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5 Tips For Maintaining Healthy Digestion
Eating is not only one of the great pleasures in life, it’s also essential to your health and well-being. The foods you eat nourish your body, providing energy and enhancing the function of all your vital organs.
Keeping the digestive system operating in peak condition is vital for your overall health, but can sometimes be difficult to maintain with the busy lifestyles that we lead today. Sometimes it is necessary to go back to the basics, to remember how we should be living and try to modify our behaviours so that our bodies can work the way as they were designed. Here are a few tips to help keep your digestive system in peak condition.
Eating for a Healthy Digestive System
1) Balanced Nutrition.
It goes without saying that a balanced, natural diet is in tune with our body’s inner workings - after all, our caveman ancestors certainly did not dine on a diet of burgers and fries. It should be your goal to eat unprocessed food, in a format as close to its natural state as possible. One of the best ways to improve your digestive health is by maintaining a diet that is high in fibre and rich in fruits, vegetables, legumes and whole grains. Fibre is especially important because it helps stabilise blood sugar levels, makes you feel full, and keeps you “regular”.
2) Drink Plenty Of Water.
Most of us do not drink nearly as much water as our body needs. The Institute of Medicine recommends that women drink 9 cups of water a day, and men drink 13 cups. That water in your cup of coffee doesn’t count, so try to limit your consumption of dehydrating drinks like coffee, soda and alcohol.
3) Eat Smaller, and More Frequent Meals.
Nutritionists recommend a smaller intake of food consumed throughout the day as 4-5 meals, rather than the traditional 3 meals in a day. This has the additional benefit of reducing spikes in blood-sugar levels, and reduces the urge to snack between meals.
Chew Food Thoroughly, Eat Slowly. This is difficult to do when you’re on the move, but slowing down the way you eat helps digestion enormously. It gives the enzymes in your saliva a better chance of breaking down carbohydrates, and also physically breaks the food into smaller pieces. You will also find that you will feel more full and generally eat less when you eat more slowly.
Follow a regular eating schedule. Dieticians and other experts agree that eating breakfast, lunch, dinner, and snacks around the same time each day allows for proper digestion of your food.
4) Add probiotics to your diet.
These are microorganisms that are the same type of healthy bacteria naturally present in your digestive tract. Probiotics help keep your entire body healthy by counteracting the effects of a poor diet, antibiotics, and stress. Consumed on a daily basis, they may also improve nutrient absorption, break down lactose, guard against IBS, and generally strengthen your immune system.
5) Take Care Of Your Body.
Physical care of your body can have a profound affect on your digestion. Exercise regularly (at least 30 minutes a day) to help maintain a healthy heart and blood flow. Exercise also helps reduce stress, which has a big effect on the digestive process both in the area of digestive muscular behaviour, and also digestive enzyme production. Stress can also reduce the colonies of beneficial bacteria in your digestive tract, and that can leave you with imbalanced microflora.
In an ideal world, all your nutrients would come from the food that you eat – however that is not always possible. If your daily diet is less than ideal, consider vitamin and mineral supplements. Natren Probiotics can also help maintain a functional digestive system, providing a helping hand to the body’s natural digestive process, and restoring some of the imbalances that a modern lifestyle and diet imposes on the body.
