Digestive system plays a major role in the overall health of your body. Digestive problems are particularly common in Western society and have become part of the daily routine of many of us, but in normal condition they are not supposed to appear at all. Too many people have become accustomed to living with digestive disorders such as abdominal pain and bloating, irritable bowel and constipation.
Here I would like to show you 5 factors that can affect your digestive system and cause it to function improperly. I will also suggest you solutions to overcome these factors:
1. Stress
You don’t need a doctor to know that stress plays a major role in the health of our gut. The biochemical changes that occur when we are stressed have significant and immediate impact on our gut function. When the brain feels very stressed, it releases various hormones that cause changes to the digestive system in the short term, such as lack of appetite, heartburn, nausea, diarrhea and stomach pain. In the long term, prolonged stress can worsen chronic diseases such as irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) and heartburn.
It not only affects existing chronic diseases, but may also lead to the development of a variety of gastrointestinal diseases such as gastroesophageal reflux disease (GERD), peptic ulcer disease, inflammatory bowel disease (IBD), and even food allergies. Stress can cause inflammation of the gastrointestinal system, and makes you more susceptible to infection. A healthy lifestyle should include stress reduction techniques that will improve not only your digestive system, but your overall well-being. To help you better cope with stress, read my article about
14 Effective Natural Remedies for Stress and Anxiety and
7 Simple and Effective Meditation Techniques to Reduce Stress.
2. Enzyme Deficiency
There are many factors that can affect your body’s ability to produce a high enough enzyme level to maintain good health. These can be: unhealthy diet, air pollution, emotional stress, lack of sleep and more. Enzyme deficiency is the root of many digestion problems in our society. Your digestive enzymes, which are mostly produced in your pancreas, help you break down the food into nutrients so that your body can absorb them. Enzyme deficiency results in poor digestion and poor nutrient absorption, and this creates a variety of gastrointestinal problems, including: constipation, bloating, cramping and heartburn.
We get many enzymes from the foods we eat, especially raw foods that directly help with our digestive process. To maintain a healthy enzyme levels it’s important to eat raw foods that are enzyme-rich. Consuming them helps your body’s to produce its own enzymes and reduces the burden on your body to produce the enzymes it needs. In addition to raw foods, read my article
how to make digestive enzyme detox smoothie which contains digestive enzymes that help to ease the burden of the complicated process of digestion.
3. Magnesium Deficiency
Magnesium deficiency causes, among many other things, constipation and digestive-related disorders. Your body uses this important mineral to aid in the digestion process. Without magnesium, your body cannot properly digest foods, as it activates enzymes that let the body digest and break down food into smaller pieces for energy, and it also works to produce and transport energy during digestion.You may not get enough magnesium in your diet. Having the right amount of magnesium in your body is important to your digestive and overall health, so make sure to include magnesium-rich foods, such as dark green leafy vegetables, nuts, seeds, whole grains, beans, lentils, avocados, bananas and dried fruits. Magnesium is also available as a supplement, but you should not take magnesium supplement without a physician’s approval as it can interfere with current medications that you take.
4. Intestinal Flora Imbalance
Our intestinal tract is full of various species of bacteria and yeasts that help digestion, kill harmful and pathogenic infections as well as helping to produce many vitamins and other chemical substances needed for our health. These organisms that live in our intestines are called the intestinal flora. When the good or friendly flora are missing or in low concentration, it allows
other harmful pathogens to multiply in the intestine. This affects the digestion of food, and can cause many other symptoms, since the pathogens create toxins that are absorbed into the body.
The causes for intestinal flora imbalance can be due to illnesses, improper diet, antibiotic use, other medications, food chemicals and more. In these cases you may want to consider taking probiotics. You can refer in this matter to my article
9 reasons to take probiotics and why it’s so good for you. Or you can eat live-culture yogurt that often provides plenty of probiotics and is the simplest way to get them. Make sure that the label states that it is live culture yogurt, as some companies pasteurize or kill the probiotic organisms after they have fermented the milk to make yogurt.
5. Heavy Metal Toxicity
The presence of toxic metals, such as too much mercury, aluminum, cadmium, arsenic, lead and nickel, has a damaging effect on the intestinal flora for some people. These metals flood the environment and can be found in cookware, household cleaners, cosmetics, air pollution, insecticides, herbicides and smoking that causes cadmium poisoning. They invade our body and cause or contribute to a long list of diseases.
To help fight heavy metal toxicity you can use
clay to detox your body, or consume foods rich in pectin fibers (such as apples). Those fibers bind cholesterol and heavy metals to cleanse blood and intestines. Cilantro or coriander also aids our body to get rid of mercury and other heavy metals that end up in our bloodstream. Also chlorophyll rich-foods are food in this case. Chlorophyll is the green color in green leaves ,fruits and veges. It is not just a pigment, it connects with the toxins and free radicals and turns them into neutral materials. Studies have shown that chlorophyll helps in cleaning heavy metals that tend to accumulate in our body in different places, and has anti cancer properties, that specifically affect the liver. Read more about it in my article
how to detoxify your body using chlorophyll. Also the green algae chlorella has been shown to help remove heavy metals, such as cadmium and mercury, pesticides and industrial pollutants from the body, thus helping to detoxify it. You can find more information in my article
how to boost your health by eating seaweeds and algae. You can also prepare herbal infusion from red clover blossoms that also cleanse heavy metals and chemical toxicity, include those caused by the use of drugs.
