"Put a Damper on Bedwetting" by Nancy Webster

This post is excerpted from an article of the same title which appears in Beeyoutiful's Fall/Winter 2012 "cata-zine." Nancy Webster is one of Beeyoutiful's regular researchers and writers, a homeschool mother of eight, and leader of the Southern Middle Tennessee chapter of the Weston A. Price Foundation. She is the moderator of Beeyoutiful's health forum, www.MerryHeartMedicine.com, where you can ask questions and learn from others about this topic and many more.

"I'm so glad we've never lived in a place where laundry lines are visible or prohibited, because for 21 years, ours were crowded with more sheets and blankets than clothes. All eight of our children were bedwetters. One child wet the bed until age fourteen, and the youngest age a Webster child got dry was six. I remember being shocked to learn that most children get dry at night about the same time they get dry in the daytime.

"Our child who took the longest to get dry at night also suffered from polyuria (excessive urination) during the daytime. Sometimes he had to pee every 15 minutes. The pediatric urologist had no clue why this happened.

"Then, Dr. Natasha Campbell-McBride, creator of the Gut and Psychology Syndrome (GAPS) Diet, taught me they why I'd sought for so long. She contends that enuresis and polyuria are the result of abnormal gut flora. These flora produce a variety of toxins, many of which are excreted via the urine. Toxic urine irritates and inflames the lining of the bladder and urethra, making the bladder unable to hold much.

"This problem sometimes results in chronic urinary tract infections and cystitis if the gut dysbiosis is not addressed. Antibiotics to treat the infections only exacerbate the problem in the long run, even if they ease symptoms for a while, because the antibiotics destroy good bacteria in the digestive system.

"For the sleeping child (or even teen or adult), the irritated bladder may empty without waking the person, because the bladder was never full and so never produced the sensation of needing to urinate. If a gut healing program like the GAPS Diet is instigated, bedwetting will likely worsen (or start) in the first stages as die-off of bad bacteria increases toxin levels in the body making the urine even more problematic for the already irritated bladder. This is why it is important to control die-off using a slow build-up of probiotics and various foods as they are reintroduced on the GAPS Introducion Diet. The GAPS Diet can ultimtely bring complete relif from enuresis polyuria, and chronic urinay tract infections.

"Meanwhile, Dr. McBride recommends the use of alarms, drinking a comfortable amount of water, and temporarily avoiding foods high in salicylates and oxalates, which won't be hard when following the GAPS Intro Diet. She also says to take cranberry supplements to reduce inflammation in the bladder.

"This is where Beeyoutiful's easy-to-swallow Cranberry Power Cleanse vegcaps come to the rescue. They're a combination of cranberry extract with uva ursi. The cranberries contain powerful compounds called proanthocyanidins, which discourage harmful bacteria from clinging to the lining of the urinary tract. The herb uva ursi has long been used for its healing power over urinary tract infections, cystitis, and even kidney stones."

To read more articles by Nancy Webster, click here and then click Nancy Webster in the list of tags.