Borborygmi, the rumbling and growling sounds your gut makes, are a normal part of digestion. Your stomach and intestines produce these noises as muscles contract to push food, liquid, and gas through the digestive tract. In healthy adults, your bowels make sounds roughly 5 to 35 times per minute. You can’t eliminate them entirely, but you can significantly reduce how loud and frequent they are with a combination of eating habits, air-swallowing prevention, and targeted remedies.
Why Your Stomach Makes Noise
The growling you hear is the sound of your digestive muscles squeezing contents forward through a hollow tube. When there’s a mix of gas, liquid, and partially digested food moving through a narrow space, it creates audible vibrations, much like water gurgling through pipes. This happens both during active digestion and when your stomach is empty. An empty stomach actually tends to be louder because there’s less material to muffle the contractions.
Gas is the main amplifier. The more gas trapped in your digestive tract, the louder and more frequent the sounds become. That gas comes from two sources: air you swallow (aerophagia) and gas produced by bacteria fermenting food in your intestines. Reducing both of these is the most effective way to quiet things down.
Eat Slower and Chew More Thoroughly
The single most impactful change is slowing down at meals. Chewing food more completely means your stomach has less work to do breaking it down, which reduces the intensity of contractions and the gas they produce. Thorough chewing also cuts the amount of air you swallow with each bite, directly lowering the gas volume in your gut.
Portion size matters too. Large meals, especially those heavy in fats, sugars, or red meat, generate more gas during digestion and force your intestines to work harder. Eating smaller, more frequent meals spreads that digestive workload out and reduces the buildup of gas that makes borborygmi noticeable. If your stomach growls loudly between meals because it’s empty, a small snack can dampen the noise by giving those contractions something to work on quietly.
Stop Swallowing Extra Air
A surprising amount of gut gas comes not from digestion but from air you inadvertently swallow. Several common habits pump air straight into your stomach:
- Drinking through straws. Sip directly from a glass instead.
- Chewing gum or sucking on hard candy. Both cause you to swallow repeatedly, pulling air in each time.
- Talking while eating. Save conversation for after you’ve finished chewing and swallowing each bite.
- Eating too fast. Rushing through meals means larger gulps of air with every swallow.
These changes feel minor, but collectively they can cut down the air volume in your digestive tract enough to make a noticeable difference in how often your stomach growls.
Foods That Make It Worse
Certain foods are notorious gas producers because they contain complex sugars (oligosaccharides) that your body can’t fully break down. Bacteria in your intestines ferment these leftovers and release hydrogen and methane gas in the process. The usual culprits include beans, lentils, broccoli, cauliflower, cabbage, whole grains, nuts, and seeds.
This doesn’t mean you need to avoid these foods entirely. They’re nutritious, and your body often adapts to them if you increase your intake gradually. But if you’re heading into a meeting or a quiet setting and want to minimize gurgling, it helps to know which foods tend to set things off for you personally. Carbonated drinks are another obvious source, as they deliver gas directly into your stomach.
Over-the-Counter Options That Help
Two types of products target the gas behind borborygmi in different ways.
Simethicone (sold as Gas-X, Mylanta Gas, or Phazyme) works by breaking up gas bubbles in your digestive tract so they can merge into larger pockets that are easier to pass. It doesn’t reduce the total amount of gas, but it changes how that gas moves through you, often making it less noisy and less uncomfortable. The typical dose is one or two tablets after meals and at bedtime as needed. It’s considered safe and well-tolerated.
Alpha-galactosidase (the enzyme in Beano) takes a different approach. It breaks down those hard-to-digest sugars in beans, cruciferous vegetables, and grains before your gut bacteria can ferment them. You take it with the first bite of the problem food, not after. One tablet or about five drops of the liquid covers roughly a half-cup serving. If you’re eating a larger portion, use two or three tablets. The effect is most pronounced about five hours after eating, so it’s a preventive measure rather than an instant fix. Heat destroys the enzyme, so you can’t cook with it.
Keep Things Moving
Gas builds up when digestion slows down. Constipation is one of the most common reasons borborygmi get louder, because stool sitting in the large intestine gives bacteria more time to produce methane and hydrogen. Keeping your bowels regular through adequate fiber intake, hydration, and physical activity reduces this gas accumulation. Foods like oatmeal, prunes, and bran help maintain motility in the large intestine. If constipation is a recurring issue, an over-the-counter fiber supplement or gentle laxative can prevent the gas buildup that amplifies gut noise.
Physical activity helps too. Even a short walk after a meal speeds gastric emptying and encourages gas to move through rather than pooling in one spot.
Posture and Body Position
How you’re positioned can affect how audible borborygmi are. Compression of the abdomen, whether from slouching, tight clothing, or certain seated positions, can squeeze the stomach and intestines in ways that force gas and fluid through narrower spaces, making sounds louder. Sitting upright or standing after meals gives your digestive tract more room to work quietly. Some people notice that borborygmi change with breathing patterns, since the diaphragm sits directly above the stomach and can compress it during deep inhalation.
When Borborygmi Signal Something Else
Occasional stomach growling is completely normal. But persistently loud, frequent, or painful borborygmi can point to an underlying digestive condition. Irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) commonly causes exaggerated gut sounds along with bloating, cramping, and changes in bowel habits. Small intestinal bacterial overgrowth (SIBO) occurs when excess bacteria colonize the small intestine, often after surgery or in conditions that slow digestive motility like diabetes or Crohn’s disease. Those bacteria ferment food earlier in the digestive process than normal, producing excessive gas, diarrhea, and sometimes weight loss or nutritional deficiencies.
Celiac disease, food intolerances (particularly lactose or fructose), and other malabsorption conditions can also drive persistent borborygmi because undigested nutrients feed bacterial gas production. If your stomach noises come with unexplained weight loss, chronic diarrhea, significant bloating, or abdominal pain that doesn’t improve with the strategies above, those symptoms together warrant investigation by a gastroenterologist. The growling itself isn’t dangerous, but it can be a useful signal that digestion isn’t working as it should.