Disclaimer: I am not a scientist or doctor or dietician. If I got all of this wrong, whoops!
Our household’s been using a lot of prune lately, and I say “using” because prune is a tool. Prune is a tool that, when employed correctly, will liberate your baby from the bonds of constipation, and will unfortunately also liberate that prune—mostly digested—from your baby’s diaper, sending you dashing to the changing table while making mental notes of which spots on your couch, rug, other rug, pants, and floor will need cleaning once the diaper is changed. Unfortunately, prune is only a temporary tool. We’ve been told the only cure for frequent constipation is the young man’s digestive system developing a little bit more. Hurry up, digestive system! Until it does: More prune.
I’ve been thinking—as I spoonfeed prune and more prune to a six-month child who grunts ferociously if I take too long to refill the prune spoon—that I don’t understand prunes. Do they just have a lot of fiber? It can’t only be that. Doctors recommend prune juice for the same problem. And the point of juice is that the fiber’s taken out! Right? Right??
Evidently, no. According to Harvard (ever heard of it?) there’s a little bit of fiber in prune juice. I didn’t know they could hide fiber in juice. I mean, I knew about pulp, but water-soluble fiber? That’s breaking my brain. I hear “fiber” and I picture fibers. They didn’t cover this in high school health class. (Big takeaways from high school health class: Eat a lot of fiber and also schizophrenia has nothing to do with mood swings.)
It turns out that some fibers are better than others for making you—or your six-month-old child who sometimes topples forward in his chair but still wants to eat prune and ends up mashing his face into the bowl in an inefficient but cute attempt to ingest more prune—poop. One of those? Pectin.
If you want to read a 2017 study on the differences between soluble and insoluble fiber (and different soluble fibers, and different insoluble fibers!) here you go, but the short version is: Pectin good. Makes poop softer. The medium version continues: Soluble, too. Dissolves in water. That’s how they sneak it into prune juice. It makes poop softer because it holds onto the water when the large intestine tries to steal it. Maybe that’s why my son’s dump last week came out with such low viscosity and I had to scrub each individual fiber of the living room rug to get the stain out. (Guessing those fibers were insoluble.)
All of this is a little beside the point, though. Prune juice does have pectin in it—a now-famously sneaky fiber—but it has more sorbitol, a sugar alcohol which does basically the same thing, getting more water into the poop. Prunes? Even more sorbitol than prune juice. Prunes, if I’m understanding that Harvard post and half a dozen Healthline articles correctly, have a ton of sorbitol. And while sorbitol basically does the same thing as pectin, it goes about it more aggressively. Pectin keeps the large intestine from stealing water from your baby’s poop. Sorbitol goes and steals water from the large intestine itself. The poop gets softer. Your child poops. The large intestine never sees it coming.
None of this answers whether my child will poop today, which is what I really want to know, along with at what point I should call the doctor and ask what the hell we do. It does make me think we should maybe hit the gas pedal on learning to use a sippy cup, though. It seems like the constipated really just want a little more water in their poop, and the doctor said my kid’s old enough to start messing around with water. I like that there’s an age for that. An “experiment with water” age. Like how some people give their kids beer at family events when they’re sixteen, so they’ll get used to it. Or when they’re eleven if they’re from Wisconsin.
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