Glad you're back at home Bissler!
Not to be too negative, but I felt obliged to add a warning against too much faith being put in the experiences of others. It may well be that diet helps for
some people, but there is a reason why it is important to use scientific rigour when doling out advice. I see this "it worked for me" argument all the time, but unfortunately with these types of personal experiences it is impossible to evaluate the difference between correlation and causation. Sometimes things just correlate by chance, sometimes because they are both driven by some third factor, and sometimes because there really is a causative factor. But even in the latter case, it's very unusual in human healthcare to find something that is universally true. To use an example: "I did a rain dance every morning and I haven't had a heart attack since" is really exactly the same as "I stopped eating processed foods and haven't had a heart attack since", the only difference is that one of them sounds more plausible, i.e. appeals to your prior expectations. People naturally tend to believe evidence that supports their prior expectation (or what they want to believe), whilst rejecting/not looking for evidence of the contrary.
Without wanting to single anyone out, this one caught my eye (to paraphrase):
"crohn's disease is rare in asia; asians don't eat dairy; therefore dairy is a factor in crohn's disease"
Now, dairy
might be a factor, but that observation alone does not tell us that - it's just a correlation. In actual fact, a genetic condition such as crohn's will vary in incidence according to genetic background, and thus segregate by race. Lo and behold, as well as having a lot of people who don't eat dairy, Asia also has a lot of Asian people in it. So it's possible that crohn's, a genetic condition, has low incidence in Asia not because asian people don't eat dairy, but because Asian people have different genetics. How can you tell which is true? You do large scale regression studies, i.e. conduct science. If multiple good quality independent studies are confirming each other's findings, that is when a link becomes more credible. Then you can start to test whether the same thing applies in different populations, what else influences whether diet does or does not help, and what exactly is it about dairy (for example) that makes a difference.
I will leave you with a more light hearted version of what I just wrote:
http://www.tylervigen.com
