Are you experiencing burning diarrhea and worried if it might indicate something severe, RELAX! Though burning diarrhea can cause discomfort, it is something normal and will go away within a few hours or a day. But do keep in mind that if your condition is severe or persists more than a day or two, you should immediately see a doctor. Long-lasting diarrhea can result in dehydration and malnutrition.
Below in this article will learn why does diarrhea burn. We will also look at some tips to help manage it.
Why does diarrhea burn?
There are various reasons why you may experience burning diarrhea.
Incomplete Digestion
After you enjoy the sizzling taste of your favorite meal in your mouth, it enters your stomach. When the food reaches there, stomach acids and digestive enzymes come into action. They come in contact with the food to break it down.
Diarrhea accelerates digestion, and your body fails to digest the food fully. Due to this, the stomach acids and digestive enzymes remain in diarrhea, which can hurt the tissues, and your rectum may burn when you poop.
Eating Spicy Foods
Eating foods high on spices is another reason why diarrhea burn. Some ingredients in spicy foods can cause a burning sensation when they come in contact with body tissues. One such is capsaicin, which can displease digestive tissues, causing diarrhea. Now you know that diarrhea accelerates digestion, and when capsaicin leaves the body undigested, it can cause discomfort during the bowel movement.
Physical Injury
Your body may not fully break down some types of foods. When these leave your body, they can give small cuts to the soft tissues of the rectum.
Sometimes you may feel irritated or more conscious and wipe harder after passing the stool, not knowing that it can cause a burning sensation.
Other Causes
Some habits such as drinking too much alcohol, caffeine, artificial sweeteners can contribute to burning diarrhea. Sometimes, stress can also be the reason why diarrhea burn.
How to manage burning diarrhea?
The best way to manage burning diarrhea is to avoid certain foods and habits that contribute to it.
- Spicy foods can be the prime culprit of your discomfort. Try to avoid such foods and try milder alternatives.
- When you wipe after stool, try to be gentle like you do with a baby and use lukewarm water to wash the area.
- Limit your consumption of alcohol and caffeinated drinks as they can cause dehydration
- Also, avoid smoking.
- Say no to high sugar foods.
- To help relieve pain, you can use over-the-counter (OTC) pain relievers.
In case your condition is not under control, and you are experiencing severe discomfort and burning sensation, you should seek immediate medical help. Schedule an appointment with Gastroenterology Diagnostic Center. Call us today at 281-357-1977.
Tonight, those spicy wings, or the extra hot sauce on your tacos taste amazing. A little later on, and maybe even tomorrow, the feeling on the other end isn't so amazing.
If you're one of those people for whom the aftermath of a fabulously spicy meal is a burning sensation when you poop, there's hope. You can still fill up on spice without uncomfortable, burning regret later.
Here's what's going on: When you consume spicy foods, the compounds that give them heat move through your body relatively unchanged. Since they aren’t nutrients, your body doesn’t absorb them, says Luigi Basso, M.D., a specialist in coloproctology and laparoscopic surgery at Sapienza University of Rome in Italy.
That leaves your poop laced with spicy particles, and helps explain why it burns when you poop. “Since the last part of your anal region—your rectum and anus—is lined by cells similar to those in your mouth, spicy foods can burn just as much on the way out as on the way in,” says Dr. Basso. Ouch.
Your biology might be making it worse
This burning poop sensation can happen to anyone, but it's often worse in people who have certain gastrointestinal issues to begin with. So "make sure you don't have other things going on that would predispose you to being more sensitive," says Bruno P. Chumpitazi, M.D., a spokesperson for the American Gastroenterological Association and director of the neurogastroenterology and motility program at Texas Children's Hospital.
"A lot of people with irritable bowel syndrome can be overly sensitive to foods," he says. So spicy foods can engender pain and discomfort. Hot foods can also be challenging for people with hemorrhoids or anal fissures, says Dr. Chumpitazi. Those fissures are just like they sound—little tears which tend to be caused by constipation and sometimes even by diarrhea.
How to poop in peace after eating spicy foods
Of course, not eating spicy foods is one way to go. But if you're not going to do that (we're with you on that), try these strategies:
Tweak your menu.
Limit spicy foods that are both spicy and fatty, like chicken wings or quesadillas smothered in hot sauce. Excess fat can be a problem because the bile salts your body uses to digest them can irritate the skin around your anus, says Brooks D. Cash, M.D., a professor of medicine at the University of South Alabama.
If you’re not giving up wings any time soon, soak up some of the fatty acids in your gut by taking a fiber supplement before or right after you eat to avoid burning poop, Dr. Cash suggests. That helps bind the spice up into your poop so it won't burn so much on the way out, explains Sameer Islam, M.D., a gastroenterologist in Lubbock, Texas (who also hosts popular talks about poop on his YouTube channel).
Even better, have a diet that's consistently high in fiber, says Dr. Chumpitazi. Not only is it good for your health in so many ways, it may prevent constipation, anal fissures, and even hemorrhoids, which may be at the root of the burning poop or burning diarrhea issue. And until the fiber works, some people find relief from fissures and hemorrhoids by sitting in a warm bath (no soap needed).
Eat more spice.
This sounds totally counterintuitive, but one way to reduce (eventually) the burning sensation when you poop is to actually eat more spice. If you only eat spicy foods for a couple days, you induce “rectal hypersensitivity”—that burning pain, plus the frequent urge to go number two, says Sutep Gonlachanvit, M.D., chief of the division of gastroenterology at Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok, Thailand.
“But continuous [spicy food] ingestion for greater than 3 weeks can induce desensitization—which in turn can reduce rectal sensation,” he says. In his research, people who consumed 2.1 grams of hot pepper per day—that's about 1.25 teaspoons of cayenne pepper—experienced this benefit. Dr. Islam recommends that you try this hot pepper boot camp for your butt for a week. "Have one spicy hell week," he says. "Go crazy and develop that tolerance." Once you train pain receptors in your gut to cope with the spices better, they become tolerant of them.
- What Holding in Your Poop Does to Your Body
The receptors are on the inside of your GI tract, so putting something on the outside is unlikely to help in the long run. But as a short-term fix, you could apply a soothing cream to a clean butt—use one such as Calmoseptine ointment, which contains calamine to reduce itching and burning. You can also try Desitin, recommends Dr. Islam. "And make sure you don't use a hemorrhoid cream with a steroid or Prednisone, because that could make your irritation worse," he says. (This may also help during your spicy hell week.)
“Just apply a dab the size of a dime to the anal opening and create a thin smear,” advises Arnold Wald, M.D., a professor of gastroenterology and hepatology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
One more thing: If discomfort lingers after you've taken a burning poop, see your doctor. Pain in your butt can be a symptom of more serious problems like an infection, abscess, or cancer, says Steven D. Wexner, M.D., director of the Digestive Disease Center at Cleveland Clinic Florida.