Lactulose as a laxative is good for blood lipids too, and a prebiotic

[JayCS]

I was looking into these detailed posts of mine about magnesium cos of now needing a laxative…

Medications - Other Options (incl. Magnesium types - detailed)

The various lists above have made looking up the types complicated, here it’s re-arranged & bits added: After all is said and done it still looks to me as if magnesium malate & (bis)glycinate are best for FM. Firstly, things that can be said about magnesium generally are: improves mitochondrial activity, e.g. energy. It’s important for so much (muscles, nerves, pain (central sensitization), perhaps sleep, migraine…) usual diets do not contain enough. Helps increase vitamin D3. And vice versa…

A few years after these posts, I’m having to re-check magnesium types. Cos I’ve switched from life-long ISB-D to chronic constipation. Now I’m thinking about taking laxative types, cos magnesium malate isn’t doing the job, even overdosing it.

I unexpectedly got chronic constipation in the winter, which after a few months caused several end colon problems now making surgery necessary in the summer. It seemed to have been triggered either by magnesium threonate or switching to liposomal glutathione. Difficult to detect, it amazingly seems to have been the threonate. So took a while to figure out - “too late”. But stopping that only improved it somewhat, not enough to milder the colon issues. So I now have to take a laxative. Psyllium and similar don’t work well enough, and also resorb the supps I take day and night too much. The two laxatives recommended here are macrogol and lactulose. Macrogol I know as it is a pill filler I don’t tolerate. Now I’ve been taking lactulose for a month or two and the switch still hasn’t been flipped back to looser stools, I need to keep it up to almost the maximum recommended dose.

Looking at the laxative magnesiums I’ve read some problems with each, looking up their side effects. Magnesium citrate for instance can cause problems in too high a dose. Magnesium sulfate (Epsom salts) kills the gut bacteria.

But I spose before I start looking for the laxative magnesiums, I could sort out first whether lactulose has an effect on lipids. Best I can find out up to now is that it remains unchanged till it gets to the colon, so maybe no effect?

OK, doing a search for that gave an AI-answer that lactulose might even lower cholesterol, being a prebiotic. Trying to legitimate this, I found this study saying it has no effect on cholesterol, but on triglycerids (now apparently recommended to be called triacylglycerol, TG).

Vogt et al. 2006: L-Rhamnose and Lactulose Decrease Serum Triacylglycerols and Their Rates of Synthesis, but Do Not Affect Serum Cholesterol Concentrations in Men

https://jn.nutrition.org/article/S0022-3166(22)08410-3/fulltext

So I can stop worrying about it…

And as a prebiotic it also has a positive effect on the gut bacteria rather than magnesium sulphate killing them.

Magnesium threonate was great for sleep and calming nerves, as promised. Pity about this side effect on me…

[rosebud74]

Hi JayCS. I have been wondering how you are as you have not written anything for a while. I am sorry you are having problems with constipation. I hope you find something very soon to help you deal with it. Have you actually had surgery now?

[JayCS]

Hi Rose, thank you!: I’m stable I spose, so my developments now don’t seem to warrant so much detail for me or others.

Well, the surgeon decided not to do it, cos he now believes - like I do - it’d cause at least as much problems as it solves. That’s I think grounded on my witch-hazel cream having helped it improve a little on the one hand and the wound from the abscess he’d cut still not having completely healed after over two months. It helped me to hear him call the problem, perhaps reason, a stenosis, so too tight muscles, which fits to other muscle problems, maybe fibro-related. His recommendation to do dilation tho won’t work, tried it before, it just hurts for many hours after, esp. now the wound is still there.

So now as ever I’m searching on youtube for other conservative and alternative treatments, but Kegel-type is the only thing I can find up to now, and I’ve tried that often enough for various things anyway. But I think I should try that again, at least try.

A pain and relaxing cream his colleague had given me would sound logical and helpful, but it was delaying the healing, only when I switched to witch-hazel did it start to heal better.

I’ve increased the lactulose to the max dose, that seems to improve the constipation. I hope it doesn’t habituate (is that the word?) on me.