3. Reintroduction

If your symptoms have gone, you feel fine, and your IBD is under control, why would you want reintroduce other foods?

1/ As mentioned earlier, the elimination diet is likely to be cutting out many foods which are perfectly ok for you to eat. Unless you have an extreme intolerance, sticking to an elimination diet forever is depriving yourself unnecessarily.

2/ Major health organisations argue that going meat-only, low-carbohydrate, or cutting out fruit and vegetables means your diet would be lacking in essential nutrients. Whether this is true or not, we regard eating a wider range of food as a nutritional ‘insurance policy’. As long as those foods are not causing a deleterious or inflammatory reaction we can’t see a reason not to eat them.

3/ We believe that permanently eliminating ‘reactive’ foods from your diet ultimately makes you more sensitive to those foods. Increased sensitivity to potential inflammatory triggers is not desirable in a mixed-food environment. Post-cessation of symptoms (and disease process) it is better to expand what you are eating, within reason. It could be that some foods or dietary agents such as wheat, sugar, vegetable oils and high fibre, will never be well tolerated, so  don’t eat them - or at least, not chronically or in large amounts. It could also be that too much of similar type of foods will have a cumulative effect causing an inflammatory response.

The straightforward procedure for reintroduction:

Choose the food you want to reintroduce. Eat a small amount (a teaspoon or two). Wait half an hour. If you get a negative reaction, don’t eat any more (you won’t want to!).  If you feel ok, repeat twice more with a bit more food each time.

With your next main meal that day, have a normal-sized portion. If there are no reactions you’re probably ok with it but don’t eat it for the next four or five days. Don’t reintroduce any other foods during this time. Look out for any symptoms. If everything is ok during this time the food can be eaten normally.

Over time you may find a better way to reintroduce different foods – the point is you must reintroduce one at a time. It’s a reasonably lengthy process, but it’s far better than suffering another flare-up or taking life-long medication.

Eating a food which produces the symptoms of IBD, virtually proves that your dietary change and symptoms resolving weren’t just a coincidence.

Probiotics, supplements, and ‘superfoods’

This website is predicated on the subtractive approach. We believe the most effective way to get better is to take out the stuff which harms, not adding something to mask, relieve, or ‘cure’. Most CD/UC sufferers will benefit more by taking things out of their diet – at least initially, than adding something to sort out their gut microbiota, dysbiosis, etc.  By all means choose this route, but be aware that supplement companies are trying to sell you something.

Firstly, cut out the foods which are causing you problems, then if you feel you need to take something which ‘resets’ or sorts out your guts so that what used to harm you no longer harms you (that’s the theory), that’s fine. The human microbiota is incredibly complex – trying to figure out which probiotics or supplements to take is a hit and miss affair. We think the elimination approach is a more effective and quicker way to resolve your symptoms.

If you take a supplement at the same time as adopting an elimination diet how do you know which route has been effective? We are not against targeted supplementation per se (especially if they effectively correct a nutritional deficiency), but try the elimination route first and later on add in supplements, one-by-one.