(NaturalNews) The Daily Mail recently featured an article titled, "Junk food blamed for soaring rate of Crohn's disease among young: Three times as many 16 to 30-year-olds have condition than a decade ago."

According to the article, doctors in the UK blame the "epidemic" on a significant increase in junk food consumption along with the widespread and increased use of antibiotics. Commonly, among Crohn's patients, the gut bacteria are drastically out of balance, with harmful bacteria significantly outnumbering beneficial bacteria.

The article also stated that as many as three-quarters or approximately a quarter of a million Britons diagnosed with Crohn's will eventually be forced to undergo reconstructive bowel surgery.

What is Crohn's disease?

Crohn's disease causes chronic inflammation deep in the lining of the digestive system or the gastrointestinal (GI) tract. Although Crohn's can occur anywhere in the GI tract from the mouth to the anus, the small intestine or ileum is the site most commonly affected.

Common symptoms include abdominal cramping, unpredictable and frequent bouts of diarrhea, fatigue, rectal bleeding, a feeling of malaise, loss of appetite and weight loss. Crohn's can manifest suddenly and intensely, or mildly and then gradually becoming severe.

Not surprisingly, across the pond, many Americans, especially children, are also afflicted in record numbers with inflammatory bowel disease (IBD), from Crohn's to ulcerative colitis (similar to Crohn's), and the more common and milder "irritable bowel syndrome."

Current estimates indicate that hundreds of thousands of Americans suffer from Crohn's and ulcerative colitis. In the not too distant past, Crohn's was considered "a very rare disorder." Shockingly, in a mere 30 years, Crohn's cases have doubled

Typically, Crohn's is diagnosed by an M.D. who specializes in gastroenterology, defined by Merriam-Webster's dictionary as: "a branch of medicine concerned with the structure, functions, diseases, and pathology of the stomach and intestines."

While American doctors admit that they don't know what causes Crohn's disease, the vast majority adamantly maintain that diet and emotional stress are not causative factors.

AMA medicine postulates the following causative factors: a likely genetic predisposition, coupled with an overactive immune system triggered by infections or impairment in the way the body handles intestinal viruses and bacteria, which causes chronic inflammation in the intestines.

Of course, this theory relies on a treatment protocol based on expensive, side-effect-laden pharmaceuticals like steroids and immunosuppressive drugs that merely suppress symptoms, causing collateral damage and commonly ending in invasive surgical interventions with no cure in sight.

Symptoms and complications from allopathic treatments include:

1) Intestinal blockages caused by a gradual thickening of the intestinal wall from chronic inflammation and an accumulation of scar tissue.
2) Surrounding tissues can also be affected via ulcers that "tunnel" through from the affected area, creating anus and rectum "fistulas" that are ripe for infection.
3) Malabsorption is a problem, as diseased, inflamed digestive tissue is unable to properly absorb nutrients.
4) Anemia can occur from an iron deficiency or directly from the disease.
5) Steroid medications can cause a form of osteoporosis or weak bones.
6) Compromised liver function from pharmaceutical medications.

Recent research for causes

Over the past 50 years, there's been a rise of Crohn's disease which roughly parallels the introduction and widespread use of antibiotics. A couple of German scientists have theorized that Crohn's is an infectious disease caused by "a mutated form of normal bacterial flora that became a super germ under constant selection pressure from antibiotics."

The Germans concluded that, in vulnerable individuals, the routine use of antibiotics for various diseases can indeed trigger Crohn's disease.

Meanwhile, a British study evaluated the occurrence of Crohn's, ulcerative colitis and assorted stomach problems in 3,545 people who had been given the live measles vaccine. They found that the risk of developing Crohn's disease in the measles-vaccinated group was three times greater, and ulcerative coltis was two and a half times greater, than in those who had never received the vaccine early in life.

The study suggests that there is indeed a correlation between measles vaccines and inflammatory disease.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the Vaccine Safety Datalink (VSD) Project have confirmed a correlation between measles-containing vaccines (MCV) and inflammatory bowel disease. Also noted was that the age of the MCV recipient may be a crucial factor in determining the exact type of inflammatory disease that develops.

Swedish researchers have found that those who regularly eat at fast food restaurants and who consume too much sugar may increase their risk of Crohn's disease.

According to the Journal of Epidemiology, researchers at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden interviewed 152 people with Crohn's disease, 145 with ulcerative colitis and a control group of 305 healthy people about their dietary habits the previous five years.

The results indicated that "those who ate fast-food at least two times a week were 3.4 times more likely to develop Crohn's disease and 3.9 times more likely to develop ulcerative colitis."

The researchers also noted that "those who ate more than 55 grams of sugar per day were 2.6 times more likely to develop Crohn's disease."

Sources for this article include:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk

http://www.ccfa.org [PDF]

http://digestive.niddk.nih.gov

http://www.everydayhealth.com

http://science.naturalnews.com

Causal studies: http://drhoffman.com

CDC vaccine study: http://www.gastrohep.com