Diet and health

Diarrhoea and your digestive system

It’s not just what you eat but how you eat that affects the health of your digestive system. So even if you’re eating all the right things, you could still experience diarrhoea and other digestive problems, if you’re not eating them in the right way.

Diarrhoea and your eating habits

Over indulging, eating quickly and not chewing properly before you swallow can put your digestive system in a spin.

Here are a few everyday habits that canupset your digestive system. Try to avoid:

• Eating too quickly – it takes 20 minutes for your stomach to tell your brain that it’s full, so eating more slowly means you may eat less and therefore have less to digest
• Gulping down food – when you gulp, you swallow air, which can lead to trapped wind and poor digestion
• Eating too many fatty and spicy foods or drinking too much alcohol
• Eating big, heavy meals – these take longer to digest and make your system work harder
• Eating late at night – your digestive system is at its slowest at the end of the day. Try to eat your last meal of the day at least 3 hours before bedtime

Food allergies and intolerances

It is thought around 1 or 2 in every 100 adults in the UK have a genuine food allergy . Some people who think they have an allergy may actually just have a food ‘intolerance’, which is very different.

With a food allergy, your immune system treats certain foods as a threat to your body. Allergic reactions such as sneezing, rashes and swellings normally occur within minutes of contact with the allergenic food.

A food intolerance doesn’t involve the immune system and reactions usually take longer to develop – hours or even days after eating the food. Symptoms of an intolerance are normally stomach-related – diarrhoea, nausea, bloating, and stomach pain.

So if you think your diarrhoea could be down to a food intolerance, try keeping a diary of the food you’re eating and when bouts of diarrhoea strike, to help you work out what might be at the root of the problem.

The most common food intolerances are to gluten and lactose. Gluten is a protein found in many types of grain, including wheat, barley and oats. Lactose is a sugar found in milk.