body stuff and walking

[darkoshi]

For about a week and a half, I experienced excessive flatulence. I couldn't figure out what might be causing it, as I wasn't eating anything out of the ordinary. Then I realized that I *had* been eating more dried fruit in my breakfast cereal than usual, due to not having any corn-flakes to mix in with it.

It had never occurred to me before that dried fruit (or even fresh fruit) could cause flatulence, but apparently it can, due to the fructose and fiber which are both hard to digest.

[!AAAH! Google has a Dr.Who doodle game thingy!!! Hhahahah....
oh god it took me 33 minutes to finish the game and I don't know how many doctors died in the process.]

So anyway, after having that realization, I switched to hot oatmeal for the next breakfast, and then the next day, cold cereal without fruit. The flatulence disappeared. Then I switched back to eating the muesli and raisin bran, with some other cereal mixed in, and have still been fine since then.

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Qiao got me a pedometer. They say that to stay fit, one should walk about 10,000 steps per day. Based on the pedometer, on days when I go to work and walk outside around the pond at lunchtime, I get between 5500 and 6500 steps. On a Saturday doing yard work, I got 6200 steps. On a Sunday when I stayed home and didn't do yard work, I got about 3000 steps.

Comments

[3rdofjune]

It's been my experience that the body needs the most water around breakfast. Which makes sense; more dehydration, more waste to clean out.

Fresh fruit actually digests faster and more easily than anything else. Which is why it's not a good idea to combine fruit with cooked starches, incidentally. It's not, AFAICT, fructose that's to blame, but the fault of complex carbohydrates acting in concert with fructose and slowing down the queue. I used to have similar problems with fruit; something I learned after I started eating more fruit was to leave it alone for at least an hour after a starch meal.

(The general rule of simple sugars digesting quicker/better if eaten alone also means that eating dessert first is, at least in theory, good for you)

[darkoshi]

From what I read, people can only digest a certain amount of fructose at a time, and if one eats more than that amount in a short period of time, it can cause gas. It's probably more of a problem with dried fruit than fresh, as it's more concentrated that way*. I dunno. You could be right, about it being the combination of fruit and starches. It's something for me to keep in mind as a possible cause, if it happens to me again.

*My raisin bran sometimes has so many raisins that I could easily get 50 raisins in a bowl of cereal. But I'd never eat that many fresh grapes at once.