The gastroenterologist never talks Crohn’s disease diet — unless you count their 5 second “eat what agrees with you” remark as they sign another prescription refill for anti-inflammatory medication. And I don’t.

Eating what agrees with you — it’s so simple and like most things is easier said than done. Finding what agrees with you requires constant testing, tracking and adjusting.

The paleo diet is simple and sounds very reasonable. The same foods humans have eaten for the last 200,000 are likely to still be healthy, nourishing and agreeable today. Grains are a relatively new food introduced into the human diet only 10,000 years ago, so our digestive systems haven’t had enough time to cope and evolve with these changes plus the heavily processed foods of today. Meanwhile, there’s evidence that people have been cooking with fire for 800,000 years, so grilled meat, veggies and mushrooms are among the most agreeable things we could eat.

Paleo diet for Crohn’s disease

This is the basic idea behind the paleo diet and why it sounds like practical advice: eat the basic, good foods that have nurtured and sustained humanity for hundreds of thousands of years:

• fish and grass-fed, pasture-raised meats
• vegetables
• fruit
• nuts & roots

Notice there were no grains, legumes, dairy products, salt, refined sugar or processed oils. Looking back through the fossil record reveals overall bone density dropped and we started developing immune diseases around 10,000 years ago, just when we started eating grains from agriculture.

Tags: crohns, diet, disease, paleo