In addition to maintaining consistent physical activity throughout your week and ensuring your mental health is on track, prioritizing a well rounded diet with digestive-friendly foods is essential to creating a strong environment for your digestive system to thrive. There are certain foods that could potentially be harming your digestive process, but luckily there are practices you can incorporate into your routine to be able to identify the foods that personally affect you and that you can use to improve your diet.
How Chocolate Can Be Potentially Damaging to Your Digestion
Consuming chocolate could increase your risk of experiencing symptoms such as heartburn and bloating. While moderation is essential regarding anything you are eating or drinking, we recommend being wary of chocolate that contains high levels of processed sugars and fats.
While we all may love the taste of this delicious treat, chocolate contains high levels of sugar, milk, and fat. This is especially true for milk or white chocolate which contain all three of these potentially triggering ingredients. Milk in chocolate can be damaging specifically to those who have an intolerance to lactose and those with gastrointestinal issues such as irritable bowel syndrome. If you fall into either of these categories, it is all the more reason to be wary of consuming high levels of chocolate.
Regardless, our bodies are not created with the tools to properly digest processed foods without some sort of challenge. The liver is responsible for processing sugar, but when sugar is highly processed all of this is sent to the liver at the same time leading to the liver feeling overwhelmed and unable to do its job efficiently or smoothly.
However, some recent studies have found that cocoa can be beneficial to our digestive processes, because it can help to increase the levels of healthy bacteria in our bodies. Something to keep in mind is that cocoa does not necessarily equal all types of chocolate, and the one it most resembles would be dark chocolate which tends to contain less sugar and fat. As always, it is important to check the ingredients in the foods you are consuming to ensure they are not being jam packed with processed sugars and fats.
Why Eating Spicy Foods Can Lead to Diarrhea
If you are someone who loves indulging in some spicy food from time to time, but find that you have to run to the bathroom shortly after, you are not alone. Foods that are spicy are most likely prepared with certain spices that contain an ingredient called capsaicin. Capsaicin tends to irritate the stomach lining and gut due to its intense properties, and can lead to diarrhea in some cases due to a weak stomach lining or weak gut health. However, regardless of the status of your gut it is prudent to try and limit the amount of spicy food you eat, because of it potentially leading to unpleasant results.
When capsaicin enters our bodies, it triggers something within us that helps to stimulate the vanilloid receptor one protein. Also known as the capsaicin receptor, this protein lets our bodies know that something within us is trying to harm us. This triggers our bodies to release endorphins in hopes of blocking any potential pain that can occur. Your body is now in a sense in fight or flight mode trying to push out this potentially harmful substance which is what eventually causes the feeling of needing to run to the bathroom and experiencing diarrhea.
While some people are more sensitive to spicy foods than others, a great way to avoid diarrhea is by taking it slow in order to identify where you land on the spectrum. Incorporating sweet foods into your meals when you do choose to indulge in spicy foods can help to alleviate some of the potential issues, but the only foolproof way to ensure you will not get diarrhea is by avoiding it altogether.
Knowing your own food sensitivities is so important in creating the best diet for your own health and digestion, and while these foods are known commonly to lead to digestive ailments there might be some foods that are specifically unpleasant for your body to process. Starting a food diary where you log all the foods and substances you are consuming along with how your body reacts to them is a great way to ensure you are supporting your body in the best way possible.
How Supplements Can Help In Addition to a Healthy Diet
In addition to staying away from foods that can potentially weaken your gut health, taking supplements that help with bloating and other digestive ailments is essential to practicing proper health habits. Two of the main types of bloating supplements that are recommended for digestive health are a probiotic and a digestive enzyme supplement. Probiotics help to increase the amount of good bacteria in your body that helps to keep your gastrointestinal system and gut lining strong.
Your body naturally produces probiotics, but in order to avoid bad bacteria from overwhelming your body, taking a probiotic can help with increasing the amount of healthy bacteria for extra support. A digestive enzyme supplement helps to boost gut health enzymes in your body which help you digest foods properly. Foods such as gluten and dairy can sometimes be hard for our bodies to process, but with the help of digestive enzymes we can make it that much easier for our bodies to handle it.
In hopes of making it easy for you to get the support you need, we have curated a three-step wellness program that includes Probiotic Renu which acts as your probiotic, another supplement named Sexy & Slim which contains a digestive enzyme complex, and a third supplement named Metaboliz that helps to regulate your energy levels as well as maintain proper gut health throughout your day. It is the wellness program that will leave you feeling at peace with the fact that you are preparing your body for a multitude of digestive issues that might arise. Both probiotics and digestive enzymes can be found naturally in certain foods that can be beneficial to add to your diet as well, but this is just an easy and efficient way to give you that extra boost of support.