About Happy Belly

I’m Chef Mom. I love to cook, and to explore international tastes. I’m a crazy researcher, I explore TONS of sources, and I like to share. On this blog you’ll find IBD-AID, Specific Carbohydrate Diet, Whole 30, and Paleo, vegetable-forward yumminess -- including recipes and practical, real-life suggestions for comfort through IBD (Irritable Bowel Disease).

I’m not a medical professional, but through dietary changes, my family has found comfort and easing of medical symptoms, plus fresh new healthy menu choices.

I’m the one who does most of the cooking in our family. I LOVE exploring cookbooks. I like digging through gourmet recipe sites (New York Times, Bon Appetit, Ottolenghi, etc), and sites of expats and international cuisine, to find overlaps with our diet.

My dishes follow the IBD-AID diet. IBD-AID is kind of like “contemporary medical research updates the Specific Carbohydrate Diet (SCD).” In comparison to popular diets, my dishes overlap Whole 30, Paleo, and gluten-free and dairy-free, with lots of veggies.

IBD is an umbrella medical term which encompasses Crohn’s disease, Ulcerative Colitis (UC), and several other diseases. Our family includes "UC-FamilyMember" who has ulcerative colitis, "Crohns-FamilyMember" who has Crohn's disease, and "EGE-FamilyMember" who has eosinophilic gastroenteritis (EGE).

Through diet shifts, my family has found comfort and calming of symptoms. After following this diet for several months, EGE-FamilyMember, diagnosed in the 1980s, is for the first time symptom-free. About a year into this dietary approach, UC-FamilyMember‘s doctor declared him in remission.

This blog is a way to share the results of all my learning, research, and discoveries with you. I hope it brings you new ideas and new hope.

image source: Wikimedia

Difference between IBD-AID and Paleo

IBD-AID is grounded in science, being defined by the University of Massachusetts Medical School. Paleo is not based on a body of scientific research, instead it’s more like citizen science and each individual’s observations. Many Paleo recipe authors seem to fall into one of the following categories: pursuing weight loss, pursuing extreme fitness (such as crossfit), or having IBS (Irritable bowel syndrome). It seems like each Paleo recipe author has their own definition of which foods are allowed and what are not. The foods Some Paleo authors permit potatoes, sweet potatoes, plantains. Some permit rice, arrowroot, tapioca, potato starch, or maple syrup. Some venture into Shirataki noodles (a.k.a. konjak noodles, or konnyaku noodles). None of these are on the allowable foods lists for SCD or IBD-AID. Depending on which Paleo author you are reading, the recipes might be meat-heavy. Many use only standard American diet (SAD) portions of vegetables. Since my family isn’t in this for weight...

Special ingredients in my pantry

My pantry doesn’t look like a standard-American-diet (SAD) pantry. What’s absent: In my pantry you won’t find sugar, brown sugar, powdered sugar, molasses, corn syrup. In my pantry there’s no wheat flour, no cornmeal, no cornstarch. There are no breakfast oats (even though they’re supposedly “gluten free,” they don’t make EGE-FamilyMember’s gut happy). There’s no pasta, no substitute pastas, except for the 100% lentil kind. There are no crackers, no cereals, no granolas, no snack bars (UC-FamilyMember ran through the SCD-qualified Larabars, and called it quits.) Okay, full disclosure: there is a tiny jar of sugar so I can fill the hummingbird feeder in the winter. (In the summer the hummingbirds eat from all the flowers in my garden.) And, there’s a bag of rice for when we have visitors, and a bag of quinoa for when EGE-FamilyMember craves something different from our usual IBD-AID fare. But aside from those, our pantry is rather different. What’s well-stocked: What you will find ...

Difference between IBD-AID and SCD / Specific Carbohydrate Diet

IBD-AID and SCD have similar roots, but at this point they are quite different. Since I've been Chef Mom under both diets, I can say that I find SCD to be much more restrictive, IBD-AID to be much broader in its list of recommended foods. Both diets limit your starches and sugars intake, and guide you to avoid processed foods, instead sending you back to pure food ingredients. The definitions SCD began as a hypothesis developed in the 1920’s by Dr. Sidney Haas, that if you starved the “bad bacteria” your symptoms would disappear. It was popularized by Elaine Gottschall through her book Breaking the Vicious Cycle (1994), together with lab research circa 1970-1990. The lab testing SCD received sounds like it was more like analysis of the chemistry inherent in the foodstuff itself, without much data on how it affected the whole patient. Recently, Seattle Children’s Hospital has begun to work with SCD and pediatric IBD patients. IBD-AID is being developed today by the University of M...

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