Gas (Flatulence)
Gas (flatulence) is produced in your digestive system when you eat foods that are hard to digest, or you eat too much and overload your digestive tract or if you don’t produce enough digestive enzymes to break down your food. Indigestion is no fun and whatever the reason it can be extremely uncomfortable and potentially embarrassing. Here’s a joke that illustrates that.
An elderly couple were sitting in church towards the back. The wife wrote a note and passed it to her husband. “I just passed a silent fart,” she wrote. “What do you think I should do?” Her husband wrote back. “Get a new battery for your hearing aid.”
Okay. Back to business. There are some things you can do about excess gas and here they are. Peppermints really do help with gas; that’s why they are offered in most restaurants. In addition to the peppermint at the restaurant, you can drink Alvita’s Peppermint tea.
But why are you getting gas? You may be eating food your body can’t digest. See the book Eat Right 4 Your Type for a list of foods you can easily digest. I do believe in the “Eat Right 4 Your Type” book. I love eating dried beans. Sometimes I would get gassy and sometimes I wouldn’t. When I checked the list of beans I was to avoid according to the “Eat Right…” book, sure enough, those were the ones that made me gassy. Eating beans has been a lot more fun since then. You can also increase digestibility of beans by making sure you have a complete protein. Beans by themselves are not a complete protein; they need something else to go along with them. If you cook beans with meat, this makes a complete protein. If you don’t cook with meat, add corn to the beans or eat with cornbread or with whole wheat bread.
You may not be producing enough digestive enzymes. Mom’s advice about “chew your food,” is sound because digestion starts in your mouth. Chewing breaks down the food and mixes digestive enzymes with it. Not everyone produces strong digestive juices so taking a digestive enzyme with meals may be your answer.
Activated charcoal is very effective in case you are really miserable. It takes about 15 minutes but once it starts working it binds up gas, toxins, and anything else making you miserable and passes it out of your system.
I hope you noticed that many of our “traditional” food habits are designed to improve the digestion of the food. Some traditional combinations that do this are beans and cornbread, after dinner mints, caraway seed in rye bread, and mint jelly served with lamb. There are many more, too, so don’t be too quick to throw out “tradition.”
Click here for information on Peppermint Tea
Click here for the book “Eat Right 4 Your Type”
Click here for information on a digestive enzyme
Click here for information on Activated Charcoal
Category: Condition, Herbal Remedies
