Say Goodbye to Gas and Bloating with Peppermint Tea!

Ever wake up one day and feel a bloated stomach? Or maybe discomfort/pain in your gut? You’re not alone. Here are 5 bloating facts you didn’t know could change your life: from taking advantage of your active lifestyle, to eating habits with certain foods.

Bloating symptoms include poor gut health due to poor digestion, leading to tightness in the abdomen and visible increase in belly size.

If you’ve experienced bloating problems and never heard of peppermint tea, it’s a naturally sweet and caffeine-free tea that can improve your gut health and, thus, improve bloating problems and serve as a cure for bloating. Peppermint contains menthol, which luckily has a relaxing effect on the smooth muscles of the gastrointestinal (GI) tract which are basically organs from the mouth to the anus that contributes to your gut health and stomach. By consuming peppermint tea on a regular basis, it can:

• Reduce intestinal spasms
• Allow gas to pass freely through
• Relieve and relax the tight feeling caused from bloating
• Stimulate bile flow (which contribute to digestion of fats)
• Improve the breakdown of food in the stomach

Eating certain foods in your diet may help with bloating, but what may be arguably more important is how you consume your food. Believe it or not, microhabits like these build up over time, and eventually contribute to bloating problems. Examples include:

• Eating too fast
• Not chewing properly
• Talking while eating

Habits like these cause you to consume and swallow excess air, leading to bloating. So no matter how healthy you may think a food is, bloating can be caused from the way you eat your own seemingly healthy diet.

Now you may ask: what does excess air have to do with bloating? Well excess air can actually cause your stomach and intestines to be stretched, triggering pressure and discomfort which results in the bloated belly look and feel you may experience.

Instead, try to eat slowly and also by chewing more mindfully-closing your mouth when eating-as breathing through the mouth than nose also causes unnecessary excess air to be consumed.

Have you ever felt anxiety or stress and noticed bloating symptoms? Well, this isn’t just a coincidence. Your own gut and the brain are tightly connected. So when you’re stressed or anxious, your digestion slows down and your gut becomes more sensitive which results in bloating. Essentially, stress and anxiety will literally blow up your gut.

Good news? This is fixable. Mental health is important, not just because of self love, but also the physical effects of your gut which cause bloating. Try these exercises you can do right now to cure bloating!

• Meditate for 5-20 minutes per day
• Walk for 15-30 minutes per day
• Visit a therapist!

Physical health matters, and it starts with taking care of your mental health. However, balancing both of these things looks different for every individual, whether that be how much fitness one gets or how much sunshine someone should absorb.

Believe it or not, your gut has its own circadian rhythm, which plays a major role in bloating. Just like our internal 24-hour clock, our gut’s circadian rhythm speeds up and slows down depending on the time of the day. So when we eat late at night, it goes against our gut’s circadian rhythm, causing indigestion and bloating.

Aside from eating late at night, there are also other ways your gut’s circadian rhythm could be disrupted. Some include:

• Jet Lag
• Night Shifts
• Staying up late

Though it may seem as if supplements provide beneficial results to bloating problems, it is crucial to take the right supplements to combat bloating in the gut and stomach. Bloating, and almost every other health issue, varies per person and it is important to understand your health circumstances before getting a certain probiotic or any other supplements.

These types of supplements can worsen bloating issues by causing diarrhea, gas, and other negative symptoms. This is why it is incredibly important to understand what is causing your bloating, and how you can specifically treat it with specific supplements.

Bloating is an increasingly common problem prevalent in many people’s lives, and it all starts from small, bad habits that contribute to gut and stomach issues. Luckily, with the rising benefits of technology (LLM and SMS), you can find out how to take care of your gut health and bloating issues with just a quiz. Not only does it factor in various key information to find products, it also tailors a lifestyle plan involving fitness and exercise relating to the gut, stomach, and other bloating related parts of the body that you could work on everyday.

This article and its contents have been medically reviewed by Aditya Jain (MD at Harvard Medical School and Op-Ed Fellow at Doximity).