Some time ago I started having trouble with my digestive system. After a painful six months of trying differant foods and measuring the results I came to the anwer that it’s dairy products. (I was too daft to seek advice. And possibly embarrased to talk about such things with anyone). So best guess is lactose intolerance right?
The problem seems to have reduced in recent months, sometimes I can have a small pizza now and I just get a lot of bubbling & churning in my stomach, followed by lotsa gas, so long as I’ve not had any dairy related items in the recent days.
But now I’ve started to get those symptoms from drinking bottled water. As I typically drink little else in the daytime this is very annoying.
Any ideas why this could be? Is it flushing nastiness that’s stuck in my system into a more sensitive area?
Problem doesn’t seem to happen with tap water though. Which is odd.
Lactose is a sugar, a disaccaride of glucose and glactose and is found almost exclusively in the milk of man and other mammals. If it is in bottled water, then someone would have to have added it. But that is rather unlikely since it isn’t an especially sweet sugar.
It could be hundreds of things, unfortunately. You need to start a food dairy to see whether the gas correlates with a particular food. The water is likely just driving the gas through the intestines faster than being the cause itself.
It’s also possible that you have a low-level gastrointestinal bug of some kind and that these symptoms will abate when it goes away.
Is this a recent change in your fluid intake? Many people can’t handle more than. say, 6oz of water on an empty stomach at once. It doesn’t stick around in their stomachs very long and it’s more than their intestines can handle all at once. Often their body either learns or physiologically adapts to handle the new pattern of drinking.
Oddly, many of those people can tolerate a full 8-12oz of other beverages, because they are not pure water. Either this slows down the release of the water from the stomach or the flavor gives the GI tract a cue to prepare itself (It has been documented for centuries the first phase of digestion is “cephalic” (in the head) before any actual ingestion actually takes place: your digetive tract does set itself up to prepare for what is coming)
It wasn’t that long ago that Americans rarely drank bottled water, and carrying water invariably inspired mocking comparisons to camping. Just 20 years ago, Americans travelling in Europe for the first time were aghast at carrying their water. US public drinking water was invariably dispensed from fountains (it’s hard to drink 80z from a fountain). Those are less common in modern buildings today, which may be why everyone carries 12-16oz bottles
I might suggest putting a little flavoring in your water. It might slow down the lesson of handling plain water, but it may offer mroe immediate relief. I personally favor a cheap store brand of sugar-free powdered beverage, mixed at half strength or less, to make it easier to convince myself to drink 8-16 oz of water at a time, but now that you mention it, it does seem to reduce the sloshing a bit too, if I sip a little before taking the main bolus.
I originally self diagnosed lactose intolerance, but I found that some days, my stomach would continue to get upset over nothing but water. Finally I saw a gastroenterologist and was diagnosed with IBS.
Get to a doctor. See a nutritionist after seeing a gastro, have them both work with you to plan out your food so that you can avoid triggers and stock up on good preventative foods. Adding probiotics has been great for me, as well as cutting out cheese and high fat foods entirely. Your situation may require similar food-tweaking. A gastro doc won’t even bat an eye when you confess you have chronic gas/diarrhea/constipation. They see it all day every day, so get seen!
Some of us have both LI and IBS. You need to see a professional. There are cures, or least medications that will greatly reduce IBS symptoms, but IBS is a syndrome, a collection of symptoms with a variety of causes and manifestations. Which medication (possibly with diet modification) will work best for you may take time to find, but when you do the difference will be remarkable.
