, maybe avoiding tomatoes,
beef, milk and wheat might be useful, instead have a traditional diet of rice, fish, barley and fresh veg. From England? Avoid tomatoes, potatoes, corn, instead eat (fermented) grains like wheat, chickpeas, fava beans, veggies, &c.
Nourishing Traditions by Sally Fallon is a good starting point for learning more about how traditional diets can heal and some of the problems with modern food processing.
Avoid foods that kill good bacteria or encourage wrong bacteria - I call them dead foods. Foods that have been processed to store for long amounts of time. Pasteurized foods. Canned foods (including home canning - sorry). All the shelf stable foods.
Food, traditionally, before the recent inventions of canning and pasteurization, is a living thing. It contained bacteria, good and bad, and all sorts of other invisible beasties (my term for microorganism). Even dried beans in a jar in my pantry breath and slowly consume the sugars - because they are alive. The moment I put them in the ground, they will grow. Very few foods are naturally shelf stable. Flour when ground from whole grain will begin to taste rancid in only a few days because the oils in the germ of the wheat are now exposed to air. Yet, the flour we buy in the store can be ground a year a go. By removing the living part from the wheat - the germ - the flour will keep for many months before going rancid. To ship things long distances, to make them store well, all this requires eliminating invisible beasties both good and bad.
I've often wondered if these invisible beasties (good, bad and neutral) help our body to better digest the specific food. Maybe the good bacteria help break it down, maybe the bad bacteria tells our gut to create such and such a response - like homeopathy.
Then there are the foods like processed sugars that can encourage too much of one invisible beastie to take over. Like processed bread and sugar can encourage yeast infections.
For the most part, these dead foods have been commercially processed. A general theme of avoiding anything in a box, jar, tin, or package can be a big step towards keeping dead foods from your diet. Have a look at
In defence of food by Michael Pollan. Pollan calls these dead foods, 'food like substances'. This book is a marvelous introduction to those interested in improving their diet.
Live culture foods/Fermented foods/living foods - whatever you like to call them can make a world of difference to gut health. These are foods like yoghurt, sauerkraut, kefir, kimchi, miso, kosher dill pickles, and so many other things I can't possible list them all. Even traditionally made cheese and cured sausage like peperoni or salami contain beneficial bacteria.
Raw milk is an excellent source of beneficial invisible beasties; however, it is paramount that the milk come from a trusted source with healthy animals. Animals raised on a small scale where the farmer can pay strict attention to the health of each critter create some of the most nourishing substance available to humankind. But there is a reason why pasteurization took over so quickly, and it wasn't to increase shelf life. There are many pathogens that can be transmitted to humans through raw milk so it's vital that you take the time to know where your milk comes from. If you have been ill or are simply not use to raw milk, start small, maybe one teaspoon the first day, two teaspoons the next, doubling it each day until you are up to the amount you wish.
Live foods that have been pasteurized or heat processed - like sauerkraut in a tin - no longer have the beneficial invisible beasties that make them so good for the gut. Because they have been fermented, they still have nourishing qualities, but none of the live bacteria that we seek when rebuilding a gut after antibiotics or illness.
Likewise, cooking foods at home reduce or wipe out these beneficial bacteria. But there are ways to get arround this. When making miso soup, add the miso paste in at the end of the cooking time. Or add it at the regular cooking time, then add a little bit more miso paste at serving. Sally Fallon (
Nourishing Traditions linked above) tells us that even a small bit of yoghurt whey or life sauerkraut juice added to a meal at serving time can help increase digestibility and give our gut a few extra beneficial bacteria.
For more about fermenting foods, why they are awesome and how to make your own, check out Sandor Kat'z books
Wild Fermentation and
The art of fermentation.
Like I said in my opening post, there is no one right way to heal a gut. There are many ways that work. Some work for one person but not another. The ways I write here are what works for me.
I am very fond of the idea of eating a pre-industrial diet. Unfortunately I have to work with the damage that has been done to my system by my illness and it's treatment and the ingredients available to me. So, although I try to eat a diet very like England before the New World, my system can't tolerate high fibre foods. That means that pottages and soups must be made with semi-refined ingredients to avoid having too much fibre. I still add some new world foods to my diet, after all they are more-or-less part of a pre-industrial English diet. But I don't make a regular thing of corn, potatoes, tomatoes, or the like. Maybe once or twice a week if I'm feeling strong.
One other thing that has helped me is to have small amounts of many types of ingredients. A friend, long ago, spent a month on a fad diet where she was to eat 100 different ingredients each day. It seemed to agree with her while she was on it, but it was too much work for her daily life. I think it's a great idea, maybe not a full hundred different foods, but a vast selection of ingredients each day can be very beneficial. There are some new theories in diet which say it's not the quantity of the foods you eat, it's the information from the foods that effect your body. Since I can't eat much fibre, I can't eat many whole grains. But when I cook rice, I add one Tbs of brown rice for every cup of white rice, or a handful of whole grain flour for every cup of white flour. That way my body still gets the information even if it can't benefit from the volume. A little is better than none at all. A little bit of many foods seems to work better than lot of a few foods.
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