Digestive disorders affect nearly 70 million people in the United State, according to the National Institute of Diabetes, Digestive and Kidney Diseases.
Hartford Hospital gastroenterologist Dr. Neil Parikh has a few suggestions on how to maintain digestive health and avoid being among that 70 million.
Q: How can we maintain a healthy digestive tract and reduce the number of digestive disorders?
A: When I think of general digestive disease wellness, the first thing that comes to mind is the association of obesity with gastrointestinal health. While we often correlate obesity with cardiac disease and diabetes, there are also important negative gastrointestinal consequences with obesity. Being overweight increases your risk of gallstones, gastroesophageal reflux, fatty liver disease, pancreatitis, and cancers of the colon, esophagus and pancreas.
Q: So can exercise reduce your risk of these diseases like it does for cardiac disease and diabetes?
A: Yes. In fact, exercise and weight loss can reduce the level of inflammation in diseases such as fatty liver and reduce symptoms of acid reflux. Interestingly, on a slightly different note, recent animal studies have suggested that exercise also affects your gut microbiome, which is the composition of good and bad bacteria in your gastrointestinal tract. These preliminary studies have shown high intensity exercise may increase the proportion of good bacteria compared to bad bacteria. This is fascinating because we are starting to see multiple links between the gut microbiome and many gastrointestinal diseases.
Q: Is this where probiotics can play a role?
A: Possibly. Like the interplay between gastrointestinal diseases and the gut microbiome, we are still waiting for definitive studies to tell us exactly where probiotics fit into our treatment paradigms. For some conditions such as antibiotic-associated diarrhea or in specific cases of inflammatory bowel disease, probiotics may definitely be helpful while the jury is still out on their clinical benefit in other GI illnesses such as irritable bowel syndrome.
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