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Bloated Stomach
Why do so many of us suffer from bloated stomachs? What are the causes and what are the solutions? In this article we'll look at the most common of the many causes of bloating, wind, and digestive discomfort.
Bloated Stomach Causes
Although we talk about our stomachs bloating, what we are actually referring to is most often a bloated abdomen. There are two main categories of bloating. One is due to internal gastric pressure building up because of poor digestion and wind, while the other is water retention around the abdomen, which often correlates with women's menstrual cycles. Bloating is generally considered 'transient'. It comes and goes, either through the day or over longer periods of time.
Bloated Stomach After Eating
People most commonly experience bloating after eating, and here is the first clue. Most bloating is due to inadequate digestion or breaking down of one food group or another.
Resolving your Bloated Stomach
Try to pay attention to which foods cause you to bloat, have digestive pain or wind. You will most likely find that a variety of foods cause your problem, but on closer examination you may find that these foods are all one 'type'. In other words broccoli may be suspected on one occasion, then lettuce another and finally beans. Notice that these are all geen, fiberous foods. One option is to simply identify and avoid these foods, but is there a better alternative?
Understanding Bloating
A great deal is made in the media of the importance of probiotics, but surprisingly little attention is paid to the real culpret, which is generally a lack of appropriate digestive enzymes.
Enzymes are 'catalysts'. They speed up a process; iin this incsance, the process of digestion. All foods carry the appropriate enzymes needed to break them down for ingestion. Enzymes are part of nature's design to disintegrate plant and animal materials and recycle them into the soil.
But there is one problem. Cooking destroys all enzymes.
Why Cooking May Cause Bloating
The problem is that cooking destroys just about every enzyme in a food. This means it is almost entirely down to your poor pancreas to pump out sufficient pancreatic enzymes for three meals a day. And your pancreas can't keep doing that indefinately. The net result is incomplete digestion, leading to gas, bloating, constipation, diarrhoea, cramps and so on.
The more sinister element to eating cooked foods devoid of enzymes is that your white blood cells may become involved. If your pancreas can't keep up, your body may release its load of white blood cell enzymes into the food to break it down - but this of course leaves you more vulnerable to infection and inflammation.
Poor digestion leads to inadequate nutrient absorbtion, which in turn may lead to poor organ function and inadequate stomach acidity. Lack of stomach acid makes the situation worse, and so you find yourself in a never-ending cycle of bloating as a response to more and more foods.
Bloated Stomach Remedies
At Self Health Enterprises, we insist on Cleansing, Hydration AND Nutrition to restore health, so please read the relevant sections regarding Cleansing and Hydration in combination with this article to achieve your best outcome. If you are attending to cleansing and hydration, we believe the next most important focus is enzyme supplementation.
Since most of us eat cooked meals three times per day, it is too much to ask of us to 'simply' switch to raw food, where all the enzymes are intact. So what is the alternative?
Digestive Enzyme Supplements
Digestive Enzymes come in many shapes and sizes. Different enzymes are suited to 'digest' or break down different types of food. The enzyme 'Lipase' for example, breaks down fats. Cellulase breaks down fibrous matter in green leafy vegetables, and 'Lactase' will break down lactose, which is the substance most commonly responsible for dairy intolerance.
By supplementing with the appropriate enzymes, a great many of our customers report tremendous benefits, and for you to benefit in a similar way, we have provided the following pages dedicated to enzymes:
Digestive Enzymes which describes more fully the roll of enzymes in digestion, and
Digestive Enzyme Supplements which describes more fully which enzyme supplement to choose according to your own sensitivities.
