Dehydration And "d"

[suzanne*]

How long can one have diarrhea before it starts to make one dehydrated and all? I am just wondering what days/weeks of this does to a person. I just started gluten-free yesterday, and from what I am reading here, it make take weeks or months to feel better. So can a person have D for months and not get dehydrated? Should I be drinking gatorade or something?

[cassP]

How long can one have diarrhea before it starts to make one dehydrated and all? I am just wondering what days/weeks of this does to a person. I just started gluten-free yesterday, and from what I am reading here, it make take weeks or months to feel better. So can a person have D for months and not get dehydrated? Should I be drinking gatorade or something?

i dont fully have an answer for you- but i can tell u- that i had Salmonella poisoning in Japan in the 90s. i had D for 10 days. i recovered and was ok. i dont know about more than that.

ya- i would try to drink Gatorade, or i also like FUSE Slenderize... just make sure everything is gluten free.

i would also cook a big pot of basmati rice (YUM).. and add it to every meal- its even good with scrambled eggs- it should also "slow" you down a little

i also think that you're going to get better and better- you've only just started gluten free.

all that being said- try your best to stay healthy- and go back to your doctor if you're worried.

and hopefully other members will offer you more expert advice because i mostly suffered from "C" and fatty malabsorption looking stools rather than "D"

[SGWhiskers]

Depending on the severity, dehydration can occur in a few days. If your body likes it, drink Gatoraide or pedialyte or a non-milk based protien drink to keep your hydration and energy levels up.

The good news is that I think a lot of the GI folks here found reasonable relief from the worst of their symptoms in the first few weeks of gluten-free as long as they were strict. Keep hydrated, take your vitamins, and if your body can handle it, add in some protien shakes.

[Skylark]

You can get a little dehydrated from chronic D. Obviously you've made it this far, so your dehydration problems are not extreme. I do get a little tired and lightheaded if I'm dehydrated. I've read that Gatorade is too strong for simple hydration, since it's formulated for hard exercise where you're sweating out a lot of salt. I water it down to half strength when I'm sick and it seems to work really well.

[Emilushka]

Gatorade is isotonic, which means that it has the same ratio of water-to-electrolytes that your blood does. That's why Gatorade is so good at rehydrating after a workout; you add both the water and the electrolytes that have been lost in sweat, and instead of diluting your blood with pure water (which triggers you to pee out the water you so carefully tried to replace) you just add volume back in at the same concentration.

Adult diarrhea is usually also isotonic, so replacing it with Gatorade is the smartest thing you can do. Essentially, you want to just replace whatever you lost, and since adults lose isotonic diarrhea, you want to drink an isotonic fluid like Gatorade to replace the volume you lost.

Gatorade is actually better than other sports drinks because it contains glucose, which your body requires to transport the sodium across the intestinal wall. The actual sugar in Gatorade, if you look at the side of the bottle, is sucrose. Sucrose = 1 glucose + 1 fructose (it's a compounded sugar). The trouble with that fructose is that it doesn't help you absorb the salt. It just goes straight across the membrane without needing a transporter. The glucose takes a salt with it, which allows you to get the electrolytes (which is part of what you lost in the diarrhea in the first place, and you want to replace what you lost). Powerade and most other drinks in the same "class" use high fructose corn syrup, which has only the useless fructose and no glucose at all. So you get sugar, which is great after a workout, but you don't transport much sodium and you miss out on the electrolytes.

Kids are different. Kids tend to have hypotonic diarrhea, which means less stuff in the water than there is in the blood (a lower concentration of electrolytes). So for kids, Pedialyte is better than Gatorade because Pedialyte is a hypotonic solution - again, you're replacing what you lost.

In terms of length of time to get dehydrated, if you find yourself having repeated episodes of diarrhea over and over again for days at a time, it's not a bad idea to drink some Gatorade to try to replace it. You don't need to go overboard as long as you're able to eat reasonably well and drink water and keep everything down.

One way to test your hydration: pinch the skin on the back of your hand. If it goes right back down immediately, you have plenty of water in your body. If it sticks up for a little while (a second or two) you are dehydrated. That's called "skin turgor" and it's actually one of the tools we use in the Emergency Department to figure out how badly dehydrated a person is.