It can perhaps be the easy option to take, for many misinformed people will advise you that it was your diet being one of the most likely causes of colitis. On the face of it this could appear a reasonable conclusion as, in a very simplistic form, all the food and drink that you have consumed does pass through the intestinal tract and therefore it is most likely to be responsible if something goes wrong. Is this really true?
There is also the misconception that some types of food consumed are identified as a cause of colitis because all of a sudden the known symptoms of the disease appear. The opposite is probably true in that some foods can triggers symptoms for sufferers but that is not to say that these foodstuffs actually caused the diagnosis in the first place.
The incidences of colitis were once restricted to countries of the West. What has been significant is the spread of the diagnosis of colitis to other areas of the world including former colitis free continents such as the Far East and Africa. This has come about by greater movement of people, a greater awareness of the Western lifestyle and with rising living standards, and a desire to adopt such a lifestyle. So therefore it can be easy to class diet as a cause through witnessing other continents embrace a Western diet, yet this would be incorrect without considering other matters.
What is required is further research and investigation into other possible contributors such as the role of genetics and also a very important element, environmental factors. In the last few years there has been extensive genetic studies undertaken and the results have identified several genes that can be associated with the incidence of colitis. Whilst these findings may be able to explain some of the diagnosis in Western society, it cannot be used as evidence for the ever increasing numbers of diagnosis of the disease in other continents. This is where the role of environmental factors has to be investigated. The role of bacteria, both good and bad, requires to be studied, the cleanliness or otherwise of our environment, the increasing amounts of stress that people are subjected to in their daily lives, are all factors that could play a significant role in the causes of colitis.
Simplistic analysis suggests that if a Western diet is a contributory factor in the onset of colitis then the basic formula of consumption of high levels of fat and sugar with a correspondingly low consumption of fresh fruit and vegetables is a recipe for an increased chance of being diagnosed. Whilst a conclusion could be drawn from some research that indicated that a diet high in sugar could be associated with a higher incidence of colitis, there is no demonstration that it could justifiable be a cause of colitis. It could well be that the desire for a greater consumption of sugar may be an actual consequence of being diagnosed with the disease rather than a cause of colitis.
As can be witnessed, there is much discussion about the causes of colitis and whether diet does actually play a role in its development. What should be taken from this is that a healthy balanced diet should be consumed and if someone is diagnosed with colitis, whilst adjustments have to be made to what is consumed, there still needs to be as much balance as comfortably possible in the diet to try and maintain good overall health.
