Is an All-Natural Way to Cleanse the Colon Good for Diabetics?

Is an all-natural way to cleanse the colon appropriate for diabetics? For that matter, does anybody really benefit from the colon wall cleansers you see advertised on TV and in health magazines?

There are a lot of reasons to be very skeptical of any product advertised as a "colon cleanse." First of all, a lot a of the claims made about the need for the products are just plain false.

Nobody has food particles from 20 years ago stuck to the lining of their colon. You may indeed carry several pounds of stool, and you will lose weight if you pass it, but whether it's an all-natural way to cleanse the colon or a totally pharmaceutical way to cleanse the colon, no colon cleanser is going to substitute for a diet. And if you could lose 10, 20, or 30 pounds by taking one of the products, you have a something beyond constipation that requires medical attention.

The list of ingredients in colon cleanses is also suspect. If you see a label that lists 30, 50, or 100 herbs, what you are seeing is the company's way to keep its competitors from claiming patent infringement. There are only about a dozen relatively inexpensive laxative herbs out there, and if they only listed the herbs that do the job, manufacturers would leave themselves open to various kinds of lawsuits.

And the general tone of the advertising is usually just plain sleazy. In one particularly egregious example, the marketer announced that the reason people need the product was that ignorant farmers used practices like strip farming that so deplete the soil of minerals that a carrot a hundred years ago had 80 times the mineral content of a carrot today.

Well, strip farming happens to refer to plowing just a little furrow of ground to plant crops in rather than the whole field, not stripping the soil away. And if a carrot is 2 per cent mineral content today, the announcer seems to apply it was 160 per cent mineral content a century ago. It's hard to find a colon cleanser that's not a scam.

But I do think colon cleansing is a good idea for diabetics. Here's why.

Blood sugars don't just go up in response to eating sugary, carbohydrate-loaded foods. They also go up when the colon is distended.

When the cells lining the part of the small intestine closest to the stomach are stretched, as they just after the stomach has finished digesting a meal, they send out signals through the central nervous system to the pancreas.

The pancreas basically gets an early warning signal that a big load of glucose may be on its way. It secretes insulin to move the glucose into the cells that need it, but just in case the food was not particularly rich in available carbohydrates, it also sends out glucagon to tell the liver to release enough glucose to keep blood sugar levels from falling too low. Water passes through the large intestine fast enough to avoid this response, but any kind of bulky, watery food, or large quantities of meat and potatoes type foods, will trigger it.

Of course, diabetics either cannot produce the insulin or their cells don't respond to it. Diabetics can, however, produce glucagon.

That's why eating a bowl of lettuce can raise blood glucose levels just as much as eating a bowl of ice cream. And it's also why diabetics with chronic constipation tend to have higher blood sugar levels and why diabetics benefit from staying regular.

This does not mean that, if you are a diabetic, you need to run out and buy the most expensive colon cleanser you can find. It will help simply to avoid stuffing yourself at any meal, even if it's with a "free food," like celery sticks or lettuce. It will also help if drop any accumulated stool, but I don't recommend any kind of "dual action" product.

The combination of a bulking agent and a laxative is sure to be uncomfortable, but let's think this through: The laxative sends stool out. The bulking agent makes more stool. You're getting rid of what the product puts in your body, so you need more and more and more of the product. Pretty clever marketing, huh?

It's better just to eat more fiber-rich vegetables, but in moderation (start with one additional serving a day, not ten), and maybe to get your laxative action from something like prunes (again, in moderation, because they are a high-sugar fruit). Milk of magnesia will also bring water into the colon that makes passing stools easier.

Blood sugars will go down when you become regular. It's just not necessary to do anything drastic to cleanse the colon to support diabetic health.

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