Letters from the SCD support group: Date: Fri, 17 Jul 1998 17:43:04 +0200 From: gwozdz <gwozdz@vwl.tu-freiberg.de> To: scd-longisland <scd-list@longisland.com> Subject: Off topic - raw food Dear members of the SCD list, after being on this list for more than a year I decided to unsubscribe because I haven't been able to benefit from the list for quite a while now. My short story will tell you why: I was diagnosed with colitis/crohns of the large bowel in 1992 and since that time the inflamation, which was a minor one at the beginning, spread to affect the rectum and sigmoid (?), tiny inflammation at the end of the small bowel emerged as well. I started the scd in april last year and followed it till about august and then switched to the Lutz-diet since it turned out the scd didn't help me (boy I loved the homemade yoghurt). The very low carbohydrate Lutz-diet helped a bit, but it required eating a lot of animal fat and proteins, the quality of which, in general, is very poor everywhere. I was still taking drugs at that time, and coming closer to the end of the year my condition deteriorated more and more. Thus I decided to go for prednisone for the first time of my illness - up to 50 mg! It suppressed the inflammation but I felt like a zombie and got pimples all over my back. In mid Feb I had had it. I had always been looking for alternatives and finally come across raw food and - as you in America call it - Natural Hygiene (NH). I read all I could get hold of and the theory of NH convinced me that it was worth a trial. The idea of NH is: The cause of all desease is toxification. Detoxification gives your body the chance to heal. Toxification comes from cooked foods, meds, the environment etc. The only food usable for your body is raw food. I thought that, when it helped people cure cancer, it could help me as well. I went on a 2 days water fast, which was pretty rough, because I had lost a lot of weight already, and then started my raw food diet: raw fruit and vegies. I still had some canned fish and gouts cheese in between but found I did better without. And most importantly, I quit taking all drugs. I lost even more weight, which I learned was natural because of the detoxification process. It would take to long to go into the details, so to make it short: I am in the fifth month of eating raw food now and feel better than ever in the last 4 years. I don't take drugs, I eat an almost 100% raw food diet and recently I resumed running (6 km) and I notice an improved mental clarity. I don't want to conceal that the transition to a raw food diet is not easy all the time: I tend to overeat, which causes problems, naturally, and sometimes I miss yummy cooked food. But I don't miss the bleeding and the violent rushes to the toilet. These have not yet gone completely but I have them under control more and more. This is not a 100% success story (yet) but I know I am on the right way. I am still not convinced that I can do without any (raw) animal protein and fat, but I am convinced that cooked food is extremely harmful to my body, because it can't make use of it, whereas raw food is of the best nutritional value - without side effects, so to say. I am still searching. Maybe some of you find my experience interesting and inspiring. I purposely wrote this mail today because I feel a bit down, so I thought I won't sound too enthusiastic or even rightous or fanatical. Just one last thing before some links you might want to try out. At the beginning of this year I came across a drug called (here in Germany) "H15". It has helped people with inflammatory deseases tremendously but with much fewer side effects than prednisone (or even none, if that's possible). H15 is obtainable in Germany only under difficult circumstances through international pharmacies because it has not yet been approved by the national drug authorities. I have some picture files with information about it in English which were mailed to me by a nice guy who had collected information about this - actually very old drug - from India called "boswellia serrata", the main constituents of which are boswellic acids. I can mail them to you, if you are interested. And I just checked on the internet and found info about it too (see link). Boswellia serrata Roxb Miroslav
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