My Crohnstipated Life

According to Dr. Rubin, there are two major reasons people become malnourished when they have inflammatory bowel disease. The first one is due to the bowel itself, and what we would describe as decreased absorption of nutrients. That may be due to inflammation of the bowel that doesn’t allow you to absorb the nutrients that your body desperately needs. It may also be due to resection, or surgical removal, of bowel. So if you have had portions of your intestines removed, you can end up with malnourishment or at least malnourishment of specific nutrients. People who have strictures or narrowing of their bowel, or who have had surgeries and have scar tissue in their abdomen, can develop loops of bowel that have an excessive amount of bacteria, and they actually can contribute to types of malabsorption.

The second major category of malnutrition is simply that people are not taking in enough calories. People learn very quickly when they suffer from these disorders that if they don’t eat or they eat a lot less, their symptoms are minimized. So they develop what we call food phobia, which means that they’ve learned that when they eat they feel bad, so they start to either consciously or even subconsciously avoid eating enough, and by limiting their diet they can end up becoming malnourished.

To me, that’s an unacceptable lifestyle, to achieve an unrestricted quality of life that also means enabling people to be liberated from these types of elimination diets so they can enjoy all the things they want to enjoy.

The better way to manage it is not to eliminate more and more foods so that they don’t feel any discomfort, but rather to understand the extent of their disease and to employ appropriate therapies to take care of it so that they can enjoy eating the different foods that they want.