How is your digestive health? That is a question that isn’t always the easiest to answer for most people. Digestive health is a specific part of your health that includes how well you digest your food without disturbance, and how well you absorb the nutrients in the food that you’ve eaten. When you look at that process closely, you can see that it plays a massive role in your overall health. That is why it should come as little surprise that digestive health has more than just how hungry you are, and whether or not you had enough brussel sprouts.
These conditions can be signs your digestive health is not optimal.
Hemorrhoids
When hemorrhoids happen for the first time, it may be upsetting. When you reach back to clean yourself, and see a handful of blood on the toilet paper it can be startling. While this can be shocking, this is often the first sign of hemorrhoids, which are extremely inflamed veins in the rectum and around the anus. It causes people a lot of discomfort and can result from poor hydration, autoimmune disease, and a host of other illnesses. Fortunately, there are a large number of safe treatments that you can use to help lessen the discomfort. Getting lots of proper hydration, eating more fiber, and probiotics can go a long way to helping reduce inflammation. Many times this is a sign your digestion is being affected by a food sensitivity and/or bacterial overgrowth’s.
Celiac Disease
In the last decade or so, gluten sensitivity has become an intensely debated topic. Today a lot of controversy still surrounds the discussions about celiac disease. Much of this is due to the massive amounts of marketing that employed heavy usage of the term, gluten-free. Celiac disease is a serious condition that is characterized by an intense sensitivity to gluten that causes the body to destroy villi in your intestines, which are responsible for the essential process that extracts the nutritional benefits from the food you eat, allowing you to live. The symptoms range from diarrhea to scarier things like seizures, but all of these symptoms are in the category of serious illness and generally signify something life threatening. Non Celiac Gluten Sensitivity (NCGS) is when your body creates an immune response to gluten even if you don’t have Celiac. This can present with many digestive symptoms like bloating, pain and constipation or diarrhea as well as fatigue and depression.
Gastroesophageal Reflux Disease
GERD, or Gastroesophageal Reflux Disease is the persistent action of stomach acids traveling up the esophagus. This condition affects a large portion of adults in the world and can be caused by a wide range of disturbances from emotional issues to physical issues. It is linked heavily to obesity, but it can be treated using various means including dietary restrictions, dietary additions, and a tablespoon of baking soda dissolved in water. Doctors usually prescribe PPI’s to reduce stomach acid, but it’s not always an issue with too much stomach acid. Many people have low stomach acid and PPI’s actually reduce the production of stomach acid so in the long run this may make things worse.
Using functional medicine testing like the GI MAP can help you discover WHY you have the GERD and Hemorrhoids in the first place. A Vibrant Wellness Wheat Zoomer can tell you for sure if you have a sensitivity to gluten and wheat or if you’re Celiac. Test, don’t guess.
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