Have you had it with digestive problems? If everything you eat causes you indigestion, diarrhea, gas or cramps, the good news is it's not everything.

As we age, the digestive process becomes less efficient with a decrease of hydrochloric acid, the digestive juices. Therefore the foods you may have enjoyed for years, suddenly become your worse enemy. Foods that you have always been encouraged to eat: complex carbohydrates may be taxing your aging digestive system.

The Specific Carbohydrate Diet (SCD)

Taking a new look at your diet may drastically anti-age your digestive system.  The SCD may just be that new look.  Dr. Sidney Haas, who died in 1964 at the age of 94, was dedicated to improving his patient's digestion woes.  He created the SCD after 50 years of researching the effect of carbohydrates on celiac disease, a digestive disease that damages the small intestine and prevents the ability to digest gluten.

Dr. Haas' work was an blessing to celiac disease sufferer but may have been lost to the rest of us had it not been for Elaine Gottschall, a biochemist and cell biologist, whose daughter suffered from colitis. Gottschall authored Breaking the Vicious Cycle and  pointed the guilty finger straight at gluten as the cause of everything from irritable bowel syndrome and Crohn's disease to autism.

The SCD restricts not the amount of carbohydrates you eat but the type: slowly absorbed starches, which sit in the intestines and feed microbes and produce harmful by-products such as yeast, acids and bacteria.

Are You Gluten Intolerant

The list is long and may be indicative of other disorders. Don't self-diagnosis but use the following information to consider whether you might benefit from the SCD.

What You Can't Eat

• All sugars and sugar substitutes except saccharin
• Fructose and corn syrups
• All grains and grain flours
• Oats
• Pasta
• Potatoes
• Rice
• Animal milks
• Mozzarella, ricotta and American cheeses

What You Can Eat

• Nuts and nut flours
• Homemade yogurt
• Fruit and unsweetened fruit juices
• Honey and saccharin
• Most vegetables except potatoes
• Most beans
• Aged cheeses and dry curd cottage cheese
• Fish
• Beef

Get a more complete lists of foods at Breaking the Vicious Cycle.

While the Special Carbohydrate Diet is quite restrictive of typical American foods, if your symptoms are few, you may fare quite well by finding the food(s) that cause your digestive problems. Wheat is by far the most common culprit and eliminating it for a week or two may bring the welcome relief you need.

Adding the probiotic benefits of homemade yogurt is one of the most important anti-aging and healing foods you can have in your diet. Making yogurt is quick, easy and inexpensive. A yogurt maker is the most important kitchen devise you can buy for your health.

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