EATING FOR A HEALTHY GUT

Indigestion is a term often used to describe the feeling of a mild stomach upset, or a burning sensation behind the breastbone. Once your doctor has assured you that you do not have a serious condition, it is worth trying some self-help. A common cause of indigestion is overeating, so small regular meals can help. Relief can also be obtained by reducing the intake of fried food, chocolate, coffee, alcohol and colas and by smoking less. If you have been told that you have a hiatus hernia and indigestion is worse at night, you should avoid eating late in the evening. Your condition may also be helped by raising the head of your bed by about 10cm (4in).

Heartburn can be attributed to disturbances in the production of stomach acid and other digestive secretions.


Food Combining
Many people believe that their digestion and general health have been improved by separating starching food from protein. Unfortunately, there is no known physiological reason for this improvement, but you can adopt the following rules if you want to see if food combining works for you.

Irritable Bowel Syndrome (IBS)
This common problem should be diagnosed by a doctor to exclude other rarer conditions that may similar symptoms. Once you know IBS is your problem you can improve your symptoms by:
Eating more fibre: adding wheat bran is the easiest way to increase fibre, but it is not always the best choice and too much bran may reduce the absorption of minerals. Follow the Optimum Diet and gradually increase the fibre in your diet by eating more unprocessed whole food, including grains, fruit, vegetables and pulses in particular. Always drink more water as you increase your fibre levels. This allows time for the digestive system to adapt, but this approach should be stopped if you experience diarrhoea.

Eating less sugar: even if you do not have the yeast syndrome, symptoms can be caused by the muscles in the wall of the intestine becoming less active or stopping altogether when refined sugar is eaten.

Looking for possible food intolerance: this is not a true allergy, so normal allergy tests are not helpful. However, if you write down everything you eat over two or three days, the food to which you are intolerant are usually the ones you eat most often. It is worth totally excluding these food for a few days to see if your symptoms improve. Even if you do not notice much improvement, your symptoms may get much worse when you start to eat normally again, indicating that you are intolerant to them.

The food that commonly cause food intolerance are grains (especially wheat), and those containing milk (including whey). Food intolerances change over time, and you will usually find you can reintroduce the problem food after a few months, provided you do not eat them too often.