Before you embark on a system of colon health that you read in a magazine, online, or heard about from a friend, it is important to educate yourself about the colon, what it does, and what a colonic will do to your body.
The colon (or large intestine) is the last stop in the digestive tract. By the time the food that you have eaten reaches the colon, it has been digested by the stomach and the small intestine. The colon is left to do two major things: 1) collect and hold waste and 2) help maintain water balance in the body. Under normal circumstances the colon does not absorb much other than water, but it can absorb substances that end up in the bloodstream.
While feces is about 30% bacteria, not all of that bacteria is necessarily bad. Many of colonic bacteria are important for optimal colon health. These “good” bacteria help break down any straggling undigested food and waste. More importantly, they line the wall of the large intestine and take up room so that other, more harmful bacteria do not live there. This is the primary way that yogurts and health supplements containing “good” bacteria promote colon health.
There are a number of different ways to speed up the rate at which the colon empties waste. Some of them are slow and steady, like dietary fiber, while others are fast and somewhat aggressive, like a high colonic. Fiber and other bulk-forming laxatives simply increase the amount of water that is drawn into the colon (or prevents water from being absorbed from the feces into the body).
More water in the colon makes for faster moving bowels and less straining during defecation. Osmotic laxatives, like those taken prior to colonoscopy, work in a similar fashion to bulk-forming laxatives but faster. Stimulant laxatives irritate the lining of the colon and cause it to expel its contents. The non-laxative way to cleanse the colon is a colonic. A colonic introduces water directly into the colon to dissolve and wash away feces.
The key to colon health is to keep the bowels moving at a regular rate—not too fast and not too slow. The most straightforward way of doing this is through the intake of suitable amounts of dietary fiber. Unfortunately, getting enough fiber in a Western diet is difficult. The more that a food is processed or refined, the more fiber is removed. Since much of the food that we eat is refined, the amount of fiber in our diets is woefully low. Therefore, eating foods high in fiber and supplementing with additional sources of dietary fiber is an excellent way to achieve colon health (while lowering cholesterol and normalizing blood sugar, by the way).
Other means of clearing the bowels may have a purpose in some cases (such as before a colonoscopy), but they should be done sparingly and correctly. Colon hydrotherapy and colonics cause a rapid removal of waste but also risk changing water balance in the body. Remember that the colon can absorb material within it. Therefore, be very wary of a colonic that contains relatively exotic substances, such as coffee or herbs. Ideally the water in the colonic should be pure except for some salts like sodium. These salts should match the concentration of the blood or within the cells (isosmotic). Anything else might introduce unwanted substances to the body or draw out things other than waste.