Does salt water colon cleansing have any side effects?

With the improvement of living standards, people's diet is becoming more and more greasy. Eating a lot of meat, fish and delicacies from land and sea every day causes food accumulation and indigestion in the stomach. Toxins are deposited in our body, causing various toxin reactions such as pigmentation, acne, constipation, etc., causing various diseases in people's body. We need to eliminate toxins in the body to a certain extent in order to improve our physical condition.

There are many ways to clean toxins and intestinal waste, such as eating some detoxifying and laxative foods to clean intestinal waste, drinking some detoxifying and beauty teas to clean intestinal toxins, but the most commonly used method is salt water cleansing. But what are the side effects of salt water cleansing?

Generally, when food enters the body, it is first digested and absorbed in the small intestine. This process only takes a few hours. Then the food enters the large intestine and becomes waste. Using salt water to cleanse the intestines the next morning will not prevent the body from absorbing the nutrients in the food, let alone help lose weight. Although salt water bowel cleansing can effectively change constipation in a short period of time, it cannot cure it completely. Frequent use of salt water to cleanse the intestines may destroy the intestinal flora and cause intestinal dysfunction.

Moreover, long-term use will become less and less effective, just like taking a laxative.

Causes electrolyte imbalance

Many people reported that they excreted a lot of food and lost weight within 1-2 hours after using it, so they believe that this method can make the intestines cleaner and thus achieve the effect of weight loss. In fact, diarrhea is caused by the destruction of electrolytic balance. In terms of the composition of salt water, it is basically composed of water molecules, sodium ions, chloride ions and a small amount of calcium and magnesium ions in the water. Excessive intake of these ions will affect the electrolyte balance in the body and increase the burden on the kidneys because the kidneys are responsible for maintaining the balance of ions in the blood. At the same time, it also directly increases the workload of the small intestinal epithelial cells, because both water molecules and ions are absorbed through these cells. If sodium ions enter the blood, it will also cause changes in blood pressure, and in severe cases it can easily lead to cerebrovascular disease.

Causes edema

Long-term bowel cleansing with salt water can cause severe edema. For example, some individuals have strong intestinal absorption capacity and absorb all the salt water. Large amounts of salt intake will change the osmotic pressure, causing swelling of the ankles, eyelids, and feet. It is especially dangerous for people with poor kidney function or elderly people with high blood pressure.

To sum up, the so-called salt water intestinal detoxification method is actually deliberately creating diarrhea, just like taking laxatives. During the diarrhea process, the stool in the large intestine is indeed softened to a certain extent, and an urge to defecate is formed. However, this method cannot clean intestinal toxins as everyone expects, and this method may disrupt the electrolyte balance in the body.

The above article summarizes many side effects of salt water bowel cleansing. Everything has two sides, a good side and a bad side. Salt water can indeed clean out toxins in our intestines and remove waste from the body, but it also brings us some obvious side effects. We need to weigh the pros and cons before using this method to cleanse the intestines.