The digestive system's role in maintaining a healthy lifestyle is quite essential. It is crucial for your overall health, as it absorbs and brings all the necessary nutrients to your body parts. Are you aware of what poor digestive health can cause? It can expand to several issues and become the prominent underlying cause behind uncomfortable conditions, including abdominal pain, indigestion, etc.
Despite a proper diet, your body may not have all the essential nutrients, which leads to several digestive issues. Here’s what you need to learn more about digestive health, and that too, from a gastroenterologist’s perspective! Read this blog to learn how to avoid these issues and manage better health for a lifetime!
Understanding Common Digestive Disorders
Presently, digestive disorders have become a common issue among people. It can occur for several reasons, which may differ from person to person. Here are some of the most basic and frequent digestive disorders that you may go through!
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Acid Reflux: Commonly known as heartburn, it is one of the primary symptoms and causes of digestive disorders. In this condition, you feel a burning sensation resulting from the stomach's acidic content flowing upwards into the oesophagus. Some unknown reasons behind this uncomfortable condition include food habits and other factors like smoking, obesity, alcohol consumption, and many more.
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Irritable Bowel Syndrome (IBS): Also referred to as nervous stomach or irritable colon, this is another major gastrointestinal or digestive disorder. While suffering from IBS, you may experience frequent bloating, cramps, and abdominal pain. The severities of symptoms differ for everyone, and even teenagers and children may suffer from this disorder! Diagnosing and testing it by an expert gastroenterologist is essential to cure this condition.
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Inflammatory Bowel Disease (IBD): This is a severe disorder where one may suffer chronic inflammation of tissues in the digestive system. It may include inflammation and ulcers in the lining of the intestine. The general signs of this condition involve diarrhoea, reduced appetite, fatigue, and others.
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Chronic Constipation: Though the cause of this condition can be of different kinds, it is another major digestive disorder that leads to an equal amount of stress like this e other issues! You will have less than three weekly bowel movements if you suffer from chronic constipation! Also, the associated conditions can be a hard stool, causing much distress and pain.
The Importance Of Nutrition In Maintaining Digestive Health
To eliminate all these issues, your primary focus should be to have a balanced diet and the essential nutrients required for a healthy digestive system. You can promote better digestive health by giving your body enough nutrition that it needs daily.
However, lacking these nutrients can have adverse effects and worsen conditions. Adding enough fibre, proteins, minerals, and vitamins to your daily diet would be best. Check out these foods you can consider adding to improve digestion and prevent digestive disorders!
- Whole-grain food items, like brown rice, quinoa, corn, etc.
- Leafy green vegetables
- Fruits rich in fibre, like bananas, oranges, etc.
- Yoghurt
- Fermented milk with probiotics
The Link Between Stress And Digestive Health
Are you aware that digestive disorders can deteriorate with shooting stress? Though this fact may go unnoticed, anxiety and digestive health are strongly related! You may have noticed that you tend to get nauseous when you feel highly stressed. This simple incident highlights how the brain directly affects your stomach.
When your brain activates the stress response, the digestive system is suppressed. Instead, all the resources are redirected in the body to prepare for a fight or reaction. The digestive system gets shut, and the secretions for the digestion process get reduced. After the stress, your body recovers from the situation and gradually resumes digestion!
But in case of frequent stress response triggers, it gets more challenging for the body to recover. The result can be observed in digestive issues like acid reflux, bloating, cramps, gas, etc. Try different relaxation techniques to activate the relaxation response frequently to limit the increase of such digestive disorders!
The Impact Of Lifestyle Factors
Apart from stress, you need to maintain other factors, which are the root cause behind the advent of such disorders. These causes can arise from your lifestyle habits, which you commit daily or more frequently without even giving it a second thought!
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Diet: As mentioned earlier in this blog, diet is crucial in managing overall health. A generous amount of essential nutrients will smoothen the digestive process and inhibit disorders.
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Exercises: Engaging in outdoor or physical activities daily ensures a healthy gut! Even if you are a beginner, try some simple exercises or even running daily to experience better digestive health.
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Smoking: If you have developed a habit of smoking by now, it’s high time you let it go! Because smoking may worsen the issues, making them more severe.
Conclusion:
After reading this blog, you may have developed a better idea of what digestive disorders can be, what triggers them, and how you can prevent them. Besides these, consider drinking plenty of water, all thy greens, and consulting with a gastroenterologist, if conditions worsen!
Also Read: All You Need To Know About Irritable Bowel Syndrome And Its Treatment - Healix Hospitals