Bowel disease found to be twice as common in Western Europe than in Eastern Europe.
Of course they don’t know why it should be that “Crohn’s disease (CD) and ulcerative colitis (UC) are. twice as common in Western Europe as in Eastern Europe”.
I think it’s because there’s much more yoghurt in the Eastern European diet and not enough spice in the Western European diet!
Yoghurt and spice chicken image- health.com
ScienceNordic reports:
A huge study with data from ten million people points towards a previously undescribed tendency. The bowel diseases Crohn’s disease (CD) and ulcerative colitis (UC) are twice as common in Western Europe as in Eastern Europe. The international study was headed by a group of researchers at the Digestive Disease Centre, Copenhagen University Hospital, Herlev, Denmark.
The researchers gathered data about CD and UC patients from 31 intestinal health centres from more than 20 countries throughout Europe. The centres covered a total of some ten million people.
”The whole point of setting up a project such as this one is that we want everyone to take part. We have approached as many of the relevant institutions as we could,” he says.The reason why Burisch decided to focus on the incidence of these two diseases was that the number of patients started to increase in Eastern Europe, including Hungary and Croatia. …..
…. It turned out that the diseases were twice as common in the West as in the East. …..
An obvious reason for this difference could be that Western Europeans are generally better at examining and diagnosing, which means that there may well be a significant number of undiagnosed patients in Eastern Europe. ”But the Eastern European centres that we looked at were good at diagnosing. In fact, they appeared to be more in line with international guidelines than we are [in Western Europe].”
An alternative explanation is that the immune system can become lazy as the living standards improve.
”In Western Europe we have high standards of hygiene and we consume lots of controlled and processed foods, which may confuse and dull our immune system,” says the researcher, pointing out that the search for an explanation is still at the speculative stage. …
And since it is in the speculative stage I suggest it is due to more yoghurt in the East and not enough spice in the West!
Tags: crohn disease, Eastern Europe, spice, Ulcerative colitis, Western Europe, yoghurt
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