Diet and health

Respect your digestive system

Most of us take our digestive systems for granted – that is, until something goes wrong. As well as being linked to what you eat, the health of your digestive system is also affected by the way you eat. So you can still experience diarrhoea and other digestive problems even if you’re eating all the right things.

Healthy eating habits

Did you know it takes an average of 18 hours for your body to digest a meal? Just as we need time to digest food, we also need time to ‘ingest’ food. That means taking the time to eat everything by chewing thoroughly and appreciating every mouthful. Chewing produces more saliva, which contains ‘amylase’, an important enzyme that aids digestion.
Here are a few key things to remember when eating:

• 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 quickly means you swallow more air, which can lead to trapped wind and poor digestion.
• Smaller, lighter meals are easier to digest than large, heavy meals. So try eating little and often, with healthy snacks in-between to keep you going.
• Try to have your final meal of the day at least 3 hours before bedtime, when your digestive system is at its slowest. This can even help you sleep better. If you’re still feeling peckish near bedtime, snack on a banana or a light salad – as lettuce contains a substance called lactucarium, which aids sleep.
• Avoid overindulging in rich or spicy foods and drinking too much alcohol.
   

Food allergies and intolerances

It is thought around 1 in 70 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.