I know that many UCers cannot handle fruit and fiber food such as blueberries, but they might be worthwhile to eat if you can tolerate them.

I have always found that powdered psyllium seed works wonders for my UC. Again many others on this forum feel the same, and just as many find that it makes them worse or at best does nothing for them. The probiotics in kefir also seemed to help me so I began mixing kefir with Pseed instead of ordinary milk. At the time I was taking VSL#3DS.

Anyway that combination has been a wonder drug for me. I don't take it every day because VSL#3DS is expensive and the Pseed tastes terrible (yeech!) but as long as I monitor my diet then I don't need to take it every day. I added blueberries in an attempt to make it more palatable. That didn't work, nothing can improve the taste of that gunk, but I found that the blueberries seemed to make it even more effective for UC.

I believe this is an important factor that has helped me maintain a long term remission. Last week I really needed something because for sure it looked like I was on a superhighway to Flarestown. But this combination pulled me thru yet again. So I decided to do a little research and found that blueberries have a lot of studies backing them up. It worked so well that I decided to add more detail to my signature.

www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/02/100208145055.htm
New research from the Lund University Faculty of Engineering in Sweden shows that blueberry fibre are important and can alleviate and protect against intestinal inflammations, such as ulcerative colitis.

Åsa Håkansson and Camilla Bränning also noted that if blueberries are eaten together with probiotics, the content of butyric acid and propionic acid increased in the blood, two substances that are formed when fibre are broken down and that have previously been known to be important energy sources for intestinal cells.

Glad you found something that helps. Isn't flarestown in New Jersey somewhere?

GaryLouville said...
I was curious if you knew the reason for your suspecting you were on a superhighway to Flarestown

I noticed at first a gradual increase of frequency and stools becoming more raggedly and watery. The only thing new and different was that I was eating chocolate which had never been a problem for me before. Ordinarily when symptoms deteriorate I stop eating the offending food, but this was CHOCOLATE. Tried different brands that used to be fine to eat but now things continued to get worse. But the last thing I wanted was to put chocolate on my forbidden foods list.

Within 4 days liquid stools 6-7 times a day. My last flare in 2010 was accompanied with severe abdominal pain. Before my UC diagnosis I was sure I had ulcers. Now I needed once again to take DGL (deglycyrrhizinated licorice) for the pain. Not eating, lost 5 pounds in 3 days. The final straw was waking up 3 times at night to fill the toilet bowel with blood. That was when I knew I was in deep Doo-Doo.

I know how hard it is to escape a full-blown flare. Last time it took a 3 week course of antibiotics for a perianal abscess that serendipitously ended my flare. I hoped abx would work again this time but apparently my guts were not yet as badly shredded as before. One day after eating the Pseed, kefir, probiotics, blueberry gunk I noticed stools that were becoming less watery.

After 4 days I was back to normal with one solid formed stool a day. A work of art actually. I am fairly sure that if I continued to eat chocolate then I would have gotten worse and worse.

I used to be a BIG consumer of blueberries, even went to pick them and got about 10 pounds to freeze. But then my gut started objecting to them, probably due to the skin/fiber so had to sadly remove them from my diet. Now my gut is getting more OK with fiber and skin (grapes are OK now) so might dip my toe back into the blueberry field.

Yes blueberries (and other tart berries) have so many benefits but the gut rules. (I also have trouble eating just a few of them so that may have been part of it).

I heard about blueberries a while back and have found that they seem to alleviate my ulcerative colitis. I noticed quite a few here say good things about psylium seed and I want to try it too.