Plant Based Diet for Crohn's and Colitis: Mitsuro Chiba, MD PhD

Against the Grain

Dr. Mitsuro Chiba is an MD, PhD is a gastroenterologist and researcher at Akita City Hospital, Kawamoto, Akita City, Japan.
He believes that inflammatory bowel disease is a lifestyle disease mediated mainly by a westernized diet, and has had many subsequent publications detailing his use of a plant based, semi-vegetarian diet.
He began to provide a plant-based diet for patients with inflammatory bowel disease at Nakadori General Hospital (Akita City, Japan) in 2003, and then continued to provide the diet at Akita City Hospital since 2013. We had a very detailed discussion regarding his well cited paper "Lifestyle-related disease in Crohn’s disease: Relapse prevention by a semi-vegetarian diet" published in 2010 which demonstrated the efficacy of using a plant based diet in combination with infliximab for induction of remission then maintenance with a plant based diet alone.
Though Dr. Chiba’s English is excellent, special thank you to Dr. Chiba’s daughter Kaeko who helped with translation at certain points of the interview.
This podcast should not be interpreted as medical advice as a plant based diet is not FDA approved for the treatment of inflammatory bowel disease.
Dr. Chiba's study:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2877178/
Lester Breslow's 1980 publication regarding healthy habits:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0091743580900420