mother of 8 year old with colitis...What else can We do?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

All the meds in the world won't fully help if his diet is irritating.  Tell us what you feed him.

 

You really need to be super attentive on reading food labels to avoid things like pepper, yeast extract, wheat gluten, MSG.  Also go easy on the fruit juices.  If his rectum is inflammed almost everything will aggravate him.  Start with HOMEMADE chicken soup NOT FROM A CAN.  Avoid preservatives and raw veggies.  Stew things to soften them up.  Avoid red meat.  Look at his vitamins and cut out IRON.  He might be a little aneamic but it's better to get iron infusions that taking vitamins with IRON.  IRON will upset his already irritated colon.  I can't imagine what you are feeding him for breakfast.  I'd stick with corn flakes or plain rice puffs in rice milk.  Most stores have rice milk in various flavors.

 

Eventually your goal should be to incorporate as much fiber into his diet as you can get away with.  This means resistant starches.  WARNING this will cause gas.  Gas pains are bad and so you need to start off SUPER SLOW but build up gradually over the MONTHS.  Slow and steady wins the race.  He will need the butyrate formed from the starch to help his colon.    You can get this from fiber choice with multivitamins that doesn't have iron in it.  Most stores carry this.  However a child only needs like 1/4 of a tablet at first.   Cold rice has 15 % resistant starch in it.  Slightly green bananas also have this starch.  But the most starch like this comes from beans.     This starch helps form into butyrate that is the most important thing you can get down to his colon of anything you can get into the diet.      Start incorporating curcumin / tumeric into his diet as a flavoring as it is very good for colitis.  The least irritating spice to flavor his food will be celery salt.

 

Post Edited (Horus) : 9/6/2007 2:46:55 PM (GMT-6)