Herbs for Bowel Health

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As polite topics of conversation go, constipation, gas, diarrhea and irritable bowel syndrome probably don’t make your list. Plus, you may be too busy thinking about your face or your figure to consider your colon. Even so, you can perfect your elimination by following a few basic lifestyle rules. This is important because your eliminative system carries away the wastes of all of your cells, allowing each organ to function in a clean environment. And if you encounter elimination troubles along the way, some simple and effective natural remedies can put you back in balance.

Twisting its way to link your mouth and your rectum is your digestive tract, an approximately thirty-foot-long tube with a pretty straightforward job. Food goes in one end, gets chomped up, and then gets broken down further by acids, enzymes, and bacteria. Finally, the nutrients are absorbed into the bloodstream. The remnants get eliminated at the far end of the large intestine, the anus.

The digestive tract includes four distinct parts: the esophagus, stomach, small intestine and large intestine. Separated from each other by special muscles called sphincters (which normally stay tightly closed and which regulate the movement of food and food residues from one part to another), each section has its own job to do as well as its own corresponding herbal remedies.

Herbalists are as interested in what comes out of the body as what goes in. If food doesn’t get properly digested or the waste products of digestion can’t get out, it hardly matters what you put in your mouth.

To be on the safe side, please see your medical practitioner if you have persistent rectal bleeding, intolerable abdominal pain or daily digestive pain that exceeds a week in duration.

Start at the stomach

Although a small amount of starch is broken down in the mouth, the stomach is where the first real action is—where powerful chemicals of digestion are mixed with the food mass. If these digestive juices, including hydrochloric acid, pancreatic juice, and bile, are in short supply, the whole process gets off to a poor start.

Traditional herbalists around the world agree that herbs with a bitter taste promote digestive secretions and speed up digestion. Gentian (Gentiana lutea) is the most popular digestive bitter in Western herbalism. Europeans often drink a bitter aperitif (an ounce or so of a bitter herbal beverage) before the first bite of a meal, to stimulate digestive secretions and keep food passing through at a good clip. Bitter herbs reduce gas, bloating, symptoms of food allergies, and indigestion. Other bitter digestants include barberry root (Berberis vulgaris), dandelion (Taraxacum officinale) and artichoke (Cynara scolymus).

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