The Specific Carbohydrate Diet, or SCD, is designed to treat digestive disorders such as inflammatory bowel disease, celiac disease and chronic diarrhea. While many people may cringe at the idea of following a restrictive diet, the Specific Carbohydrate Diet has been instrumental both in helping patients control their symptoms as well as resolving serious complications such malnutrition.
Malnutrition Explained
Malnutrition means that your body is not receiving sufficient nutrients. While lack of food or poor diet can cause malnutrition, it may also occur when your body is unable to properly absorb nutrients from your food. This malabsorption is a common side effect of digestive disorders like inflammatory bowel disease and celiac disease. Malnutrition may be mild or severe and may cause symptoms such as fatigue, dizziness, weight loss and poor immune system function.
How the SCD Works
To understand how the Specific Carbohydrate Diet can heal malnutrition, it helps to have an understanding of the basic premise of the SCD. The SCD is predicated on the fact that the human gut contains a huge number of microorganisms. In a healthy person, these microorganisms exist in a delicate balance that favors the proliferation of beneficial microbes. If this balance is disrupted, however, harmful microbes may begin to take over, causing unpleasant symptoms and leading to the formation of certain digestive disorders. The Specific Carbohydrate Diet rebalances your gut microorganisms through the consumption of easy to digest foods.
Healing Malnutrition with the SCD
The Specific Carbohydrate Diet reverses malnutrition by limiting the diet to foods that can easily be digested by people with compromised digestive systems. Patients eat meats, eggs, fish, vegetables fruits, nuts and fermented dairy products. Complex carbohydrates, such as grains and starches, are prohibited because they are more difficult to digest. Furthermore, complex carbohydrates boost the body's population of harmful bacteria because they are rarely fully digested and the undigested remainders are the ideal food for harmful microbes. By avoiding difficult to digest foods and consuming only easy to digest foods, patients receive adequate nutrients while slowly remedying the bacterial imbalance that allowed malnutrition to occur in the first place.
Malnutrition and SCD Carbohydrate Intake
While SCD patients need to be vigilant about avoiding complex carbohydrates, this does not mean that they should attempt to remove all carbohydrates from their diet. Healing from malnutrition often requires that a patient consume sufficient amounts of allowed carbohydrates, so attempting a low-carb version of the SCD is often does not help heal a patient from malnutrition. Acceptable carbohydrates include fruits, sweet veggies, honey and nut-flour baked goods.
References
- KidsHealth from Nemours: Inflammatory Bowel Disease
- KidsHealth from Nemours: Hunger and Malnutrition
- MedlinePlus: Malnutrition
- Breaking the Vicious Cycle Website: The Specific Carbohydrate Diet
- Breaking the Vicious Cycle Website: The Science Behind the Diet
- Breaking the Vicious Cycle Website: Carbohydrate Content
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