Video Transcription

Hey we are back at Hauser Diet central and we are going to talk to you about good digestion and constipation and some things that can come from not having good digestion. Well part of this is a topic that maybe most people don’t talk about all the time and might feel a little bit uncomfortable talking about, but it really is key to your health. Having the appropriate amount of bowl movements per day and having the right amount of fiber and water in your diet are key to optimal health.

Obviously nobody wants to come down with colon cancer. That is one of the risks of constipation is that you have a bunch of stool sitting around in your large intestine for a long time and it is just fermenting and causing bacteria to overgrow and you can actually start getting the beginnings of colon cancer if you have stool sitting around in there very long. I know that is king of a gross thing to talk about but what we have found is that if people follow the appropriate Hauser Diet they are more likely to have regular bowl movements and regular digestion.

One of the things I wanted to mention first was what is considered regular digestion. Well, try and have a bowel movement after every meal. Right, if you don’t go daily that is really bad. You should really be going at least twice a day and I would say probably there is a good amount of people who don’t. What should they do? First and foremost is water. A lot of people are walking around dehydrated they are not getting nearly the amount of water that they need, which you calculate how much you need by taking your body weight and dividing by two to get how many ounces of water you need a day. Obviously for athletes or active people you need more. If you are just doing sports drinks, diet sodas, coffee, and milk, where is the water? A lot of people just need to sit down and have purified water and nothing added in. Making sure you some how watched what you are drinking, fresh filtered water is number one.

Now what about fruits and vegetables? Those have a lot of fiber. Right, obviously some Diet Types get more than others. You have the Monkey and the Giraffe they should not really have constipation problems because their diet is primarily vegetables. They should be getting lots of fresh vegetables so they should really have good digestion. I think most of the Monkeys and Giraffes that we talk to never complain about constipation. When we start getting to the other side of the diet spectrum and even the Bears who are right in the middle a lot of Bears are constipated but Lions and Otters can have this problem too. They don’t get a lot of fruit so that’s first. They are not going to be getting a lot of apples and those things. They want to increase their vegetables. Make sure you are getting a lot of fresh vegetables. If you are a Lion and you only get a few vegetables per day, and you are having all canned greens, that is really not going to be much help for your digestion. Make sure it is fresh, make sure you are getting plenty of it, and if you are having constipation you can do more water, and then more vegetables would be the next thing to try and jump start your intestines.

The other thing that you can do is include legumes in your diet: lentils, beans, cuscus, and whole grain rice. The grains and the beans are very good source of fiber and I know some people say that if they eat to much fiber they will actually feel like their stomach is completely expanding. When you do add in these kinds of high fiber foods you need to take it gradually and add it in a little bit at a time because if you just all of a sudden say I am going to eat forty one grams of fiber per day your stomach is going to have a little problem. The legumes are something that is more appropriate for a Monkey or a Giraffe to be eating, where the Lions and Otters should be having this as more of a side dish. The Monkeys and Giraffes could have this as a main meal because it is a very good source of vegetable protein. If you are a Lion or a Otter you really should look at where your complex carbs are coming from because it is east to just get caught up in doing brown bread, brown rice, and those may not have a lot of fiber grams in them. You should read your labels for you fiber. You are right because your whole grain, it might say whole grain or whole wheat is what they would say. It really is just brown white bread, brown in color.

Again you want to make sure that there are four or five grams in order for it to be a high fiver. I found a lot of whole grain breads that have had two grams of fiber per slice and even less. You are thinking this is something that is sold as a healthy whole grain option and it doesn’t even have half of the fiber that someone should have. Those are very dense. When you grab a bread that is a high fiber bread, it is heavy and dense. It is not going to be that squishy kind of Wonder bread thing.

I think that there are some people that have done what they can with the water, with the vegetables, with the complex carbs and they still are having struggles with constipation, or bloating or different things. We do here a lot of digestive complaints. I would estimate that there is population out there that they just don’t feel that they have good digestion overall. We have some people that we recommend that they supplement with enzymes or acidophilus or different things like that to really help their digestion along. Some people don’t digest just certain foods very well. Food used to be very fresh. You used to go to the market and it was just recently picked by a farmer and so the natural digestive enzymes were contained in foods like this. These foods are however many weeks old so you know that the process for picking and harvesting involved slowing down the digestive process that occurs naturally within food. Because other wise it would completely rot within a day or two of being in your refrigerator. The food itself is not as high in natural enzymes as it used to be. Many of us need a little digestive enzyme help and there is nothing wrong with that I think it is better because you will get more nutritional value out of your food.

In summary, make sure you are drinking plenty of water, get plenty of fresh vegetables, getting your appropriate amount of complex carbohydrates for your Diet Type, and make sure, if you don’t get very many options like a Lion or a Otter who can have them with every meal, that you are getting the most bang for your buck besides just choosing good old brown bread. If necessary, look into digestive enzymes to really get things moving along. Until next time…