I am curious to know if anyone has experience of shifting from a non vegetarian to vegetarian diet. I.e. did it make any difference to your symptoms ?

i don't have the experience, but a few others on here were vegetarians (vegans) and it was only after they switched from that to NSD that they found relief. i think i have my facts correct. but others will let me know if i do not. so, kind of the opposite of what you are asking, yes, i know.

if you are interested in investigating other diet angles, may i suggest that you find a doctor (naturpath perhaps) and have blood work done to find out what food you are sensitive to. this is how i found out my casein and to a lesser extent egg sensitivity.

for me, that testing was really needed because i don't have an immediate response to the food like some people do. nor do i seem to have a severe rxn to the food. so cause and effect weren't so obvious to me. though in hindsight, it does explain why dairy (even yogurt) flared my gastritis, but i thought i was ok with 1/2 cup yogurt or less at a time. now realize my error.

or, another approach, one that my naturpath doctor suggested to me, forgetting that we had done the blood work, would be to follow an "autoimmune / autoinflammatory" diet. when i read the pamphlet on it, i realized it wasn't that these foods were necessarily inflammatory in nature. rather it was merely a list of the foods that almost no one is sensitive to vs the ones that a larger group of people can be. so for example, it said lamb was ok, but beef was not. but for me, i know both are safe foods, based on the blood work.

and i've read recently how a gluten-free, casein-free diet seemed to help other diseases like autism.

i think we're gonna find more and more where there are certain food allergens that a lot more people are sensitive to than we ever realized.

with all of that. a diet high in vitamins and minerals will help boost the immune system and that shouldn't be a bad thing. so long as you're not eating foods that your system is sensitive to.

YES. YES. and YES.

I am currently 95% vegan - no aminmal products on a day to day basis, and just a little bit of fish/seafood a couple times per week. I have always loved a good grass fed steak, but my system no longer reacts well to digesting a big hunk of meat.

I also eat about 95% starch free, except for a few spices & starchy fruits/veggies. I am also 95% pain free because of eating this way.

I eat lots of fresh fruits & veggies, and I soak/sprout my nuts & seeds before eating them, so they are super easy to digest.

I now have boundless energy and a very positive attitude on life because I am no longer wearing myself down my trying to digest foods that don't agree with my body. I also feel better than I have in years because my body is virtually free of inflammation.

Some people claim to thrive on meat, cheese & eggs, but I personally know I am not one of them! Although my husband and our dogs love meat and our friend's farm fresh eggs, and they all seem to do quite well with them But their guts are in much better state than mine too.

I am very into "raw" un-cooking where you can make homemade nut cheeses that are full of go for you probiotics, and other fermented foods like sauerkraut, water cured pickles, etc. I also drink fermented water kefir. I drink lots of fruit/green smoothies, fresh juices, veggie meals, homemade nut/date bars, raw dehydrated veggie crackers, zucchini "noodles", salads, etc.

-Andrea

I detail the 1st two months in my blog going LSD + Vegan and all I can tell you is that it does not work in the long run. It's a great detoxifier, but long-term you miss out on important proteins and nutrients. One example of this is beans. Since vegans use a lot of these to substitute their protein instead of meat, it doesn't work for LSD since beans contain starch.

After two months, I lost close to 20 pounds and I was not even trying. My muscle mass decreased and I'm still battling being underweight / under muscle mass.

As mentioned, I would do allergy tests (food, protein, gluten, etc.) along with vitamin deficiencies. These are expensive, but well worth the investment. IMO if I had done these sooner, I wouldn't be going through the underweight/muscle mass issue - seriously, I have to use a rope to pull myself out of bed.

In the end, I'm probably going to eat a modified version of the paleo diet (meat, veggies, nuts), but it's just a guess until I get all my tests back (they can take up to 4 weeks).

That is excellent. What happens , if say you ate some e.g. red meat. Does it increase your pains overnight ?

If I were to sit down to a nice grilled Painted Hills steak (grass fed from our favorite Oregon ranch)on a Friday night as I used to do so often, I would soon notice within a couple hours my tummy would start bloating up, and I would feel lots of pressure and just feel uncomfortable. Then the next morning, my insides (gut walls) would feel inflammed and super sensitive, and then most likely the next morning my body would just feel more achey and I would have less energy.

I also would end up tossing and turning more as my body tried to digest that steak all night, which leads to feeling more sluggish and crappy the next day. Then it's like a chain reacation, once my body is inflammed, it continues to get more inflammed, the more interesting foods I eat, and then my back is burning again, and Hello Flare!

Now for dinner, I have a big bowl of fresh soup, maybe a giant plate of squash pasta with a nut based sauce (like brazil nut pesto), and then possibly a fruit/spinach smoothie a few hours later in the night, and I wake up feeling refreshed, and free of inflammation.

On certain nights, I have been eating fish and things like homemade crabcakes (yummy!) and I notice on those nights I also have more trouble with digestion, but I am okay with some discomfort once in a while, just not too often because that spells F-L-A-R-E.

The way I rationalize this in MY mind is I think my body got to a pretty bad spot with my colitis & AS, and it's just trying its best it can to heal itself, and with the wrong foods my body feels like it is attacking itself, and I think when I ingest too much DNA from other animals it does not aid in the healing process, instead my insides almost seem as they are rejecting the other animal proteins. Now, I don't know if this can ever be scientifically proven - but I honestly don't care, cuz it works for me!!

-Andrea

What sucks about being in the diet for a few months is that you really don't know what's hurting you & what's not. For Andrea, I'm betting that red meat is hitting her like a ton of bricks because red meat is the hardest to digest and makes her gut very acidic (BTW, Andrea, have you tried using HCL tablets to balance things out?)

For me, I do better with red meat, but still choose to stay away from it due to health reasons & healing my gut faster.

My hopes is that in less than 6 months I can take all of the tests I've done and use that info to test my body to make sure if it's a true flare-up or not. Of course I won't go for the well-known stuff, but fringe foods.

My doctor also mentioned HCL as a way to mitigate problems digesting protein. It could be that her stomach has too little acid to digest protein properly, in which case the HCL tablets help get it broken down into amino acids instead of letting undigested protein hit the intestines.

I was an aquanarian (is that the term? vegetarian but eat fish only) from July to December. In that period I had a dramatic reduction in my Ank Spond Pain and my general wellness.
However otu of the blue I had a massive relapse of another autoimmune problem and then my AS went crazy again. So it didnt seem to help me long term, but definately short term.

thanks for the website there Brian ill keep an eye on that.