Today I'd like to expand on last weeks post and talk about the digestive process, start to finish as well as provide some strategies you can employ to support your digestion naturally. Here it goes..
Digestion Part 2
Digestion is a North to South process. It begins in the mind (as discussed last week). Once food is consumed, it works its way through various 'compartments' where food is broken down into nutrients and absorbed. Toxins are packaged for shipment out of the body, and wastes are then excreted. Sounds simple enough right? Well, let's break it down a little more...
There are 3 key players (organs) in the digestive game - Stomach, Pancreas, and Gallbladder. Each one plays a critical role in how our food is broken down so that it can be absorbed and assimilated into our bodies.
The stomach is the main holding tank, if your will, where the food is liquified and proteins are broken down. As you take your first bite, your stomach is releasing copious amounts of hydrochloric acid, hormones (gastrin), and enzymes, namely Pepsin (which digests proteins). As food is received by the stomach, it is met by a bath of hydrochloric acid where it starts to liquify. Pepsin begins to act on the proteins by breaking them down into smaller polypeptides and peptides (smaller strings of amino acids). The pH of the stomach is very acidic. It sits between a pH of 1.5-3 during digestion. This highly acidic environment serves several purposes:
1. Helps break the chemical bonds of food and turn it into a liquid form.
2. Activates pepsinogen (inactive form) into pepsin (active form). If pepsin were active in the stomach all the time without food, the stomach would start to catabolize itself (meaning you would die). It's very important that the acid levels remain below pH 3 because as the pH increases above this level, the ability to activate pepsin drops sharply - meaning you won't be able to breakdown proteins!
3. Disinfects the stomach and kills harmful pathogens before they can enter your bloodstream. (Yay for your immune system!)
Once this highly acidic liquified food, now referred to as Chyme, is ready, it is released into the small intestines for further breakdown. As the chyme enters the small intestines, the pancreas is signaled to release bicarbonate to neutralize the acid level as well as pancreatic enzymes for further nutrient breakdown. At the same time, the gallbladder is signaled to release bile which will emulsify the fats into smaller fatty acids. The villi and microvilli of the intestinal walls begin to absorb the broken down nutrients into the bloodstream and the lymph system.
The chyme will continue its path down the small intestines and large intestines where more vitamins and minerals are extracted, water and some bile is recycled, and eventually formed into feces and excreted.
Whew, that was a mouthful (no pun intended).
So the above description is how digestion is SUPPOSED to work. Although, you can probably guess that's not quite how the story plays out for most of us. Because of the type of food we ingest, highly refined carbohydrates and poor quality fat or no-fat/low-fat, the stress that surounds our everyday lives, and the toxic load we put our poor liver through on a daily basis, it's safe to assume that most people have a digestive track that is out of balance. So what can you do to even things out a bit??? Below are a few easy strategies you can employ to support your digestive track start to finish.
1. CHEW YOUR FOOD! this is the single easiest change you can make that will have a huge impact on your digestion. Undigested food particles can cause trauma to the intestinal walls and can create a leaky gut situation (we'll save that for a later post).
2. Eat real whole food. Reducing or eliminating highly refined carbohydrates can have a positive impact on your stomachs ability to secrete hydrochloric acid which is needed for all the above mentioned reasons.
3. Eat high quality fat with every meal. You gallbladder will not work optimally if you don't consume fat. What happens instead is the bile can back up in the gallbladder. It can become viscous - eventually leading to it's inability to squeeze and release bile or it can lead to the formation of stones. The quality of fat you put in your body is just as important. If you eat trans fats, your liver will not be able to produce high quality bile and package toxins appropriately. This will increase your overall toxic load.
4. Eat plenty of fermented vegetables and consume fermented drinks! The beneficial bacteria in fermented foods nourished the healthy bacteria in your gut. These helpful little guys aid your body in breaking down and absorbing vitamins and minerals. They even produce vitamins themselves from wastes in the large intestine! These types of food include kimchee, beet kvass, and kombucha.
I hope this helps to shed some light on the various processes in the digestive tract. It's easy to not think about what happens next after we put the food in our mouth. Hopefully these tips will help you to bring a little more balance to your digestive tract.
Coming up next, I will be sharing specific tonics you can make at home to help support digestion including the use of apple cider vinegar to stimulate hydrochloric acid secretion (YES, more HCL is a good thing!) and beet kvass to help you gallbladder. Stay tuned!
As always, please feel free to leave comments or provide any feedback! Thank you!
Isn't the body fantastic ???
ReplyDelete