Dr. Maria Abreu, Professor of Medicine, Microbiology, and Immunology at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine, has conducted research on a diet for ulcerative colitis that can lead to a reduction in symptoms in sufferers. Ulcerative colitis is a chronic inflammatory gastric disease that causes severe abdominal pain, diarrhea, fecal bleeding. Managing this disease and living with it is not easy for those who suffer from it.

The doctor then recruited 17 people with severe ulcerative colitis and subjected them to a particular type of diet, dividing them into two groups and having them follow two different diets. After a month she reversed the groups: who first followed one diet for one month, did the other the next. What happened?

The result is what you read below.

ULCERATIVE COLITIS: THE DIET THAT WORKS

The 17 patients at the end of Dr. Abreu’s experiment had achieved a significant reduction in symptoms, transitioning to mild ulcerative colitis, but in some cases there was even a total remission of the disease. The point is, everyone only had improvement in symptoms when they did one of the two diets. With one diet everyone got better, with the other everyone got worse.

What diet did the doctor use?

Abreu put the first group on a diet high in fiber but very low in fat, reduced to ten percent of their daily calories. The other group, on the other hand, followed a diet rich in fiber but with 35% fat (similar to the Mediterranean one, which has about 30%). The fibers came largely from fruits and vegetables.

Improvements were noted only in the first group. When the groups switched diets, those who went back to eating more fat got worse, those who ate less fat got better. Basically, explains Abreu, the experiment has been able to demonstrate that a diet that is high in fiber but at the same time low in fat is the winning move to reduce the symptoms of ulcerative colitis.

However, it is necessary to reduce fats to a minimum, for example by limiting yourself to a teaspoon or two of olive oil a day and preferring skimmed or low-fat foods such as defatted white meats, white fish, whole grains, fruit, vegetables, legumes, egg whites, dairy products skimmed. Examples are the Pritikin diet and Doctors Rosati’s rice diet.

After publishing the results in the journal C linical Gastroenterology and Hepatology, Dr. Abreu is conducting the same experiment on Chron’s disease patients, and has announced that she is getting similar results.