An inefficient bowel is the genesis of several major degenerative, including cancer. Good health starts with good digestion, so let’s take a closer look at yours.

The Beet Goes on

Which brings us to my favourite topic: stools. An important measure of bowel perfonnance is transit time - how long it takes from the time you eat a food until it comes out the other end. The most effective way to measure this is to eat three or four whole beetroots. This is because beetroot can turn the stool bright red and so if you take note of when you eat the beets you can calculate how long your own personal transit time is. Twelve to 24 hours is the optimal transit time. Sweetcorn works well too - you should spot recognisable corn emerging out the other end. If it’s less than 12 hours it’s possible that you’re not absorbing all the nutrients you should be from your food. More than 24 hours indicates that the wastes are sitting inside your bowel for too long and this can greatly increase the risk of colon disease.

If you’ve done this experiment and found that your transit time is slow, you’ll be relieved to hear that all isn’t lost:

• One of the major elements in your diet to increase is fibre, and generally you can do this pretty easily by upping the amount of fruit, vegetables and pulses (e.g. lentils) you’re eating. Whole grains are also full of fibre, so adding these to your diet will help too. By whole grains I mean unprocessed grains, because processing removes all of the husk and the fibre, which is why brown rice is so much better for you than white. A word of warning though: because of the healthy associations attached to brown bread, some processed loaves are coloured to give them a healthy colour. Look for the key phrase ‘wholemeal’ to avoid this particular trick. Bread should be heavy and more brick-like - light and fluffy says a lot of air and not much substance.
• Increasing your water intake is vital. Water shortages do for your digestion pretty much what they do for any other living thing.
• Foods that react negatively in the gut include sugar, alcohol, high-fat foods and junk foods
  like chips and pastries, to name but a few of the major culprits. Foods made up of flour are particularly able to slow everything down in there. Remember making glue from flour and water when you were at school? The same principle applies here.

Friend or Foe?

Your insides are prime real estate. You have between about 400 and 500 different bacteria living in your bowels. A total of one hundred trillion bacteria live in your entire digestive system comprising a total weight of about four pounds, and the majority of these guys live in your colon. Some kinds of bacteria are goodies, some are baddies and some don’t affect our health at all. The trick isn’t to let the baddies overwhelm our system and cause an imbalance leading to ill health.

The goodies aren’t just in there for the ride, they actually have a major effect on our good health. These guys manufacture many vitamins, including from the important B group, and make some minerals more bioavailable. They also help increase our resistance to food poisoning and are a vital part of our immune system. They can even work to prevent tumours and cancers. To get more of these desirable tenants into your system, eat more cultured foods like yoghurt, sauerkraut and cottage cheese. There are also a number of yoghurts now available containing ‘live bacteria’ (such as bifidus). If yoghurt leaves you cold, you could take a friendly bacteria supplement. Just one tablet can represent the equivalent of fifteen small tubs of yoghurt, which would take a long time to get through using the traditional teaspoon technique!

Tagged under:beetroot beets brown bread colon disease fibre fruit vegetables Health Flash sweetcorn

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