One man’s cure for a painful gut ... eating stale bread

MOST of us think stale bread is only good for the bin. But not Roy Anderson. For after 40 years of failed treatments for his Crohn’s disease, Roy found that old bread was the only thing that helped.

The 78-year-old former member of the Royal Ulster Constabulary Reserve is convinced that a remedy based on an old-fashioned treatment for wounds and inflammation on the skin works on the inside, too.

The idea came to him last May while watching an old John Wayne film in which a doctor used an ancient cure to treat an injured soldier.

Roy was reminded of the poultices his grandmother used to put on cuts and grazes. A poultice is a soft, moist mass of bread, clay or other binding ingredient which is usually heated, spread on cloth and applied to a sore area.

For years Roy’s symptoms — stomach pains and frequently having to rush to the bathroom — had taken over his life. Seeing the film was a lightbulb moment.

‘I thought a poultice inside my body might heal my gut in the same way it helps healing on the skin,’ explains Roy, who lives with his wife Iris, also 78, in Bangor, Northern Ireland, and has two children and four grandchildren.

He cut slices from a loaf and left it for seven days, covered with a dishcloth. He then poured milk over the stale bread and heated it in the microwave before eating it (he’d fasted the previous day).

‘Afterwards I felt so different — I had no stomach pain and my motions were normal,’ he says. ‘I haven’t even had to eat it again. Having it that one time seems to have cured my gut.’

Sounds dotty? In fact, Roy’s serendipitous discovery chimes with the latest thinking about gut health and bacteria.

Scientists are working on the idea that altering bacteria inside us — through what we eat — could be a new approach for treating inflammatory bowel disease (IBD), an umbrella term for a range of gut conditions including Crohn’s disease, which affects Roy. CROHN’S

is caused by the immune system attacking healthy cells in the lining of the digestive tract leading to pain and chronic diarrhoea — one theory is that it is linked to antibiotic use, which destroys gut bacteria.

Last week, Dr Sally Mitton, a consultant gastroenterologist at St George’s Hospital, South-West London, blamed antibiotics — and junk food — for the threefold rise in young people being treated for Crohn’s over the past decade.

The immune system can also trigger a similar condition, ulcerative colitis. This affects the colon, low down in the digestive tract, causing ulcers which can then bleed. Around 260,000 Britons are thought to be affected by these two debilitating conditions. At the moment there is no cure for IBD. The main form of treatment is with drugs such as infliximab, which work on the immune system to stop the gut’s inflammatory reaction. However, these are generally only given in severe cases as they knock out the immune system, and sideeffects include an increased risk of infections.

Steroids can also be given in severe cases to calm down inflammation. But again, these don’t tackle the root problem.

In some cases the gut becomes irreparably damaged, and around 60 per cent of patients with Crohn’s and 20 per cent of those with ulcerative colitis end up having part of their gut removed.

But research suggests that probiotics may provide a solution. These are the ‘good’ bacteria that colonise the stomach and are thought to aid digestion as well as providing other health benefits.

Most of us are familiar with overthe-counter probiotics, but Roy’s home-grown treatment may have worked by delivering helpful bacteria in much the same way.

Indeed, a Spanish study just published found that eating white bread significantly boosts levels a ‘good’ gut bacterium.

‘Bacteria almost certainly have a part to play in inflammatory bowel diseases because these conditions are driven by the immune system, and the immune system in turn is driven by gut bacteria,’ explains Anton Emmanuel, a consultant gastroenterologist at University College Hospital, London.

‘It’s logical to say that if you alter the bacteria, you can alter the immune system and, therefore, alter inflammatory bowel diseases.’

A review of studies published in the journal Digestive Diseases in 2009 found that probiotics are an effective treatment for IBD. One of those looking at the use of probiotics for gut conditions is Professor Ingvar Bjarnason, a gastroenterologist at King’s College London. While the results will be published later this year, he says it might not simply be that boosting good bacteria is important — trying to get rid of ‘ bad’ bacteria may also be key. He points to evidence that 90 per cent of patients with severe Crohn’s improve after going on a special liquid diet containing nutrients in their simplest forms, which effectively kill off the bacteria in their colon. The nutrients are absorbed higher up the digestive system, starving the bacteria in the colon, so they die off.

In even more cutting - edge research, scientists at VU University Medical Centre in Amsterdam are l ooking i nto whether altering the genes of bacteria can help gut conditions.

As Dr Emmanuel explains: ‘ At the moment, beneficial bacteria seem to be effective only when you are taking them, so the idea of altering the bacterial flora with gene therapy, which would deliver “good” genetic material into bacterial genes, could mean a more permanent solution.’

The theory is that if consumed for long enough, these genetically tweaked bacteria would colonise the gut, permanently changing the genetic make-up of its bacteria.

According to Dr Emmanuel, research has so far shown that ulcerative colitis appears to be more responsive to probiotics than Crohn’s — but this could be because they haven’t yet tested the right mixture of bugs to fight Crohn’s. ‘What’s emerging is that a single strain of bacteria probably isn’t as good as a preparation that contains several strains,’ says Dr Emmanuel.

It is also worth pointing out that existing studies have looked at special mixed probiotics, containing several types of bacteria. Overthe- counter probiotics usually contain just one or two species of bacteria and are usually made up of low numbers of ‘live’ bacteria.

‘Your gut is designed to kill foreign bacteria, so the stomach acid s t arts attacking t he probiotics,’ says Dr Emmanuel. ‘Most over-the-counter probiotics contain very few bacteria and the ones they do contain get destroyed in the stomach.’

Another difficulty with probiotics is that everyone has a unique bacterial make-up, which means that the probiotic that works for one person with IBD may not work in another. For this reason, Roy’s concoction may not help other people, says Dr Emmanuel. PROFESSOR

Jeremy Nicholson, a biomolecular researcher at Imperial College London, agrees that while Roy’s t r eatment is scientifically possible, there is only a small chance it will benefit others.

‘We all have 100 trillion bacteria organisms living inside and on our bodies, with most in the lower gut,’ he says. ‘It’s estimated the bacteria contain f i ve million genes, compared with our 20,000 genes.

‘It is unlikely his remedy will help someone else, as we are so microbially diverse.’

Dr Emmanuel adds: ‘ In future these types of bacteria-focused treatments could make a big difference to people with IBD and are likely to be much safer and have fewer side-effects.’

But Roy thinks his remedy could make a more immediate difference. He was diagnosed with Crohn’s in 1969. Within a year his weight plummeted from 10½ st to around 6st because he couldn’t digest food properly, and he was in and out of hospital constantly. For three years he was fitted with a colostomy bag to give his lower intestine a chance to heal. But even after it was removed, Roy’s condition continued to dominate his life.

‘Some days I’d be going to the loo 12 or 13 times,’ he says. ‘It’s very difficult even to get yourself organised to go to work when you’re living like that, so I was desperate.’

But since his bread treatment, his life has been transformed.

‘One year on, I’m still free from stomach pain and I’ve not needed to rush to the loo again,’ he says. ‘I believe there’s hope for people with gut problems now.’