The Specific Carbohydrate Diet (SCD)
Last week, I talked about the GFCF Diet which involves removing gluten and casein from your child’s diet. This diet allows the gut to heal, prevents the body having an autoimmune reaction and has been shown to reduce many of the symptoms of ASD.
The SCD, or Specific Carbohydrate Diet, is a step on from the GFCF Diet and was made popular by the book “Breaking the Vicious Cycle” by Elaine Gottschall.
Gottschall created the SCD after her daughter’s ulcerative colitis and neurological problems were dramatically improved by a change in diet. Elaine was able to make the “gut brain link” and realized that what her daughter ate affected her gut which, in turn, affected her brain. The SCD was born and has gone on to help sufferers of IBS, Crohn’s Disease, celiac, cystic fibrosis, diverticulitis, ulcerative colitis and autism spectrum disorders.
The Diet Explained
Full information can be found in Elaine’s book, “Breaking the Vicious Cycle”, on the website www.breakingtheviciouscycle.info and also on www.pecanbread.com but I will give you a brief overview of the diet here.
The SCD is a healthy, nutritionally balanced diet which just eliminates complex carbohydrates (disaccharides and polysaccharides) and refined sugar from the diet.
These complex carbohydrates are “banned” because they are said to feed the “bad” bacteria in the intestines which causes them to grow and multiply, produce harmful by-products and to attack the gut wall, causing it to become inflamed. These carbohydrates are also more difficult for the body to digest properly.
By removing complex carbohydrates from the diet, the harmful gut bacteria are “starved” and levels of gut bacteria (gut flora) are rebalanced and the gut can be healed, allowing it to work efficiently and effectively.
Complex carbohydrates are complex sugars and all starches. So unlike the GFCF Diet, which removes gluten (and casein), the SCD also removes starches such as soy, rice, buckwheat and corn. However, the SCD does allow dairy products which are made from goat’s milk, which is easier to digest than cow’s milk.
Foods which are eliminated from the diet include sugars and candies, starch vegetables such as yam, parsnips and potatoes, cow’s milk and cow’s milk products, some cheeses, grains, some legumes and processed foods which are high in salt or preservatives.
A Species Appropriate Diet
The success of the SCD is thought to lie in the fact that it is the diet that human beings were mean to consume and that it is the diet followed by early man, before the agricultural age.
Early man consumed a diet rich in meat and fish, vegetables, eggs, nut and fruit which were low in sugar – a diet very different from our modern diet and a diet which we evolved to eat over millions of years. Our modern diet is now rich in cereal products, bread, legumes and pasta, and because we have only been consuming this diet for a relatively short period of years (only around 10,000 years!), the human body has not had chance to evolve to cope with these foods.
SCD Success
Gottschall and Dr Haas (the man who taught her the principles of the diet) tested the SCD over a period of 50 years and found that over 75% of people following the diet reported improvements. According to Pecanbread.com, DAN! physicians using the diet to treat children with ASD have reported nearly 100% success.
SCD Recipes
Recipes to help you implement the SCD with your child can be found at www.scdrecipe.com and in the following books from Amazon:-
- Recipes for the Specific Carbohydrate Diet: The Grain-Free, Lactose-Free, Sugar-Free Solution to IBD, Celiac Disease, Autism, Cystic Fibrosis and Other Health Conditions – Raman Prasad
- Busy Mom’s Dairy Free SCD Cookbook with Honey Sweetened Recipes – Tina Wade
- Eat Well, Feel Well: More Than 150 Delicious Specific Carbohydrate Diet Compliant Recipes – Kendall Conrad
You can also find many videos and video diaries on YouTube testifying to the success of the SCD in treating autism.
Tags: ASD, autism, complex carbohydrates, gut, SCD, Specific Carbohydrate Diet, sugars
