By in Nutrition

6 Easy Ways To Improve Your Digestion

#1 Sit down and eat your meals in peace

Mindless eating – eating on the run, at your desk, in the car – can cause overeating as you may miss the signal that you are full. Do you think you don’t have the time to take a lunch break? You do, it’s the law, and – let’s face it – if you eat at your desk with one eye on the computer, you’re not doing either activity – eating or working – properly. Mindless eating also reduces the time we take to

#2 Chew!

This really is the easiest way to improve your digestion. Your tummy has no teeth! So make the most of the ones you have in your mouth. Chewing increases the surface area your digestive enzymes have to work on, and the better they work, the better you digest. Chewing also stimulates stomach acid and digestive enzyme production and reduces the risk of bloating as your gut flora gets less undigested food to eat, thus reducing the risk of gas formation.

#3 Heartburn?

There are a number of possible reasons why you might suffer from heartburn or acid reflux: eating too fast (see above), loss of sphincter tone, overweight, pregnancy, too much or not enough stomach acid, or hiatus hernia. Between the oesophagus and the stomach sits the gastro-oesophageal sphincter, a ring-shaped muscle that shuts very tightly and is only meant to allow one-way travel: food going down. Sometimes, however, it can allow stomach contents up, either when stomach contents need to be rapidly expelled (i. e. being sick) or – illegitimately, so to speak – in heartburn: when the sphincter allows stomach acid to travel upwards. Stomach acid is a very strong acid. Our stomach is protected from it by a thick mucous lining, something our oesophagus lacks. So when it hits the walls of the oesophagus, we’ll know about it as we get an unpleasant burning sensation. If this happens frequently, the lining of the oesophagus can get damaged and in the long term even become cancerous.

The most common foods that affect sphincter tone are fizzy drinks of any kind, regardless of whether they contain sugar or alcohol or neither, red wine, chocolate, tomatoes and tomato products (think ketchup, pasta sauce, pizza sauce). In the case of overweight and pregnancy, it is the physical pressure of excess abdominal fat or the foetus that can cause the sphincter to open up. Until you lose the weight or give birth, it may help to sleep with the head or upper body slightly raised. Many people think that they have too much stomach acid and look to remedy it by using over-the-counter antacid medication, but actually low stomach acid is a much more common cause, and using antacid is actually going to make the problem worse. You can encourage stomach acid production by having a tablespoon of organic apple cider vinegar diluted in a glass of water 20 minutes before each meal and by using plenty of black pepper. If you are not sure whether your stomach acid is low, test yourself: Have a lot of beetroot in one meal, later check whether your urine turns pink. If it does, your stomach acid levels may be too low. Another way of testing is to dissolve ¼ teaspoon of bicarbonate of soda in 150 ml of water. Drink the solution first thing in the morning on an empty stomach before you have eaten or drunk anything else. Time how long it takes before you belch, time for up to five minutes. If you have not belched by then, your stomach acid is too low. With adequate levels, you should belch within 2-3 minutes. Repeat on three different days to get a more accurate picture. Please note that neither of these tests is particularly scientific, but they are extremely cheap and can give an indication. A nutritional therapist can arrange for more specific functional testing.

#4 Eat real foods

If it comes in a package with a label, it’s probably not real food, but processed junk – unless of course the label just has one or two ingredients, e. g. ‘chickpeas’ or ‘rice’ or ‘peanuts, salt’, because of course those foods would come in packets. Buy ingredients, not meals, and cook your own meals from scratch. It’s cheaper, too. Processed foods come with additives, colourings, transfats, artificial sweeteners, excess sugar and salt, all of which affect your gut flora and intestinal environment.

#5 Eat a great variety of foods

The more limited your diet, the more limited your gut flora is going to be. Different gut bacteria like different foods and although there is still an awful lot we don’t yet know about our microbiome, we do know that the more diversity there is, the healthier the individual. And the best way to increase diversity is to eat lots and lots and lots of different (real) foods. To test your own food variety, play this little game with yourself: Take an A4 sheet and draw a table with 25 boxes. For a week, note down every food you eat by writing it into one of the boxes. Note that if you are having crumpets one day, toast the next, and a croissant the next that will only fill one box and the word is ‘wheat’. If you are having pork chops one day, ham the next and sausages on another, then that’s ‘pork’. Everything counts only once in a week. Aim to fill all of your 25 boxes within a week. The advanced version is to fill 50 boxes! Don’t be fooled: It seems easy at first as the first few boxes fill rapidly … but then it’ll peter out. Try it, it’s great fun!

#6 Move!

If you suffer from constipation, the best thing to do – after having added lots of fibre from fresh fruits and vegetables, wholegrains and nuts and seeds – particularly linseeds/flaxseeds – is to move. Once we have swallowed our food it is passed along the digestive tract through a process called peristalsis, which is involuntary. If you have a sluggish intestine, waste is moving along too slowly and the slower it moves, the more water gets reabsorbed into the body, thus diminishing the volume of the waste, causing small, dry pellets, which become even harder to move along. Exercise encourages peristaltic movement, so get up from your chair and go for a post-lunch and/or post dinner walk and build some structured exercise into your week.

Melanie
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