Hi, petesimac:
It goes something like this: Rice is a natural starch and has very large particles, even after thorough mastication. Flour products, on the other side, have extremely small particles and during digestion the majority of these particles are seeded with the nemesis bacterium. Now there is a massive biosurface (colloid) within which these bacteria multiply. A fellow ASer contacted me and told me he could eat quinoa and yams, but not yam soup--that cause him to flare. Yams have more fibre than potatoes and are a bit less starchy, but turning them into a soup reduced the particle size enough to cause substantially more bacterial multiplication than yams in the natural state, so the soup causes a flare but natural tuber did not. Flour products are much worse in creating the optimum condition for bacterial multiplication because of so many more individual substrates.
And they multiply at the familiar geometric rate, so stuff that will slow down progression of food in the tract--proteins and fats, for example, will allow for much greater populations. Food digesting for the third hour might have 50,000 Klebsiella, but staying longer in the gut only by doubling the time it takes for digestion and there are almost 500,000 Klebsiella by then and this reaches our 'Crohn's-like microlesions' or the permeable section of our intestinal tract and the statistics dictate that enough bacteria will interact with our immune system that a flare will ensue.
So a person can fool themselves by combining starches with a meat--like oh, say, a T-bone steak--and try to blame the meat. It actually happens! But it is food combinations that can be the key. And another thing--(yes it is more complex) we can eat fried stuff that might alter some of the cooking oil from hydrophobic to hydrophilic, so it sticks to the walls of our tract and captures digesting foods and directs them into our lesions whether laden with Klebsiella or not.
The whole thing is complex enough that it frustrates our ability to detect which foods do what to us--especially if and when we take NSAIDs or other agents which dull our senses and quash our ability to discern when we are flaring or whether we are just in one long flare.
People unable to quit the drugs and unable to exclude starches will always have their cop-out and find a reason that "the diet does not work for me" and their subjective observations are understandable but should be dismissed equally with those who claim diet is 'merely anecdotal.' We have plenty of 'anecdotes' who are avoiding skeletal damage and enjoying a more normal life, if unfair to the extent that life is not so fair because we cannot eat what the majority of the population consumes with impunity.
Some of the foods that tipped me off (before I began taking NSAIDs) were 1) Fried rice 2) Papad (Indian pan-fried bread) 3) Onion rings 4) Just bread and mayonnaise cause a severe flare once and I tried to blame the mayonnaise!
One fellow ASer wrote a book--"Food Combining for Vegetarians;" Jackie LeTissier recognized that there is a starch connection with AS, but she managed her disease by not combining starches with proteins and fats (the "Hay Method").
BON APPETIT,
John
