IBS & Gut Health
Are you looking for treatment for IBS? Wanting to know the best diet for IBS?
As a Naturopath, I’m not scared to talk about poo, bloated bellies, or farting. Sounds gross and something you don’t want to talk about, but the fact is 1 in 5 Australians will have IBS throughout their lives and need help fixing it.
Good digestion is the key to good health – a fact we’ve always innately known and this has become part of our vocabulary with old sayings such as “you are what you eat.”
If your belly isn’t happy – your body is sending you a signal that you may not be digesting and absorbing your nutrients properly. We can learn a lot from our waste products, in fact dogs have been trained to detect early signs of cancer from human urine samples! Have you noticed how after a dog or cat goes to the toilet they sniff their poo? Now I’m not suggesting you do that! But animals check out their waste because they are being their own health detectives. Your poo tells you so much about your health and is a marker of your overall wellness. Have a look in the toilet once you’ve been to the loo, your stools help you to know if your insides are working properly and if your digestion is working well.
Your poo should resemble type 3 or even better, type 4 – a smooth, sausage shaped stool that is easy to pass and maintains it’s shape. Looking at your stools gives you an idea of transit time, that is, how long your food took to get from your mouth to your waste pipe. If the food transited too fast, things don’t digest well and become more liquid, if the food transited too slow, the stool get harder, dehydrated, pebbly and hard to pass.
I believe that good health begins in the gut. If you’re looking for answers on the best diet for IBS or natural treatment for IBS – keep reading for my health tips. I’ve been helping people with IBS as a Brisbane Naturopath for 12 years and you’ll be surprised how easy it is to get great results in a short amount of time.
Looking at your stools is only one way of diagnosing gut health, colonoscopy and endoscopy is the medical standard. This is super important to rule out serious bowel disease. Often clients come to visit me after they’ve had a colonoscopy which revealed nothing but Irritable Bowel. Treatment for IBS is very specific to the person as no two people have the same type.
IBS Symptoms
- Abdominal bloating and discomfort
- Changeable bowel habits – alternating between constipation or diarrhoea.
- Stool habits change – watery, loose, nuggety, thin ribbons.
- Wind
- Feeling of discomfort after eating & food sensitivities
- Feeling of urgency – needing to go to the toilet often or feeling not fully evacuated when you empty your bowels.
Most people who come to see me seeking treatment for IBS improve significantly within 4 weeks. IBS is a syndrome, which means that many factors contribute to it and it has many symptoms, so I find that a wholistic approach works best. Here’s the things I investigate when helping my clients with IBS treatment.
IBS Treatment Considerations
- Stress Levels and Sleep
- Gut Flora : goodies vs baddies
- Exercise
- Food Allergy and Intolerance
- Stool Testing – Digestive Stool Analysis
Stress makes IBS much worse. You know the feeling of butterflies in your stomach when nervous? Stress and anxiety affect the nerves to the stomach, making it lose it’s regular digestive rhythm. Stress either speeds up or slows down the digestion and impairs the normal communication between the brain and the digestive organs. I like to use herbal medicine to reduce the stress hormones in the body, while teaching my clients some stress reduction techniques. If you’re not sleeping well, your body doesn’t get the rest it needs to regenerate the parasympathetic nervous system. This part of the nervous system is responsible for good digestion. If you’re stressed and/or not sleeping well, the digestive system goes on holiday and doesn’t stick to it’s normal routine.
Your digestive system is made up of billions of good and bad bacteria. They are both part of a normal digestive process, and normally co-exist in harmony. The good bacteria regulate digestion and elimination and play a big role in helping the immune system stay healthy. In a healthy system, the bad guys are kept in check by the good guys. Think of your digestion as your rubbish bin. Rubbish is waste, after time it starts to decompose and break down and releases gases, it can get a bit stinky and will get super stinky and start growing mould if you don’t take out the bins regularly and clean out the rubbish bin with a good disinfectant. Your digestive system is the same. It needs the rubbish to be regularly taken out and the bin needs to be clean and free of excess mould and bugs. If you have a disused vegie garden, the veggies don’t just grow beautifully if they’re unattended, but the weeds do! Weeds, and bad digestive bugs are born to survive, they’re fighters and will try to invade and take over at any cost. Unless you eat well and look after your internal environment, the bad guys muscle in and set up camp, bullying out the good guys. Then you get IBS!
One of the first things I do with my IBS patients is a good old weed, feed n seed program. Using herbal medicine we weed out the bad guys and reduce their food sources (sugar, yeast, refined carbs.) Then we put back the good guys (probiotics.) Many of my clients already take probiotics, but there’s just no room for these good guys to set up camp and live in your digestive system if the bad guys already have the good camping spots. What you need to do is kill off the bad guys first, then the good guys (probiotics) will have some room to move, have babies and set up a lovely life for themselves.
Regular exercise helps the muscles of the bowel to move properly. Many of us have jobs where we sit down all day. Have you ever noticed if your IBS is better on days when you move around more, say on a weekend?
Get moving and your bowel will be much happier.
Often IBS is caused by an undiagnosed food allergy or intolerance. I carefully ask my clients about their diet, including food and drink. Lactose and gluten are common culprits. Less common but often very powerful are artificial sweeteners – if you chew gum or have sugar free food such as diet yoghurt, protein bars/ shakes or drinks with artificial sweeteners, these are often the source of irritation causing bloating and diarrhoea.
FODMAP intolerance is a common cause of IBS. Fodmaps are a group of sugars in everyday foods that aren’t digested properly in some people, triggering IBS symptoms.
If you’d like to read more about Food Allergy – check out my food allergy testing blog post.
If basic treatments for IBS aren’t working for my clients, I always recommend a digestive stool test. This is a little different to standard stool tests done by GPs. It gives us an amazing amount of information about what’s going on inside the digestive system. It checks for digestive enzyme levels, undigested protein, carbs and fats, levels of good probiotic bacteria, inflammation markers and much more.
The part I find gives us amazing results is the parasitology testing. This tests for hundreds of bacteria, viruses and parasites and if found, tests what drugs or herbs will kill it. The bug that is found is tested in the lab against a range of drug and herbs. Some which do nothing to kill the parasite and others which do. This helps me to recommend the right course of treatment to kill the pathogen and cuts out a lot of guesswork and wasted money trying treatments that aren’t effective.
Another thing I find comes up a lot in these tests for IBS sufferers is the level of good bacteria comes back at zero, even for people who take probiotics daily. This can be due to an overgrowth of bad bugs or a lack or prebiotics needed for the good bacteria to live and survive. For more information on the digestive stool analysis test, refer to the Doctors Data website.
Want an appointment to help your IBS?
The Naturopaths at Vibe Natural Health offer appointments at our clinic at 210 Days Rd, Grange in Brisbane.
Visit our appointment diary on the top right of screen to book now.
If you have questions, please email us rather than commenting on the blog at info@vibenaturalhealth.com.au
Or phone us on (07) 3366 7970. We would love to help you!
