If you are concerned about your child's digestion and are struggling to help ease the pain of your child's tummy pains we have some top tips from nutritionist Suzie Sawyer to help ensure kids have a healthy digestive system, which is crucial from an early age.
Parenting on Female First
Suzie's top tips on keeping your child's digestion healthy:
- Encourage regular toilet habits. Many children have an absolute fear of going to the loo at school. This can cause painful constipation and can become very upsetting for younger children as they don't really understand why they're feeling so uncomfortable. Reassure them not to be embarrassed and even encourage them to get used to going to the toilet before school.
- Pack the fibre. Kids need fibre to ensure regular bowel movements. Introduce brown bread and wholemeal pasta to their diets early, so that they will be more accepted. White bread and pasta have very little fibre and are nutrient lacking, particularly in B vitamins and magnesium. Magnesium helps the muscles relax, thereby keeping the bowels regular.
- Supplement with probiotics. Probiotics have proven benefits for maintaining a good-working digestive system - promoting healthy bowel movements and helping to relieve the symptoms of constipation, bloating and flatulence. A good balance of bacteria in the gut is also needed as this helps us to better absorb macronutrients. The NEW Biotic Balance ChocBalls are a fun way to ensure kids have a balance of healthy bacteria and don't need to be kept in the fridge.
- Cut the sugar. We all know that too much sugar is present in a typical Western diet. However, it's not just excess calories that are consumed by eating sugary foods; sugar also slows down the whole process of digestion. In addition, many mothers will look for low sugar drinks or foods, perhaps not realising that they will frequently contain artificial sweeteners. These are chemicals which are actually worse for the body and digestive system generally. It's often difficult regulating how much sugar children are eating, but it's better to have a little of the real thing rather than eating foods containing sweeteners.
Nutritionist Suzie Sawyer said; "It may come as quite a surprise to know that many children start to suffer from digestive problems from a very early age. The reasons for this can of course be varied, but it is never too early to get some good habits going."