White Rice Tops My List of Favorite Crohn's-Friendly Foods

As a Crohn's patient, however, I adore rice. I should quickly add that I mean white rice, not the brown or wild variety. The darker rice has proven much harder for me to digest than its white cousin.

I discovered rice a zillion hospitalizations ago. After one of several Crohn's small bowel resections, I had made it past decaffeinated coffee, broth and grits and was waiting for my first more substantial food. The aide brought me a baked chicken breast and a gargantuan serving of white rice.

According to a fact sheet on the home page of the USA Rice Federation, more than half the world's population relies on the same food for energy as I do. It provides fiber to make you feel full and contains antioxidant phytonutrients, as well as plenty of vitamins. Rice actually adds more than 15 essential nutrients to the diet.

Each serving provides 2.5 grams of protein that's relatively easy to digest. Half a cup contains slightly more than 100 calories, roughly the same as those in a piece of toast or a glass of milk.

When I'm not in a flare and can eat fairly normally for a patient who has lost half her small intestine, I zap instant rice in the microwave and let it cuddle on a plate next to fish, chicken or beef.

Rice is the first thing I ask for when coming off a liquid diet. It's easy to fix. It's dense, so a little goes a long way. And my gut just plain tolerates it. I would not go so far, however, as to speculate that it actually wards off a flare. I don't for a minute believe any food or anything else consistently does that.

Not all white rice has to be boring. I often load it with reduced-sodium soy sauce. I also munch on rice cakes when it's time to snack. Like many people with Crohn's disease, I'm also lactose intolerant, so I've learned to make a tempting rice pudding using soy milk, egg substitute, sugar and some almond flavoring.

Lest anyone get the idea that rice is the most wonderful thing that's ever happened to anyone with Crohn's disease, I need to state that many patients with this condition must avoid it. If intestinal narrowing is part of the picture, the tiny grains can get stuck and wreak havoc. And while I can easily digest white rice but not any of the darker varieties, some patients can't tolerate any type of rice.

Ironically, some consider rice a controversial food for Crohn's patients. According to the Crohn's Colitis Foundation of America (CCFA), the Specific Carbohydrate Diet (SCD) is the subject of many recent heated debates. The 1994 book Breaking the Vicious Cycle: Intestinal Health Through Diet by biochemist Elaine Gottschall promotes a regimen free of all grain, lactose and sucrose for Crohn's patients, many of whom cannot tolerate gluten.

The SCD is much stricter than a gluten-free diet. It assumes that carbohydrates comprise the main source of energy for the intestinal microbes believed to kick start the development of inflammatory bowel disease (IBD). Rice is definitely forbidden.

This diet doesn't get my vote for a very simple reason. The response of patients to it is much like their reaction to standard drugs to treat Crohn's disease: no two patients ever experience the same results.

As for me, I'll just stick with my white rice.