September 2nd, 2010
Welcome to The little page of Digestive Health Top Tips! This is where you’ll learn more about:
- what goes on inside your digestive system
- what can go wrong
- what you can do about it
Everything today is rush, rush, rush – and that goes for eating too. By wolfing down your meals in minutes you take in excess air, often giving you trapped wind (which could prove embarrassing later!) but you also digest poorly, eat too much and miss out on the pleasure of eating great tasting food.
Chewing thoroughly helps digestion
By chewing each mouthful thoroughly, you break down the food further with your teeth, making it easier to digest. Chewing for longer also makes sure that plenty of amylase (a digestive enzyme in saliva) gets mixed in with each mouthful, which helps your digestive system work properly.
A main course should take 20 minutes
Gulping down your food means that you won’t know you’ve eaten enough until too late. The stomach takes 20 minutes to tell the brain it’s full, by which time you could have given it far too much to digest.
The speed you eat at doesn’t make any difference to the amount of time your digestive system takes to process food. Whatever you eat, it’s going to be in your digestive system for about 18 hours – and that’s a healthy digestive system. Give yourself heartburn or indigestion and it’ll take even longer.
Smaller portions, more often
The healthy answer is to eat smaller portions at mealtimes and choose healthy snacks – fruit, veg, cereal bars – to keep you going between meals. Remember, several light meals enjoyed throughout the day are much easier for you to digest than one heavy one
Eating more fibre is a great way to keep your digestive system healthy, but most of us eat only 12g of fibre a day, a long way short of the recommended 18g. As you know, it prevents constipation and 'keeps you regular' but fibre is doubly good because the best sources of fibre are the foods you should be eating more of anyway: starchy carbohydrates, fruit and veg.
Fantastic fibre
Fibre is divided into two types:
- Insoluble: your body can’t digest insoluble fibre but it’s useful because it helps everything else you’ve eaten move smoothly through your digestive system. That means less chance of constipation and, because it’s not digested it makes you feel full, which means you eat less.
- Sources: wholegrain bread and wholegrain breakfast cereals, fruit and veg.
- Soluble: soluble fibre is digested and could help to lower blood cholesterol and control blood glucose levels.
- Sources: oats, and pulses like beans and lentils.
We’re all so busy these days, it seems there’s rarely time to eat properly. That’s a problem for two reasons:
- You grab something you can eat on-the-run rather than a choosing a good, balanced meal and taking time to enjoy it.
- Being busy often means being stressed, and stress means poor digestion because your body shuts down digestion to concentrate on the brain and other vital organs.
Enjoy yourself - and digestive health
- Make more time for meals: take half an hour to eat lunch and choose a balanced meal.
- Make more time for yourself: if you can’t take half an hour at lunch, try to find another time during the day where you can do something relaxing: sit in the park, go for a swim, play golf, listen to music – whatever you enjoy doing.
A healthy diet helps you deal with stress too.Wholegrains and green, leafy vegetables are rich in B vitamins, which help you relax.
Don’t eat a heavy, rich meal within 3 hours of bedtime. When you go to sleep, your digestive system slows down too, so eating a big meal before bed means your digestive system has to work through the night. This means you don’t get a good night’s sleep for two reasons:
- Digestion requires energy so you could struggle to get to sleep, then wake up feeling exhausted.
- Digesting just before bed means your blood sugar levels are rising, making you more alert, when you should be winding down.
If you need to nibble on something before bed, try a banana with some nuts and seeds (helps stabilise your blood sugar levels, which means better quality sleep) or lettuce (it contains lactucarium, which promotes deeper, more restful sleep.)
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