What causes Irritable Bowel Syndrome, commonly known as IBS?
Summary:
Irritable Bowel Syndrome (IBS) has two main causes. One being, they’re constipated. And two being, they have food allergies.
Constipation can contribute to IBS resulting in intermittent diarrhea. Each person should have 2 healthy bowel movements per day.
Food allergies and sensitivities can contribute to IBS. Eating the wrong foods can disrupt the balance of your microbiome and overall digestive health.
The microbiome plays an important role in maintaining healthy bowel movements. Made up of microorganisms like bacteria, parasites and fungus, the microbiome keeps us healthy.
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Transcription of Irritable Bowel Syndrome Video
Dr. Heather Tick: What is Irritable Bowel Syndrome or IBS? There are a lot of people out there with digestive problems and we tend to give them names. We like names in medicine and we in particular like initials so that gets called IBS or Irritable Bowel Syndrome. But what is it most of the time? Well from my experience treating thousands and thousands of patients over almost 30 years, most of the time Irritable Bowel Syndrome is caused by one of two things:
One is that people are constipated and their body gives them intermittent diarrhea to just clean them out but they’re not eating properly and they’re just having too few bowel movements.I believe people need to have two regular bowel movements every day and they should be easy to pass.
The second reason is that people are eating the wrong thing. So they eat foods that they may be sensitive to or foods that have too many chemicals in them.
For example, right now we know that there’s a mass of microorganisms in our bowel called the microbiome and if you want to read more about that, Google the word and along with the words Scientific American and few different articles will pop up. They’re really interesting. These microorganisms which are bacteria, viruses, parasites, fungus, are in and around our body and they keep us healthy. And if you have a healthy microbiome you will have a healthy immune system but you will also have normal bowel function. Our microbiome reacts badly to things like pesticides, chemicals, certain additives that get regularly added to our food so that’s why I advocate eating food as cleanly as possible with as few chemicals and additives as possible.
So those are two of the main causes of Irritable Bowel and there are some easy ways that you can heal your bowel by eating well and making sure that you have regular bowel movements.
