These are eight ways to help your digestive system stay health and function properly:

1. Eat a healthy diet that includes food rich in fiber, such as fruits, vegetables, and whole grains.
2. Reduce fats and oils in your diet.
3. Maintain a healthy weight appropriate for your age and sex.
4. Get regular exercise.
5. Control stress.
6. If you smoke, stop!
7. Limit alcohol use.
8. Use medications only as directed and only if needed, including over-the-counter medications and herbal remedies.

A healthy lifestyle can help prevent gastrointestinal symptoms or make it easier to control or modify a digestive disorder.

1. Eat a healthy diet that includes food rich in fiber, such as fruits, vegetables, and whole grains.

Plant foods (such as fruits, vegetables and whole grains) contain vitamins, minerals and compounds that may protect you against cancer. Plant foods are also an excellent source of fiber, a nutrient that is very important to digestion.

Dietary fiber is the part of plant foods that your body cannot digest. Fiber is important because:

• It keeps your digestive tract healthy.
• It can affect your blood sugar and cholesterol levels.

The recommended daily intake of fiber is 20 g to 35 g. Unfortunately, too many people don't get enough fiber—each day Americans typically consume 10 to 15 grams of fiber.

Fiber comes in two forms—soluble and insoluble:

• Soluble fiber.
  This type of fiber absorbs up to 15 times its weight in water as it moves through the digestive tract, producing softer stools. Soluble fiber has been shown to help lower blood cholesterol by about 2% to 4%. Foods high in soluble fiber include oat bran, oatmeal, dry beans and peas, barley, citrus fruits, strawberries, and apples.
• Insoluble fiber.
  This type of fiber does not lower blood cholesterol, but gives stool its bulk. It is important in keeping the bowels healthy and preventing constipation, diverticular disease, and colon cancer. Foods high in insoluble fiber include whole-wheat breads, whole-grain cereals, wheat bran, cabbage, beets, carrots, turnips, and cauliflower.

Some ways that fiber may help your digestive tract:

• Softening and bulking of your stool helps to prevent constipation, some types of diarrhea, and symptoms of irritable bowel syndrome.
• Softening and bulking also decreases pressure in the GI tract, reducing your risk of hemorrhoids and the development of diverticular disease (small pouches in your colon).
• Soluble fiber may help lower your cholesterol by increasing the amount of bile acids excreted in stool—to make more bile acids, the liver removes more cholesterol from your blood.
• Fiber may help people with diabetes control their disease by slowing the release of sugar into the bloodstream.
• A fiber-rich diet may also lower your risk of colon and rectal cancers.

High-fiber foods are good for your health. But too much fiber too quickly can cause intestinal gas, bloating, and abdominal pain. Increase fiber in your diet slowly over a period of a several weeks. This will allow the natural bacteria in your digestive system to adjust to the change.

Learn more about Healthy Eating

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2. Reduce fats and oils in your diet.

Too much fat in your diet slows digestion and can lead to heartburn, bloating and constipation. Excess fat can also increase your risk of heart disease, high cholesterol, diabetes, and gallbladder disease. A high-fat diet may also worsen the symptoms of conditions such as inflammatory bowel disease, irritable bowel syndrome, and pancreatitis.

A diet high in saturated fats (the fats found in meat and dairy products) may increase your risk of cancer, especially colon cancer. The fats found in nuts (especially walnuts), fatty fish (such as salmon), and certain vegetable oils (olive oil and canola oil) may help reduce the risk of heart disease and are not know to increase the risk of GI cancers or other digestive disorders.

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3. Maintain a healthy weight appropriate for your age and sex.

Although digestive disorders can occur no matter what your weight, certain GI conditions and symptoms tend to be more common in people who are overweight.
These include:

• Bloating and constipation
• Gastroesophageal reflux disease (GERD)
• Gallstones and other gallbladder conditions
• Fatty liver disease

Being overweight is often associated with poor eating habits, including too much saturated fat in the diet and too little intake of fiber. Both of these are related to an increased risk of digestive disorders.

Learn more about Healthy Weight
Learn more about Obesity

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4. Get regular exercise.

Aerobic exercise — sustained physical activity that increases your breathing and heart rate — is beneficial for healthy digestion. In addition to improving heart and lung health, this type of exercise stimulates the activity of intestinal muscles.

Aerobic exercise helps maintain a health weight, promotes weight loss, builds stamina and helps strengthen the immune system. The most common aerobic activity is walking—it is easy, convenient and inexpensive.

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5. Control stress.

It is common for most people to experience moments of stress. It's important to recognize when you're feeling stressed and to take steps to relieve the tension with exercise or relaxation techniques. If not properly managed, or treated, stress can adversely affect your digestion tract.

Stress can have various effects on your digestive system. Sometimes, acute stress causes your body to pump extra blood to your muscles, so that you have more energy to fight off an attack or run away. This causes less blood to flow to your GI tract. Your digestive muscles exert less effort, digestive enzymes are secreted in smaller amounts, and passage of food waste through your digestive slows. This can produce symptoms such as heartburn, bloating and constipation.

Stress may also have the opposite effect. It can speed the passage of food through your intestines, causing abdominal pain and diarrhea. Stress may also worsen symptoms of conditions such as peptic ulcer disease, GERD, irritable bowel syndrome, and inflammatory bowel disease.

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6. If you smoke, stop!

Smoking tobacco has harmful effects on all parts of the digestive system. It can worsen the symptoms of such common conditions as GERD, peptic ulcer disease, and irritable bowel syndrome. Smoking may also increase the risk of Crohn’s disease and possibly of gallstones.

The nicotine in tobacco products may increase the production of stomach acid and decrease the production of sodium bicarbonate, a substance that neutralizes stomach acid. Smoking may also effect the way the liver handles (metabolizes) drugs and alcohol. Your liver is responsible for removing many drugs, alcohol and other toxins from your body. Smoking may alter your liver’s effectiveness in handling such substances.

Smoking also increases the risk of many cancers. According to the American Cancer Society, cigarette smoking is a major cause of lung, larynx, oral cavity, pharynx, and esophageal cancers and contributes to the development of bladder, pancreas, kidney and stomach cancers.

Spit tobacco (also known as smokeless tobacco, chew, snuff or dip) is also dangerous. People who are moderate users of spit tobacco are four times more likely to get oral (mouth) cancer, and heavy users are seven times more likely to get oral cancer. Users of spit tobacco are also have an increased risk of cancer of the esophagus, pharynx and larynx as well as the stomach, pancreas and prostate.

Learn more about smoking and how to stop

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7. Limit alcohol use.

Some alcoholic beverages (especially red wine) may have beneficial health effects, such as reducing your risk of heart disease. However, it is best to limit alcohol to a moderate amount — no more than one drink or two drinks a day. A drink is defined as 12 ounces of beer, 5 ounces of wine, or 1.5 ounces of 80-proof distilled spirits.

Too much alcohol — anything above a moderate amount — can lead to several serious problems, including disorders of the digestive system. Alcohol can cause inflammation of the lining of your stomach and relax your lower esophageal sphincter, the muscular valve that prevents stomach acid from backing up into your esophagus. These actions can cause bleeding or gastrointestinal reflux disease (GERD).

Excessive alcohol is a leading cause of liver and pancreatic disease. Chronic alcohol abuse can cause inflammation and scarring of the liver leading to cirrhosis and an increased risk of liver cancer.

Learn more about Alcohol Use Problems

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8. Use medications only as directed and only if needed, including over-the-counter medications and herbal remedies.

Nearly all medications can effect the digestion system in one way or another. Many medications are handled (metabolized) by the liver and some may have a toxic effect on liver cells. Other medications may interfere with the movement of the GI tract muscles, cause bleeding from the lining of the GI tract, or disturb the growth and function of helpful bacteria.

Most often, the effects of medications on the GI tract are mild or go unnoticed, but some drugs can produce noticeable symptoms, especially if taken regularly. For example:

• Narcotics (such as morphine and codeine) taken to relieve pain can produce constipation
• Medications taken for high blood pressure (such as beta blockers) can cause diarrhea or constipation
• Some antibiotics (such as ampicillin) taken to fight infection cause or diarrhea
• NSAIDs (nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs) can cause nausea, stomach pain, stomach bleeding, ulcers or diarrhea. These medications include such over-the-counter drugs as aspirin, ibuprofen, and naproxen

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Last modified on: 30 June 2015