What happens inside your body if you drink chia seeds every night as people brand it 'useless'
A doctor has explained what will happen to your body if you take up the chia seed water trend, and why you might not notice any changes if you take it.
People have tried all sorts of trends in the hopes of becoming healthier, with people taking to all sorts of remedies and schemes they saw someone on the internet swears by.
Some people think taping up their mouth will give them a better night's sleep, and we all know how much a good night of kip can do for one's wellbeing.
Others have made drastic changes to their diet in the hopes of having a major lifestyle change, and sometimes it seems to work while on other occasions you can practically hear the doctors screaming 'no'.
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Meanwhile, some of them are downright medically inadvisable like the trend of people using baking soda in an attempt to treat UTIs.
However, there's another one on the block which involves chia seeds and water which some people fear is 'useless' but has the backing of a doctor.
What is the chia seed water trend?
It really does what it says on the tin, as this thing involves putting a bunch of chia seeds into a bottle of water and then quaffing the lot.
You just pour a spoonful of chia seeds into the water and drink it down to reap what you hope will be the health benefits.
However, some people have come to doubt the effectiveness of this health trend as they reckon that whatever was going well for them at the start has stopped happening.
There's a good medical reason for this as Dr Karan Raj explained: "If you eat one tablespoon of chia seeds every day for a week, you probably won't feel anything."
That's not to discount the whole thing, as the doctor detailed just what this stuff does to your body.
What happens to your body in the first 24 hours?
According to Dr Raj, a tablespoon of chia seeds contains around 5g of fibre which is good, but he compared believing it'll produce quick results to thinking you'll get a 'Greek god physique after a single press up'.
That fibre is feeding the microbes in your gut and giving you a healthier digestive tract, but as the doctor explained 'those positive shifts are only temporary' unless you keep the microbes well fed.
So, within the first 24 hours what happens to your body on the chia seed water trend is that your gut health improves thanks to the extra fibre in the diet but then drops down again unless you sustain it.
Instead, he said it would be 'months of habitual high fibre intake' for you to see proper results.
Like many things health related it's something you'll have to make a routine out of rather than taking them once and calling it a day because you aren't suddenly having the smoothest toilet time of your life.
Benefits of eating chia seeds
Unlike some other health trends, which doctors urge you not to try, the chia seed one got some approval from Dr Raj as he said that boosting your fibre intake by around eight grams means you enjoy a '22 percent reduction in all cause mortality', which is spectacularly good.
On top of that, your risk of type 2 diabetes drops by 16 percent, your risk of a stroke falls by 18 percent and the chances of heart disease tumble by 15 percent.
That all sounds pretty damn good.
Dr Raj pushed against the fears of some that their daily dose of chia seeds was 'useless', instead extolling the benefits of such a healthy investment in one's microbiome.
Drinking chia seed water for a week might feel like it's doing nothing, but if you stick with it you should eventually become glad you started down this path.
Of course, you could get your fibre from other sources than chia seeds if they're not to your liking.
Topics: Food And Drink, Health, Science, Viral, Lifestyle
Joe Harker