Is that true?

Myth!

"Jumping or exercising after eating

will give you an appendicitis."

What? I have never heard of this.

I'm tossing that one out.

Ooh. So, "You need to wait

30 minutes to swim after eating."

I caught myself almost saying it

to my own children the other day,

and then broke out into laughter,

because it's an absolute myth.

Hi, I'm Austin Chiang.

I'm an assistant professor of medicine

at Jefferson Health in Philadelphia,

and I've been practicing as a gastroenterologist

since 2017.

My name is Fola May.

I'm an assistant professor of medicine at UCLA Health.

I'm a general gastroenterologist

and have been practicing gastroenterology

for the last six years.

I love this field because it allows us

to optimize people's digestive health,

and we get to prevent important cancers

like colorectal cancer.

And today we'll be debunking myths about indigestion.

"It takes years to digest gum."

This is an absolute myth.

And I remember this as a child,

hearing that it takes seven years to digest your gum.

The reality is that everything you eat,

going in one end, is going to come out the other.

The slight truth of the myth is that gum is insoluble.

So we don't have the enzymes to break down gum

like we do other foods.

But it doesn't stay in your stomach for seven years.

Just like everything else you eat,

it gets emptied from the stomach

usually within 30 and 90 minutes,

and it comes out in your stool.

"Smelly farts always means something is wrong."

I don't know, Fola.

Is there such a thing as a good-smelling fart?

I get this one a lot from my patients.

So, everyone thinks that if your farts smell really bad,

then there must be something wrong with the digestive tract.

And it's not true!

Some of the most healthy foods that we eat,

like fiber, broccoli, asparagus,

cause the smelliest farts.

I will say, though, that it is important

to pay attention to whether there are other symptoms,

particularly people who have lactose intolerance,

which means that they don't have the enzymes

to digest milk products.

And if you've noticed smelly farts over and over again

after eating milk products

or after having products like gluten frequently,

then it's probably worth looking into

whether you have a food intolerance or a food allergy.

The other symptoms to keep an eye out for

are severe abdominal pain with your smelly farts,

loose stools or diarrhea, fevers.

This can indicate an abdominal infection.

Chiang: "You should be pooping every day."

So, this is another unfortunate misconception

that human beings have.

It can be normal to have a bowel movement

up to three times a day,

and there are actually people who are normal

who have bowel movements every three days,

and anywhere in there in between can be normal.

What I typically will tell my patients

is that the most concerning thing

is if you are having infrequent stools

that are causing constipation-like symptoms.

Straining a lot when they're on the toilet bowl,

have developed blood in their stools

when they have a bowel movement.

And that's generally when we would

prescribe a medication to help you have

more frequent, yet gentle bowel movements.

The reason why it's important to

sometimes get this checked out by a professional

is because there are a lot of different causes

for infrequent stools and constipations.

And then there's the other end of the spectrum.

Some people have what we call inflammatory bowel diseases.

These are conditions that cause frequent stools

but also blood in the stools, severe abdominal pain,

and bloating, weight loss, fatigue,

other manifestations throughout the body.

And that's concerning.

So I usually like to tell people that

it's not the number of the bowel movements you're having,

it's whether or not

there are any of these concerning symptoms.

Myth or fact?

"Only spicy foods cause ulcers."

If this were true, I'd be very sad,

because I love spicy food

and I eat spicy food all the time.

Spicy food does not cause ulcers,

but that doesn't mean that spicy food doesn't cause pain.

What does cause ulcers can be a bacteria called H. pylori

that can live under the surface

of the lining of the stomach.

And this can cause ulcers,

as well as certain medications, like NSAIDs,

which are basically those over-the-counter

pain medications like Motrin, Advil.

We want to be careful

when we're taking medications like that.

Stress typically does not cause ulcers,

although it may make existing ulcers worse.

There are certain conditions that are called stress ulcers,

but this really applies to people who are very, very sick,

like, hospitalized sick,

and not the typical type of stress

that we think of when we're stressed out.

I think that is a common myth though, Austin, right?

I mean, you hear people say all the time,

"I'm so stressed I'm going to get an ulcer."

When I was younger, I would just listen to that statement.

And now I kind of want to interrupt and say,

"No, actually, that's not how it works."

Exactly. But it doesn't mean that

stress doesn't trigger, like, belly pain, because,

you know, stress can certainly May: Absolutely. Absolutely.

exacerbate and worsen those types of symptoms.

But yeah, in and of itself, it's not going to

cause an ulcer to just form out of nowhere.

Thank goodness, right?

Yeah. We'd be seeing a lot more ulcers then.

"Your stomach shrinks if you eat less."

Is that true?

Myth!

This is part of what people think they can do

to control their weight.

There's this misconception that if you eat less,

your stomach will become smaller

and then you won't need as much food to survive

and live your daily life.

Unfortunately, it is very false.

The size of the adult stomach stays approximately

that size your entire life.

The stomach is actually a pretty flexible organ,

so it does expand when we eat big meals,

but then it goes right back to its normal size

when the stomach empties itself

about 30, 90, 120 minutes later.

Naturally, our stomachs won't shrink,

but there are procedures out there

where we can actually reduce the volume of the stomach

and then help patients lose weight that way.

But that requires a procedure.

A good analogy is probably a rubber band, right?

So a rubber band has a defined size

and you can stretch it out if you have a big meal,

but it will always go back to that size.

And it's not until you're really

pushing the limits over and over again

that it starts to develop those little breaks,

get a little bit wobbly and larger,

but generally it has its innate size.

"Jumping or exercising after eating

will give you appendicitis."

What? I have never heard of this.

I'm tossing that one out.

I have my handy-dandy plushy here.

The appendix is this pocket that comes off

of the beginning of the colon.

Sometimes it can get inflamed or blocked off,

and that's called appendicitis.

But exercising or jumping around after eating,

no.

We would be seeing people dropping like flies

at the gym if that were the case.

First of all, that thing is really cute.

And second of all, I agree completely.

Can you imagine all the athletes

that would be developing appendicitis?

Most of the time it just comes about.

There's nothing that sort of leads up to it,

it just suddenly happens.

And, luckily, appendicitis is something

that's very treatable.

Ooh. So, "You need to wait

30 minutes to swim after eating."

So, this is the hogwash

that every parent has told every child.

The reality is after you have a large meal,

your body does shunt blood flow to your stomach

and your digestive organs to help you digest this meal.

And I think what's happened is

that people have then feared that

because it's shunting blood away from your arms

and your legs and the large muscles that you need to swim,

that if you immediately jump into a pool

you won't be able to swim

or use your arms and legs to save yourself.

But the reality is your body has enough blood flow

to supply both your stomach and your digestive organs

and your legs and arms.

There are some people that will experience

some abdominal cramping if they swim immediately

after eating a big meal.

And that's just because the digestive muscles

are already busy at work

and you're stressing them more

by putting them under the exertion

of being in a swimming pool.

But I don't think we need to worry about drowning risk here.

"Probiotics will fix your gut."

We wouldn't have jobs

if probiotics cured everything about the gut.

I think what this statement is trying to get at

is that there's a lot about the gut microbiome,

the bacteria that live in our gut,

that can potentially impact our health.

We simply just don't know enough about it.

May: There is an actual bacterial environment

that lives in your gut.

Most of them are not bad bacteria.

They're good, healthy bacteria that you need

to have normal bowel movements,

to avoid pain and other diseases.

But every once in a while, that can get imbalanced.

So probiotics became really popular

with this concept of resetting your microbiome.

But the reality is that the science is so new in this area

and there's really very few conditions

where we've figured out how to use probiotics the right way.

And part of the reason behind this is because

there's very little regulation on probiotics

by the FDA, for instance,

there's very little consistency in the formulations.

We don't know what dosage actually works

for certain conditions as well.

So there's still a lot that we don't know about probiotics.

I do think that for some people it has an impact,

but it's not a cure-all, and it doesn't work for everyone.

Oh, good one.

"'I got food poisoning from the last thing I ate.'"

In reality, it takes hours, right,

for your stomach and your small bowel to process each meal.

So it's usually the second-to-last thing you ate.

And I think there's a big misconception about this,

because patients will come in

and swear that it was the breakfast they ate,

and I tend to ask them, "Actually,

what'd you have dinner the night before?"

Or if they're saying that they developed their symptoms

in the evening, it's, "What did you have at breakfast?"