What is Crohn’s Disease and How Did I End Up With It?
Ever since being diagnosed with Crohn’s Disease in the summer of 1999, I have wondered where it came from. Crohn’s disease is an autoimmune disorder that can attack any part of the digestive system. Crohn’s falls into the category of Inflammatory Bowel Disease (IBD) which also includes Ulcerative Colitis. In my case Crohn’s attacked my small intestine at the ileum. Like most autoimmune disease the exact cause is not known and like most people with IBD I was told food didn’t have anything to do with causing or controlling it.
A few months after diagnosis I ended up in surgery to remove 12 inches of my small intestine. Again, I was told I didn’t need to worry about my diet, but within a year I started having some digestive symptoms. I discovered the Specific Carbohydrate Diet™ (SCD™) in 2000 and have been using diet to keep my Crohn’s in remission ever since. I know diet plays a big part in my personal health, but I still wonder how I ended up with this illness in the first place. Genetics, some unknown trigger or maybe both?
I don’t have those answers, but my current dietary choices have made me reflect on the past.
A Brief History of My Family and Food
I wouldn’t say I ate a poor diet growing up, but I will say it was kind of a mixed bag. I’m a Gen Xer and ate meals very typical of the time – meat, starchy side, and a vegetable that usually came out of the freezer or a can. Sometimes we had spaghetti, tacos, or the backyard fare of hamburgers and hot dogs. Nothing all that noteworthy.
My mom became a single parent by the age of 25 and I spent a lot of time with my grandparents while she was going to nursing school and then getting a job as a nurse. My grandmother was born in 1919 and was just entering her teens (what we would now call a tween) when the Great Depression hit. She was the second oldest of six girls in her family. Times were hard of course. Her family lived on a farm, so they had food, but everything was very hard work and not always in abundance. They grew their own fruits and vegetables and butchered their own meat.
They relied on canning and smoking meats to get them through the winters. It’s not a time my grandmother ever looked back on very fondly.
My mom was born in 1952, the youngest of my grandmother’s five children. By that point in time, my grandmother was more than ready to embrace some of the new modern conveniences that began to appear in grocery stores during that time. Though she was a great cook, she was more than happy to give up baking bread and cakes. She was happy to buy the already made (and sliced!) loaves and the boxed cake mixes from the grocery store.
She still bought these things when I spent time with her, saving her big cooking projects for the holidays. My grandparents did have a huge garden and still grew tons of fresh fruits and vegetables, but they also enjoyed the store-bought lunch meats, American cheese, and canned soups.
My mom was not as into processed foods. She went through several health kicks during the ’70s and ’80s and we always had stuff like wheat germ, puffed rice, carob, and other health food store staples of the time in our cupboards. I remember her making homemade peanut butter and we even had a yogurt maker. When she bought cereal, it was usually those big bales of Shredded Wheat. We even had a chicken coop for fresh eggs, and she occasionally butchered a chicken for us to eat. Having a “TV dinner” was a special treat – of course back then they took about an hour to heat up in the oven.
When she married my stepdad (when I was 8) he was adamant about making all baked goods from scratch. He did not believe in buying store-bought bread, cookies, or cake. I learned a lot about baking from him, though he didn’t always use the best ingredients. He loved corn syrup, shortening, and hydrogenated vegetable oil.
I grew up with an appreciation for homemade food and garden vegetables, but I was pretty picky. I didn’t like most vegetables for a long time and I had a decent sweet tooth. I wanted candy, cookies, and ice cream and I could usually get it when I was with my grandparents.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m in no way blaming my grandparents for my Crohn’s Disease. I just find the connection between the rise of processed foods in the ’50s to be an interesting connection to my own upbringing and what people have thought about food ever since that time. We’re all products of the information we’re given.
What is Processed Food?
Generally speaking, food processing is considered to be any alteration from its natural state. This would include chopping, peeling, and cooking. That is not the kind of processing I’m talking about here, since that would apply to almost everything, even if you’re a raw foodist.
What I’m talking about it is modifying food from its natural state by stripping it of nutrients, adding preservatives, artificially fortifying with nutrients, and manufacturing foods that are very far from their original source.
In the 1950s these foods were marketed as not only being convenient, but being healthy, maybe even healthier than their homemade counterparts. These claims were made in part because breads and cereals were fortified with vitamins. Processed cheese was advertised as being healthy because it contained milk and canned soup because it had vegetables in it. But we know the nutrients have been pretty much obliterated due to the processing it takes to get bread soft and give it shelf life, or to make a sodium-filled canned soup have any flavor.
The exact effect of this processing on our food has on our gut microbiome isn’t known, but I don’t think a connection can be discounted. Of course, we all know people who eat the unhealthiest of diets and seem to have no problems – at least for a time – but that will always be the case. People do not react the same why to the same stimuli.
I don’t know why I have Crohn’s Disease, but I do know food plays a big part in the healing, so I have to consider that it may have played a part in the cause.
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