Healthy Lifestyle

Make Changes To Your Lifestyle

Changes in your everyday life also can impact your very moment digestion. Try to:

• Maintain a healthy weight. Bloating, constipation and gastroesophageal reflux disease (GERD) tend to be more common if you're overweight. Extra pounds increase pressure within your abdomen and stomach, forcing stomach acid back into your esophagus (reflux), causing a burning sensation in your esophagus (heartburn) and inflammation of the tissues that line your esophagus (esophagitis or GERD).
• Get regular exercise. Aerobic exercise — sustained physical activity that increases your breathing and heart rate — stimulates the activity of your intestinal muscles, helping push more food waste through your intestines more quickly.
• Control stress. When you're stressed your digestive muscles exert less effort, digestive enzymes are secreted in smaller amounts and passage of food waste through your digestive tract slows. This can cause heartburn, bloating and constipation. Stress can also do the opposite — speed passage of food through your intestines, causing abdominal pain and diarrhea. Stress can worsen symptoms of conditions such as peptic ulcer, irritable bowel syndrome and ulcerative colitis.
• Avoid tobacco. Beyond increasing your risk for a number of cancers, smoking can contribute to heartburn and peptic ulcers, and is thought to increase your risk of Crohn's disease. The nicotine in tobacco can increase stomach acid production and decrease production of sodium bicarbonate, a substance that neutralizes stomach acid. Air swallowed during smoking can produce belching or bloating from gas. Smokeless tobacco — spit tobacco, chew, snuff or dip — is just as dangerous.
• Use medications cautiously. Medications taken regularly can noticeable affect your digestion. For example, narcotics taken for pain relief can cause nausea and constipation. High blood pressure drugs can cause diarrhea or constipation, and some antibiotics can cause nausea or diarrhea. Nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs), including aspirin, ibuprofen (Advil, Motrin, others), naproxen (Aleve) and ketoprofen (Orudis KT), can cause nausea, stomach pain, stomach bleeding, ulcers or diarrhea if you take them regularly or exceed the recommended dosage.

posted by Unknown @ 12:20 AM