have you guys ever found yourself
walking down the aisle
and checking out all these adult diapers
and
just praying that you will never end up
needing any of those
well today i'm gonna tell you five
things that you should stop doing
right now that can help improve your
bladder health and stick around to the
end because the last one
is the most surprising i'm dr rina malik
urologist and pelvic surgeon and if
you're new here
i try to educate you guys on your logic
content
react to different tv shows and answer
your questions
number one stop urinating just in case
so i know that as we grew up our parents
always made us go to the bathroom before
we got in a long car ride
just in case and this actually has a
term this is called
convenience voiding or avoiding without
the sensation that you need to urinate
and is this really damaging well once in
a while it's probably not a big deal
but if you continually void just in case
meaning go to the bathroom just in case
your bladder will be signaling to your
brain
that you should start taking that volume
of urine
as meaning you're full even though
you're not really full and so your brain
will start interpreting
lower volumes of bladder filling as
being full and making you go to the
bathroom
more often but are there any studies
that really talk about this well there
was one study done
in australia where they had a
questionnaire and gave it to college-age
students between the ages of 16 and 35
and they asked them about their urinary
habits as well as their fluid intake or
what they drank
and it's important to notice that in
this age group it is not normal to wake
up at night to urinate
it is considered abnormal if you wake up
to urinate even one time at night
so what they found in this group was
that those participants who admitted to
convenience voiding or voiding just in
case
were 2.3 times more likely
to wake up at night to urinate now we
can't definitely say that
voiding just in case caused the waking
up at night but it is a sign that this
may be concerning
for urinary problems down the road so if
you need to urinate before a long car
ride once in a while
that's okay but don't make a habit of it
number two
quit smoking so a lot of people don't
know
that smoking increases your risk of
bladder cancer by
three times three times
and why exactly is that well there are
seven
thousand chemicals in tobacco and
tobacco smoke
of those 70 are known to cause cancer
and when you smoke these chemicals are
released into the bloodstream
the chemicals are then filtered by your
kidneys and then go into your urine
which sits in your bladder
for sometimes hours at a time putting
you at a higher risk
than people who don't smoke also smoking
is a bladder irritant so it can also
irritate the bladder lining and cause
you to have to go to the bathroom
more frequently or urgently meaning you
gotta go gotta go
and lastly it can also cause a chronic
cough
and when you cough you're actually
increasing the pressure in your belly
which can in turn
cause pressure on your bladder and in
some people who have a weak pelvic floor
they can leak when they're doing these
types of activities like coughing
sneezing lifting heavy things so i know
that quitting smoking is really really
hard
but there are a lot of great resources
if you can't make it to see your
physician
and ask for a smoking cessation clinic
or someone who is trained in smoking
cessation to help you with this
there are a number of resources
available to you online
so i'm going to link them down below in
the description please check them out if
you think you're ready to quit smoking
number three is bladder irritants and
what exactly are bladder irritants
well they're substances that you can
intake that can then irritate your
bladder lining and for some people
cause urinary symptoms so butter
irritants that i often talk about
are caffeine alcohol and for some people
spicy foods acidic foods artificial
sweeteners
and in some cases carbonated beverages
but
while we know that ingesting bladder
irritants can cause
urinary symptoms after you put them in
your body
what about five years down the line can
these urinary symptoms get worse
because you were taking a lot of bladder
irritants at one point in time in your
life
well the short answer is i'm not 100
sure but there's one study that looked
at this
and this study looked at almost 5 000
people
and they asked them what they were
drinking and
what their urinary symptoms were they
did this at baseline or when they first
introduced them into the study and then
five years later
and they found interestingly different
findings for men and
women for men what they found was that
if you were drinking
two or more cups of coffee a day at
baseline
you were more likely five years later to
have urinary symptoms down the line
now we don't again know that this caused
this but we know there is a linkage
interestingly in men ingesting
citrus juices was actually protective
of having urinary symptoms the thought
behind this is that perhaps
citrus juices have an anti-inflammatory
or antioxidant effect
which is protective in the prostate area
and so that can actually improve your
urinary symptoms down the line
for women interestingly we did not find
that drinking coffee at baseline changed
their urinary symptoms five years later
but women who increased their caffeine
intake
over that period of time were more
likely to have
urinary symptoms specifically urinary
urgency or the
sudden desire to go to the bathroom that
you can't delay
they also found similar findings for
soda
as well as diet caffeinated soda being
linked with worse urinary symptoms
number four stop dehydrating yourself so
that you
pee less often and the reason for this
is that when you
drink less fluid your urine gets more
concentrated so when you look in the
toilet you'll see that your urine
is more of a dark yellow or like an
amber color
rather than a light yellow color which
is what it should be
if you're curious about what your urine
color means check out my video on
exactly that topic so when you have
concentrated urine
that urine can actually irritate the
bladder lining and make you have
more irritative symptoms meaning it may
make you feel like you have to go to the
bathroom but when you get there
you actually don't urinate quite that
much this can also be a risk for people
having recurrent urinary tract
infections i go into this in much more
detail
in my video on recurrent utis but
increasing your fluid intake is the
number one way
to reduce your risk of recurrent urinary
tract infections
number five is don't hold your urine
for long periods of time and the reason
for this
is that occasionally we all do this
right when you're
busy doing something and you get the
urge to go you say you know what i'll go
in a few minutes let me finish what i'm
doing and that's okay once in a while
it's
not a big deal but if you make a habit
of it
your bladder muscle itself can get
weakened
over time and it can also lead to
certain things like
pelvic floor dysfunction which can make
it harder for you to
empty your bladder when you do finally
go and
over time that can cause a number of
different problems
one if your muscle gets very weak over
many many years you can just stop
urinating that doesn't happen very often
but it can happen it can make it so when
you do urinate you're not completely
emptying your bladder
and that urine just sits in your bladder
for much
longer and when that urine sits in your
bladder for a longer period of time it
can
put you at risk for getting urinary
tract infections
because you're not completely emptying
your bladder so
it's okay to do it once in a while but
don't ignore your urge all the time
because it can lead to severe problems
down the line
okay that's it next week i'm going to be
talking about a few things that
women specifically should stop doing
right now
to improve their bladder health so
please make sure you share my channel
with all your female friends and make
them subscribe so they don't miss my
video next week
also on friday i'm going to be sharing a
part of my instagram live where i talk
about
bowel problems with dr kumkum patel a
gastroenterologist because the bowels
are actually very tightly interrelated
with the bladder
so make sure you check it out thanks so
much for watching and always remember to
take care of yourself because you're
worth it