How To Deal With Gas!

There are several reasons why many choose to go the vegetarian route; for some it is ethical, for others it may be spiritual, religious and environment, but when surveys are conducted more often than I realized, many make this life change based on a desire for better health. With a vegetarian diet comes certain issues that may or may not be comfortable to discuss on an open forum, but hear goes!

Our gastrointestinal system, better known as our digestive system is a sensitive and intricate mechanism. It’s many components work together to process the foods we ingest into the tiniest particles to be absorbed into our bloodstream and carried to different parts of our bodies. Our digestive system benefits from a vegetarian diet as it is less taxing to process plant based foods than it is to process animal products. With the high fiber diet that most often includes beans and legumes, comes gas, flatulence, toots, farts! Doesn’t matter what word you are comfortable with, it is embarrassing and sometimes uncontrollable. 

One of our subscribers, whose children call Farty Pants, (which we think is too cute and loved hearing about!) asked us to address this and we are quite happy to oblige. We know that eating a healthy and nutritious vegetarian | vegan diet causes the body to develop gas. I ‘googled’ the World Wide Web to determine what tips are out there to assist with this issue and this is what I have come up with:

• Natural solutions to consider eating after a meal include:
• Fresh fennel or fennel seed
• Mint
• Parsley
• Apple cider vinegar
• Ginger
• Tea can also settle our tummies. Look for a brand at your local natural food stores that is designed for this. ‘Traditional Medicinals’ is a brand that both Lyndsay and I use for a number of issues and they offer ‘Eater’s Digest’, Organic Chamomile, Ginger and Organic Peppermint all designed for aiding in digestion.
• Digestive enzymes are also designed to assist in digestion. We need certain enzymes to process foods and sometimes we are lacking some of these enzymes. A supplemental enzyme can assist in speeding up the digestion process.
• Acidophilus as a supplement can also aid in your digestive health. Acidophilus is a natural bacteria that is found in the intestinal tract and it is a good bacteria. Our bodies often have altered levels of good bacteria based on our diet, stress and medications to name a few reasons. By adding a source of acidophilus you are assisting the body with this balance. Acidophilus can be taken as a capsule or powder; can be found in live culture yoghurts and kefir.

For those of you who love your beans, but don’t love how they affect your body, Livestrong, an excellent resource for healthy information offers an article about which beans cause more gas http://www.livestrong.com/article/522115-types-of-beans-that-cause-excess-gas/  along with other article links on the same page. I also found this article on Vegan Nutirionista http://www.vegan-nutritionista.com/natural-gas-remedies.html with tips on what can do to keep from creating too much gas.

The healthy Vegetarian | Vegan diet is going to come with gas. It is virtually unavoidable. Dealing with the results of gas creation in the body can be dealt with naturally and can become part of your daily regime which should keep the discomfort and the embarrassment to a minimum.