Diverticulitis: My Story
How my eyes were opened to the relationship between food and chronic disease.
In my twenties I got really sick; lying in bed for 5 days, bleeding from the lower part of my digestive tract: not pretty. I didn’t see a doctor at the time because I had no health insurance, so I have no idea what the diagnosis might have been.
Delirious days later and ten pounds lighter and I was recovered, except for one problem: I had diarrhea for the subsequent 14 years. That’s right, 14 years. When I got back into active sports it was a real problem, I had to bring a roll of toilet paper along everywhere, just in case.
And then in 2008 I passed out on the toilet on a ski weekend in Vermont. The emergency room at Bennington Hospital told me it was a stomach flu.
Four weeks later I got cramps at work. I had to lie on the floor until it passed. Then I drove to my doctor’s office, and he told me that I had diverticulitis, and I had to go to the emergency room.
I drove myself, and barely made it. I was in agony; I nearly passed out again while they were interviewing me to see if it was “serious”.
That’s a good trick to get through triage quickly, by the way. I heard the nurse yelling “Medic!” A little while later I had a doctor screaming, “Morphine!” down the hall, I was in so much pain.
Turns out I had a perforated colon. That’s right, a hole in my colon, with bubbles of air trickling out to my abdomen. I spent the next four days in the pre-operative ward, so if it got worse they could cut me open immediately. I lost 10 pounds. Then I started bleeding from my behind, and I realized these were all the same symptoms that I had had 14 years before. My blood pressure got so low that the automated blood-pressure machine wouldn’t work, it thought I was dying, and would alarm immediately.
Diverticulitis is supposed to be age-related in industrial countries—people in non-industrial countries don’t get it (Trowell, 1981). 70% of of people have it by the time you reach 80, which is why all the old folks eat fiber. It usually starts occurring at 40; I had turned 40 a week earlier! But the first attack in the 20s... I mentioned to all three of the doctors I saw that I had had constant diarrhea for the last 14 years (Cohen, 2013), since the first attack, and they shrugged. They told me to eat more fiber, and whole wheat, even though that was what I had been eating for the last 20 years. So I avoided surgery, started eating salad with salad dressing (containing industrial seed oils) and lots of whole wheat. And lots of running, since I’d read running helped diverticulitis. (Got my 5k PR at that point, still haven’t beaten it. As I was telling people, I was running from a man with a knife!)
But the more salad and whole wheat I ate, the worse it got. I couldn’t understand why. Finally had to have eight inches of my colon removed. The diarrhea continued, so obviously the cause remained.
So in 2010, I stopped eating industrial seed oils (veggie oils). In two days the diarrhea stopped. Eat the oils, it started again. I no longer craved starch or sugar, so I didn’t eat any wheat for a week, without meaning to. Then I had a sandwich, felt like crap, and had diarrhea the next morning. Hmm... but I didn’t have a problem with wheat! I ate tons of it! How could I have a problem with wheat? Another week went by, and I had two slices of pizza. I thought I was having a heart attack. So now I could turn the symptoms of the last 16 years on or off, based on eating veggie oils or wheat. Wow!
Stephen Guyenet says that chronic intestinal issues are an excellent indicator of a wheat problem, and now I believe him. I read Nina Planck’s Real Food one year before my surgery, and now I realize that if I’d just followed what that woman said, I could have avoided the whole thing, most likely.
Now I’ve learned that diverticulitis is one of the most common misdiagnoses of celiac, and erroneous bowel resections are common for people who are subsequently found to be celiac—some have died (Arvanitakis, 1977). And the 14 years of chronic diarrhea? Chronic diarrhea of the sort I had (I’ll spare you the details) are also typical of a wheat problem.
And none of my doctors ever mentioned any of this as a possibility.
Lots of people have serious problems with wheat, and come back negative on celiac tests. I think celiac is just one aspect of wheat poisoning (yeah, I know, a strong term) for people with a specific immune system profile. Apparently wheat causes leaky gut syndrome in almost everyone... It took them over 2000 years just to figure out that celiac was caused by wheat! Science and Medicine know very little about it.
Hopefully this story will help my readers, but after going through all this, and then realizing not only I, but my wife and daughters, all have wheat problems, it’s been quite an eye-opener. And the veggie oils are just plain toxic. Not fit for human consumption.
So that’s just part of the introduction. Next I’ll go into more detail on how I figured out what was going on.
Original post August 17, 2010.
Original Comments
References
Arvanitakis, Constantine. 1977. “Recurrent Colonic Ulcers in Celiac Sprue, an Unrecognized Fatal Complication: Report of a Case.” Diseases of the Colon & Rectum 20 (7): 613. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02586629.
Cohen, Erica, Garth Fuller, Roger Bolus, et al. 2013. “Increased Risk for Irritable Bowel Syndrome After Acute Diverticulitis.” Clinical Gastroenterology and Hepatology 11 (12): 1614–19. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cgh.2013.03.007.
Trowell, Hubert Carey, and Denis P. Burkitt. 1981. Western Diseases, Their Emergence and Prevention. Harvard University Press. https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674950207.
Man, this Stephan Guynet guy sounds smart!
I read the original edition of Wheat Belly on publication in 2014. I was interested because Good Calories, Bad Calories had made a huge difference in my life.
It was fascinating. I remember Dr. Davis described the role of zonulin in intestinal permeability and how that's affected by grains, especially modern grains. Because of hybridization modern wheat has almost 4 times the number of chromosomes, and subsequently more potential autoimmunity-causing proteins, than primitive einkorn wheat. He explained how celiac is just one kind of grain sensitivity, and a lot of people who test negative for celiac are nevertheless sensitive to grain (not just gluten), and suffer with mysterious chronic ailments.
I've not consumed grains since then. Somewhere along the line I also was motivated to give up industrial seed oils, probably a result of reading Hyperlipid.
It's not surprising how clueless your doctors were. Around 2005 my spouse-equivalent got really sick with what they thought was a severe flu; when I helped him through the emergency room doors, all the nurses took one look at him and descended like locusts on a cornfield. He looked that sick.
Turned out, he had a E. coli infection of his blood, which they said was caused by leaky diverticulitis. He almost died and was in intensive care for several days. Once your blood gets out of whack, it's really hard to get it back to normal again, but they managed. Anyway, about the diverticulitis, they told him not to eat berries because of the seeds. I don't recall any further advice 😐