Naomi Devlin, started using the specific carbohydrate diet when her celiac disease didn't respond to a gluten-free diet. In addition, it has helped her son who was on the ADHD scale.
She is a homepath, practicing in the UK, who often blogs about the SCD on her site: Straight Into Bed Cakefree and Dried - Grain Free and Loving it!. As well as writing about life with dietary changes, her site includes many delicious looking recipes such as Peach Frangipane Crumble. (Note: SCD recipes are marked as such--others are simply gluten-free.)
In the email below, she explains her motivation for using the SCD--and the positive results so far:
I chose SCD because it made sense to me. I'm celiac and I was in the process of writing a gluten free baking book, using all the unrefined gluten free grains, low sugar etc. Good healthy tasty stuff and not at all hair-shirty! But I was getting sicker and sicker, my skin was dry, sore and breaking out in eczema, I had diarrhoea and bloating, my periods were all over the place, I was overwhelmingly tired and my thyroid hormones kept fluctuating. I couldn't work out why - there was no gluten in my diet at all.
I noticed that the less sugar I ate the better, so I cut out all sugars except for fruit. But I would still have terrible days when all my symptoms were back. I knew it was the grains and the sugars and what I had was leaky gut. It seemed that the baking that I was doing for my book and my blog was the thing that was making me ill!
SCD has helped me enormously. I've been doing it for about four months now and my skin is returning to normal, hair is shiny, my stools are good and my stomach is flat again. It was tough at the beginning because I wasn't sure if I was improving and didn't do the intro diet properly. When I cut out seeds, coconut, peanutbutter and some of the harder to digest vegetables like peppers and cabbage I really started to see results. I also found that my taste for sweet things really died down and now I only use the tiniest amount of honey occasionally. My taste buds have woken up again.
It's been interesting for me with my son who I put on the diet too because he had constant diarrhoea too. He was also hyperactive at times - definitely not autistic but on the ADHD scale. I suspected that he was also sensitive to salicylates so it made the diet even more complex! Some of the staples of SCD such as almond flour, honey, fruits and vegetables are very high in salicylates so I have to watch the amount that he consumes. A glass of orange or pineapple juice sends him climbing the walls. So I've been making bread from ground brazils, hazels and carrot pulp left over from juicing which is delicious The difference in his behaviour is amazing; I helped out at school this week and he was calm, helpful and attentive. We also get a daily stool report too as they start to take shape!
In my practice I tend to look at diet first with many patients but very few of them are ready to make the changes they need to so I may recommend that they eat less starchy food. I also use low amine/glutamate and salicylate diets with relevant patients too. Food really is the best medicine. I believe that if you don't eat what your body needs, ill health can only follow.