Vegetarian diet helps ward off bowel disorder: Study

July 21, 2011 05:23 pm | Updated 05:23 pm IST - London

Suffering from irregular bowel movements? Turn vegetarian if you want to ward off the disorder, scientists say.

Researchers led by Dr Francesca Crowe at the Cancer Epidemiology Unit of Oxford University found that vegetarians were a third less likely to get diverticular disease - a condition thought to be caused by eating too little fibre.

For their study, the researchers looked at 47,033 British adults, of whom 15,459 were vegetarian.

After an average follow—up of 11.6 years, there were 812 cases of diverticular disease, which causes cramps, wind, bloating, constipation and diarrhoea.

After adjusting the factors such as smoking, alcohol and body mass index (BMI), the researchers found vegetarians had a lower risk of diverticular disease compared with meat eaters, the Daily Mail reported.

The reasons, according to the researchers, could be the consumption of meat altering the metabolism of bacteria in the colon, which weakens the colon wall and increases the risk of diverticular disease.

The potential protective benefits of vegetarianism could be obtained even in a short time, the study found.

There also seemed to be a link between eating more fibre and being at lower risk of the disease.

Patients who consumed the most fibre, more than 25.5g per day for women and more than 26.1g for men, had a 42 per cent lower risk than those who ate less than 14g per day.

The new findings were published in the British Medical Journal.

0 / 0
Sign in to unlock member-only benefits!
  • Access 10 free stories every month
  • Save stories to read later
  • Access to comment on every story
  • Sign-up/manage your newsletter subscriptions with a single click
  • Get notified by email for early access to discounts & offers on our products
Sign in

Comments

Comments have to be in English, and in full sentences. They cannot be abusive or personal. Please abide by our community guidelines for posting your comments.

We have migrated to a new commenting platform. If you are already a registered user of The Hindu and logged in, you may continue to engage with our articles. If you do not have an account please register and login to post comments. Users can access their older comments by logging into their accounts on Vuukle.