Constipation is a significant problem for many children and adults. Not having regular bowel movements every day leads to increased toxicity, not to mention fatigue and an uncomfortable bloated feeling.
Now a new study is showing that simply taking one of our most common and healthy remedies can correct the problem in many cases.
Researchers looked at 1,182 men and women who had what is called functional constipation. Functional constipation is the term for constipation for no obvious medical reason. They studied all of them for the effect of probiotics on their bowel transit time.
Bowel transit time refers to the amount of time it takes for your body to eliminate food. Obviously, people with constipation have an excessively long bowel transit time. Anything that would improve on that time would improve the level of their constipation.
As you probably already know, probiotics are supplements that contain various friendly bacteria. They are one of the most popular supplements in the world. They’re even accepted by most conventional doctors. But when it comes to constipation, probiotics aren’t usually the first thing you think of. But maybe they should be.
Overall, probiotics significantly reduced the transit time by 12.4 hours. This means that if someone has a bowel movement every 48 hours, that could be reduced to every 36 hours with a probiotic. Of course, that is an average time. There are going to be some people who do much better than that. And there are going to be some people who don’t benefit at all. The researchers also found out that the participants had anywhere from one to two more bowel movements per week when they took the probiotics. The most effective single strain of probiotics was the lactobacillus strain.
So probiotics might be just the thing for many people. Also, probiotics have so many other advantages, such as preventing bowel infections, helping with digestion, improving immune activity, and providing nutritional support. So if you have constipation, instead of first going to medications, try using some probiotics for a while. It might just be what you need.
Sources:
Dimidi, E., S. Christodoulides, K.C. Fragkos, et al. “The effect of probiotics on functional constipation in adults: a systematic review and meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials.” Am J Clin Nutr. 2014 August 6.