This post is dedicated to my husband - may you print it out and study it carefully.

Everyone suffers from gas problems every now and again, so here are some tips straight from Harvard for dealing with intestinal gas:

  • Slow down your eating: A little bit of air goes down with everything you swallow. To reduce the amount of air, eat and drink slowly and chew food thoroughly.
  • Avoid airy drinks and foods: Air also gets into the gut if it's incorporated into food and drinks like beer, soda, or sponge cake.
  • Don't smoke: Some air gets swallowed when people smoke. Perhaps flatulence should be added to the list of ill consequences of smoking.
  • Shun sulfur: The bad smell of flatus comes from gases that contain sulfur. Putting less sulfur into your system can reduce the amount that comes out. Avoid sulfur-rich foods like eggs, meat, and cauliflower.
  • Cook those beans: When colon bacteria feed on the sugars in beans, they produce a gas by-product. You can reduce beans' gas potential by boiling them briefly, letting them sit, and then cooking them again in fresh water, or just by cooking them longer.
  • Consider Beano: A study found that high doses of the over-the-counter product Beano reduced flatulence, but a normal dose did not produce statistically significant results.
  • Go low on high-fructose corn syrup: Foods containing this sweetener can cause bloating and flatulence in people whose small intestines can't absorb large amounts of fructose.
  • Adjust the ecosystem: Too few or too much of particular bacterial species in the intestines can produce excessive flatulence. Talk to your doctor about probiotics; in certain cases, an antibiotic might be worth considering.

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