/ck/ - Food & Cooking

>>12486000
>I'm telling you this because if it was food that *caused* IBD, why would the damage be showing up in predictable, very specific limited sections of the GI tract (for Ulcerative Colitis in particular) and not in all the other intestinal tissue, or in the stomach tissue for that matter?
UC and Crohn's are actually a hundred disorders classified under those two simple phenotypes. Finding one reason or solution to fit them all is not going to happen.

Personally I don't think food causes it directly but gut microbes+environment+genetics, the wrong combination and you end up with IBD. Certainly food can impact the microbiome, but has nothing to do with your environment or genetics.

However our knowledge on gut microbes is still pretty young and that's because it's very hard to study them outside of your gut. Out of the billions of types of microbes only about 20% of them work in traditional cultivation, and it's in a very artificial setting, they don't act and function the same as where they came from. Currently most if not all the studies on the microbiome and IBD are done after the development of the disease, so even then it can't be said if the imbalance is a cause or effect.

It's a very hard field to study but it's growing. Along with FMTs (poop transplants) showing a lot of positive results in the recent years.

Then there's evidence of environmental changes affecting people's microbiome, but for normal people they tolerate it fine, then IBD patients do not. Why? Probably genetic susceptibility.