For how we live.
For people whose pancreas cannot make enzymes, replacement therapy is proven in randomised trials. For healthy people with bloating, the flagship study is a single-arm survey of customers who bought the product online.
TikTok's 'liquid gold' is real cow's first-milk, rich in antibodies and growth factors. But the robust human evidence sits in specific gut conditions, not the immunity, skin and hair benefits sold to healthy adults.
The popular claim is that a shot before meals fires up digestion. The controlled measurement shows vinegar slows the stomach down — helpful for blood sugar, unhelpful if you already digest slowly.
H. pylori infection and NSAIDs are the two most common causes of peptic ulcers. Treatment now turns on antibiotic resistance, which is quietly reshaping the first-line regimens.
For most of the world the ability to digest milk sugar declines after weaning, set by a single gene variant. About 68 percent of people have lactose malabsorption.
Haemorrhoids affect about 1 in 20 Americans and half of over-50s. A meta-analysis found fibre cut the risk of persisting symptoms by 47 percent and of bleeding by half.
Gallstones affect 10 to 15 percent of Americans, but stones that never block a bile duct cause no symptoms. Here is when a stone stops being harmless and becomes an emergency.
A 2019 pooling of 12 trials rated peppermint oil safe and effective for IBS, with a number-needed-to-treat of three. The largest, most rigorous trial then missed its primary endpoint against placebo.
The Bristol Stool Form Scale turns an awkward question into a measurable one. Types 3 to 5 are the healthy middle; the shape of your stool tracks how fast it moved through you.
Additives such as carboxymethylcellulose stabilise processed food. A large cohort links some to slightly higher heart-disease risk, and a small trial shows one disturbs the gut — but proof of harm is not settled.
The trend treats the gut as a dashboard to be tuned with home tests, probiotics and 'gut-healing' protocols. The one intervention with the broadest evidence is the least sold: fibre.
In 53 patients, oral fluconazole — but not a mouth-only antifungal — cut gut Candida and coincided with improved disease activity. The study was observational, brief and unblinded.
A Lancet series covering 135 million person-years found the largest risk reductions in that range. Trials of isolated fibre supplements produce much smaller effects on much narrower outcomes.
A review in Gut says no intestinal disease can be cured by normalising barrier function, and that it is unproven whether restoring the barrier improves any clinical outcome at all.
A joint AGA and ACG guideline graded ten treatments for chronic constipation. The cheap osmotic laxative and the newest secretagogues sit in the same recommendation tier.
A Nurses' Health Study II analysis estimated 37% of incident reflux symptoms were attributable to five modifiable factors. Body weight was the largest single one, at 19%.
Bloating and visible distension are different problems with different mechanisms. The 2025 ESNM/UEG consensus found visceral hypersensitivity, not gas volume, doing most of the work.
The American College of Gastroenterology suggests a positive diagnostic strategy over a diagnosis of exclusion, with two blood and stool tests doing most of the ruling-out that is actually warranted.
The MITRIC basket trial gave 12 patients with immunotherapy-resistant cancer stool transplants from patients who had responded. It was safe but produced no objective tumour responses.