By the time Gerald was 10 years old, he suffered from terrible gastrointestinal symptoms, and serious depression. He was alcoholic by age 14, and suicidal and a drug user by age 18. "It's amazing," he says, "that I made it to age 20, and got sober in Alcoholics Anonymous. Depression lingered in the background for all the years I was sober in AA (till March 2009, when I began the Specific Carbohydrate Diet (SCD))."
"And then: 36 hours after removing grains, beans, potatoes, and sugars (including milk sugar) from my diet...I was returned to myself. It felt like I was taken back to a fork in the road that I faced when I was just 4 years old and carbohydrate maldigestion took over my life. It was like having strong memories return as the result of some odor that you haven’t smelled in years.
"The spectre of depression that had haunted me from my earliest childhood memories vanished without a trace, never to return, not even for one moment. It’s like I can’t be depressed even if I try! That was 28 months ago..."