Wipe Your Way to Good Health

It seems we all have our pet names for it:.dodo, poop, number 2 or others not quite fitting for a family magazine. But no matter how you say it, regular, bulky but soft and easy bowel movements are vital to good health. Oh sure, most all of us have a little problem now and then. But something is seriously wrong when four-and-a-half million people in the U.S. say they are constipated most or all of the time.

As a nutritionist, I am as interested in what comes out of the human body (or if it comes out) as what goes in. Unfortunately, as most everything in the health arena, there are big disagreements as to how one should maintain bowel regularity. Conventional medicine generally pooh-poohs the use of anything beyond a high-fiber diet, more fluids and more exercise. Yet, complementary approaches embrace numerous other therapies based on theories that conventional medicine hasn't fully accepted.

Depending on whom you ask for advice, the gamut of recommendations can run from "don't worry if you only have two or three bowel movements a week" to "transit time for waste material should be no longer than eighteen to twenty-four hours." The latter means we should all be having at least one bowel movement a day. Generally, the health practitioners who say it doesn't matter that you don't dodo everyday are accepting the fact that most people eat a highly refined, high-fat and low-fiber diet: a sure-shootin' recipe for constipation.

Eating more fiber to induce bowel regularity is the golden rule. But there's a lot of consumer confusion over what constitutes heavy-duty fiber sources. Nutritional biochemist Ruth DeBusk, PhD, RD, is a forward-thinking specialist in bowel dysfunctions and works closely with six gastroenterologists in a Tallahassee, Florida digestive disease clinic. She has a four-part "anti-constipation" program that she's never seen fail. Her first directive is to increase fiber intake to 25 to 35 grams a day by eating fruits, vegetables, dried beans and peas. Talking in grams can be a foreign language if you don't have a nutritionist's education but it's easy to add up when you estimate that a serving of fruit or vegetables has about two-to-three grams of fiber. In addition, you can use the "dietary fiber" count on the Nutrition Facts label of food products. DeBusk points out that a half-cup of bran cereal gives 11-13 grams of fiber, about half the day's worth in one sitting!

DeBusk doesn't recommend whole grains as part of her fiber formula as she finds too many people are wheat and/or gluten sensitive. So it's imperative to learn if you are intolerant or sensitive to gluten as eliminating this from your diet can make all the difference. Moreover, it's always a good idea to avoid products with refined white flour. As one colonic therapist so aptly points out a mixture of white flour and water makes a very effective plaster and can do the same in your GI tract.

DeBusk's other anti-constipation recommendations include drinking eight to ten (eight ounce) glasses of water everyday. She also insists that because caffeine is a powerful diuretic that flushes water out of your system, you should drink a cup of water for every cup of caffeinated beverage you drink, such as coffee, cola or tea. Thirdly, DeBusk pushes regular aerobic exercise to tone the muscles of the intestines to keep them in shape for moving their contents along.

Her final recommendation has been used by alternative practitioners for years and is now being recognized among conventional medicine types as a vital component to digestion and good health. This is the use of live active cultures acquired by eating yogurt (certified living cultures) or taking high quality probiotic supplements. These cultures, or probiotics, are the friendly bacteria in our gut that are key to maintaining or restoring a healthy intestinal tract environment. The large intestine alone contains about three pounds of bacteria- both beneficial and detrimental. The unfriendly bacteria, under certain circumstances, will overcome the beneficial bacteria and produce toxins and carcinogens in the bowel. Constipation can result from an upset in this microflora balance and may even be a symptom of parasitic infection.