Getnourished Visit Store


  

  

Follow Us On
Home Articles REAL Health Digestive Illness Digestive Illness Solutions
Digestive Illness Solutions Print E-mail
Written by Susan McCreadie, MD   
The digestive system. Sounds like the perfect place to start for a child with constipation, diarrhea and/or recurrent tummy aches, but a bit strange for healing a child with allergies, asthma, eczema, anxiety, depression, and more. Your digestive health is key to your overall health.

Your digestive system is where the majority of your immune and nervous system live. The immune, digestive and nervous systems are like the 3 Musketeers – all for one and one for all.  If the digestive system becomes imbalanced (not enough beneficial bacteria, overgrowth of non-beneficial bacteria, parasites and/or yeast), your immune and nervous systems may feel it as well.  I see this all the time in my patients with allergies, asthma, eczema, ADD, autism, anxiety, and others. It’s fascinating stuff – how these 3 systems interact.  The Gut and Psychology Syndrome is a great resource for those who want to learn more.  

People know their digestive system is responsible for digesting and absorbing their food, but most don’t realize that this sacred process of “digestion” is how we nourish every cell in our body.  What is more important than the way we “feed” our cells?  Not much.  The cell is where it all happens ~ the functional basic unit of life.  There’s about 100 trillion of them in your body!  Cells divide, grow, breathe, produce energy, and form every organ in your body.  So need we repeat?  Cells are a big something, and what we feed our cells is vital for our overall health, and that stems from how the food we eat is digested and absorbed into the body.  This is why your digestive system is key to your overall health.  In other words, if your digestive system is not functioning optimally the rest of “yourself” is compromised. 

Our digestive system should be armed with healthy gut flora.  These microorganisms together are busy doing a host of “chores” for our body including fermenting food, training our immune system, keeping growth of harmful pathogenic organisms in check, producing vitamins and hormones for our body, and more.  The gut flora have been called the “forgotten organ”.  We never forget our heart beats, our lungs breathe, our brain thinks, but we do forget that our digestive tract has ten times the amount of microorganisms (bacteria, fungi and protozoa) than cells in the entire body and plays a major role in the normal functioning of our body.

Every child is an individual.  So while no two roads to recovery are the same, there are a lot of similarities on the journey to a healthy gut.

Dietary considerations are paramount in discovering HOW to help a child with digestive issues heal.  Children today consume large amounts of highly processed food far from its natural state, especially processed grains found in cookies, crackers, muffins, breads, etc.  In contrast, your great-grandmother likely fed her children REAL food filled with fiber naturally (fruits, vegetables, sprouted whole grains, nuts, seeds and legumes) and she also likely fermented some foods.  Fermenting food starts the digestion process helping your child better assimilate its nutrients.  Fermented food is also filled with beneficial bacteria which helps replenish the “forgotten organ” also known as the gut flora.  These two steps of adding more fiber (remember to to make sure 80 percent of it is raw) and adding more fermented foods into your child's daily diet will help heal her digestive system with every bite!
 
Children today drink processed sugar in the form of fruit juice, even watered down fruit juice, soda/pop, energy drinks, sports drinks, “vitamin water”, and so on, replacing the ever important just plain water!  Our bodies are roughly two-thirds water, without adequate water we “dry up”, including our stool.  Make sure your child is drinking approximately half their body weight in water (40 lb child should drink 20 oz water daily).  Infants are the exception to this rule, as they primarily drink their water as breast milk or formula.  Remember when you start solid foods between 6 and 7 months, to include a sippy cup of water after every meal.  This gets them in the healthy habit of drinking water.  The other problem with drinking (and eating) processed sugar is that you are also feeding the non-beneficial bacteria, yeast and parasites which swings the digestive eco-system in their favor.  They are sitting at your table every time you eat and drink, so remember to “starve” them out with nutrient dense food and filtered water.  A great fermented drink is kombucha tea.  You can make your own or buy it.  It may take some taste bud training, but eventually you and your child will be hooked!

Remember to eliminate food intolerances.  Even if your child is eating nutrient dense, raw, fermented REAL food filled with fiber, if he or she is not tolerating the food it can lead to constipation and/or diarrhea.  The most common food intolerances I see are gluten and casein.  Be sure to have your child tested, so you know what foods (though healthy for others) are not supporting health for your child. 

A great supplement to add to your child’s diet to support a healthy digestive system and eliminate chronic constipation and/or diarrhea is probiotics, the healthy bacteria.  Not all probiotics are created equal.  See why we love HMF ~ Human based Micro-Flora, clinically proven to proliferate in the human digestive tract and reduce gastrointestinal symptoms.

Other helpful supplements for the digestive system include:

Cod liver oil with vitamin D to add healthy fats and inhibit inflammation, and a pre-digested vitamin/mineral supplement to add bio-available nutrition for the cells.

I also use homeopathic and herbal remedies to help drain and detoxify the body, through a process called Bio-Therapeutic Drainage and Physiological Regulating Medicine.  You can find a practitioner near you trained in these techniques through Seroyal and Guna Biotherapeutics.  
 
Susan McCreadie, MD is a Holistic Pediatrician and co-founder of nourishMD. She shows parents how to find REAL health for their child, so they can stop treating their child's symptoms and instead find solutions that help their child heal from the inside out.