Sluggish bowel
Although I am in pretty good health, I have a very sluggish bowel and so have to watch what I eat and drink. I always have muesli for breakfast, usually with a banana but I’m not sure if I am doing the right thing. Is this helping or exacerbating the problem and if it is not helping, what should I be doing?
You probably have milk every morning with your muesli and so you may inadvertently be exacerbating your bowel problems since, like all dairy foods, milk increases the production of mucous in the body. In the bowel, this process can then slow the transit of food through the gut.
Bananas are excellent natural probiotics which encourage the growth of the good intestinal bacteria that help with digestion but what you really need to eat are more foods rich in insoluble fibre that will kick-start a sluggish bowel. Soluble fibre breaks down in the gut to form a soft gel that slows down digestion whereas insoluble fibre remains unchanged and acts to speed up both transit time and gastric emptying.
The best breakfast foods that are rich in insoluble fibres are unpeeled apples, pears, wholegrain breads with non-dairy spreads (say tahini made from sesame seeds) and hash browns. Baked potatoes with their skins provide a high fibre intake and cooked beans (for example, home-made baked beans using haricot beans) are an even better source of the right kind of fibre than bran. When cooking dried beans, add a strip of kombu seaweed to improve digestibility, release the nutrients and reduce flatulence.