How to Deal

I can't remember if I talked about this book before, I know I've at least mentioned it briefly. I'm reading (again) Breaking the Vicious Cycle, Intestinal Health Through Diet by Elaine Gottschall. It's a diet for Crohn's, Ulcerative Colitis, Diverticulitis, Celiac, Cystic Fibrosis and chronic diarrhea. It also shows some links to Autism which I found interesting. The diet focuses on a grain free, lactose free, low sugar diet and is said to have cured hundreds, possibly thousands of people with various IBDs. This also goes along with the book a posted about not long ago, Going Against the Grain. The book talks in great detail about how grains and sugars are processed in our digestive system and what happens to people with digestive disorders. Basically, there's not a lot of evidence out there that shows what the cause of these disorders is, but there's a lot of studies that show that grains and sugars exacerbate the problems. I don't know, it's all very confusing and I'm sure I'm not articulating it properly but the bottom line is this is the reason I choose to be gluten-free because there's nothing harmful in it and if anything I'm in worse shape if I continue to eat gluten. The frustrating part about all of this, is that there is not nearly enough research being done to help people with digestive disorders. Doctor's don't recommend gluten-free or grain-free diets to people other than Celiac patients because there is not enough scientific evidence that it's helpful. The issue with that is, there haven't been enough studies done, so how do you know? It blows my mind that the symptoms between Celiac, Crohn's, and Ulcerative Colitis are so similar, and they know for sure that Celiac is gluten intolerance, yet they don't at all believe that Crohn's and UC could also be aggravated by gluten. Does that make sense to anyone else? The differences between the three are the areas of the bowel affected and the type of damage to the bowel. There are so many people out there that have gone gluten-free or done the specific carb diet and have been completely in remission ever since, so why don't they do more research and see if this is a viable option for all IBD patients? I don't know how the medical field works but am I naive to think this is so obvious? Maybe it's because there are too many other patients that don't find these methods successful, but there are no books about those people. At any rate, I am not the type of person that wants to spend the rest of her life on medication, so I'm going to do everything I can to fix this problem with diet, exercise, stress management, etc. If that means going at least gluten-free if not, SCD then that's what I'll do.