A while back, we fed BabySponte a decent amount of bananas, and later on that day, well … suffice to say BabySponte put a lot of effort into filling his diaper. WifeSponte concluded that bananas cause constipation.
I wasn’t so sure, so I googled. Turns out that half of the pages I read said that bananas cause constipation, and half said they cured constipation. Worse yet, they pro-cause and pro-cure websites all said that bananas caused/cured constipation because of their starch content.
Fully confused, we asked BabySponte’s pediatrician at his next appointment. The doc said that bananas caused constipation, but his explanation was, I felt, wanting. He explained that bananas cause constipation because they are curative of diarrhea. I don’t think that constipation and diarrhea are pole opposites - I don’t think something that cures diarrhea necessarily causes constipation, or vice versa.
Bananas are binding. They’re part of the BRAT diet–bananas, rice, applesauce and toast–that pediatricians recommend when your kid’s got diarrhea. They don’t cause constipation, per se, they just help with stopping diarrhea. (See Medline )
We have a 2 1/2 year old with chronic constipation. He gets Miralax every day, and we avoid giving him too many bananas, even though he loves them, to keep them from interfering with the stool softening from the medication.
Funny, what I’ve read suggests that probiotics have as side effects constipation AND diarrhea; there is a recommendation to pretreat with stool softeners, colon hydrotherapy, and other such things to reduce these effects.
Does the chemical makeup of bananas help with maintenance of proper intestinal flora? I can easily understand bananas helping with constipation; what particularly do they do to help alleviate diarrhea? Is it just that they normalize whatever is causing the diarrhea?
IANAD nor is my mom. She has always insisted that bananas are “mucilaginous” (I know the word but have no idea where she got it in this sense). That means that they will give consistency to poop. If you are too loose, they will firm it up. That doesn’t mean they will cause constipation, though. Eating a bunch of bananas will make you go, it just won’t be diarrhea, it will be firm.
All this for adults, not sure how much of it translates to kids, though.
Probiotics is a blanket term and about as meaningfully specific these days as medications. Which also cause constipation and diarrhea or both or neither as side effects. As can food, for that matter.
Replacing the flora in your colon can have some effect on your digestion. Just what that effect is depends entirely on what flora you had previously, what probiotics you are taking, and your consumption of food and water during the process.
Colon hydrotherapy is sheer quackery, however, and I wouldn’t recommend it for anything at any time ever. There may be some extreme cases in which a qualified gastroenterologist might want to introduce fluid into the colon, but the alternative medicine base notion is that piles of fecal material sit in your colon needing to be flushed out, which is simply fraudulently incorrect.
Bananas are useful because so few are allergic to them or suffer any stomach distress from them. And they are a good source of potassium, which is lost through diarrhea and can’t be replaced just by the water or tea that part of the BRAT diet. The BRAT diet doesn’t cure the diarrhea in the first place. (Only time and getting the bacteria out of your system does.) It merely alleviates the symptoms, doesn’t exacerbate the problem, and provides some needed nutrients. You can argue whether the fiber content of bananas is high or low, and you can find websites that say both. At about 3 grams per banana, it’s sort of medium. That’s probably good. Fiber absorbs water, so it’s helpful for diarrhea, but can create gas, which is bad especially when one is already spasming. A medium fiber content - which apples also have - is a good compromise for someone already sick.
[Minor hijack] One caution about BRAT. If you are unlucky enough to suffer from fructose malabsorption (or sensitivity) the bananas and applesauce part of this diet may make you worse. My well-meaning mother followed BRAT when I was sick as a child, and it didn’t help my diarrhea and intestinal discomfort, let me tell you! But we didn’t know any better.
More recently, when training for a century bike ride, I began to eat bunches of bananas because everyone kept saying how they were the most wonderful food ever created! I was also eating a fair amount of other fruit in an attempt to be healthy, plus sucking down power bars/gels with fructose in them. Needless to say, I was miserable, digestively speaking, and didn’t know why until I chatted with a gastroenterologist, who also was giving a nutrition seminar to our team. He suggested fructose sensitivity and, sure enough, once I limited the fructose, things were fine.
So in my case, bananas (and other fruits) were part of the cause, not a cure.[End hijack]
