A friend of mine has just been diagnosed with Crohn’s disease and she said that she was thinking of trying a Paleo diet. I happened to come across a recent article by David Suskind et al called “Clinical and Fecal Microbial Changes With Diet Therapy in Active Inflammatory Bowel Disease”. It was about 12 children (aged 10-17), who suffered from inflammatory bowel disease (IBD), who had participated in a trial to evaluate a Paleo-type diet as treatment for the condition.
What interested me was not the results (we’ll cover these for completeness), but the diet trialled. It suggested that The Paleo Diet was documented in the 1930s, if not earlier. What is Crohn’s disease? What are the main forms of inflammatory bowel disease? What is the Specific Carbohydrate Diet? Was it an early form of The Paleo Diet? And what have bananas got to do with anything?! Let’s take a look...
