Digestion:
What Really Happens To The Food You Eat
After we have eaten a meal -- and often
we do this in a hurry, without much chewing, under a lot of stress,
or in the presence of negative emotions -- we give no thought to what
becomes of our food once it has been swallowed.
We have been led to assume that anything
put in the mouth automatically gets digested flawlessly,
is efficiently absorbed into the body where it nourishes our cells,
with the waste products being eliminated completely by the large intestine.
This vision of efficiency
may exist in the best cases but for most there is many a slip between
the table and the toilet. Most bodies are not optimally efficient at
performing all the required functions, especially after years
of poor living habits, stress, fatigue, and aging.
To the natural hygienist, most disease
begins and ends with our FOOD; most of our healing
efforts are focused on improving the digestion process.
Digestion means chemically changing the foods we eat
into substances that can pass into the blood stream and circulate through
the body where nutrition is used for bodily functions.
Our bodies use nutritional substances for
fuel, for repair and rebuilding, and to conduct an incredibly complex
biochemistry. Scientists are still busily engaged in trying to understand
the chemical mysteries of our bodies.
But as bewildering as the chemistry of
life is, the chemistry of digestion itself is actually a relatively
simple process, and one doctors have had a fairly good
understanding of for many decades.
Though relatively straightforward, a lot
can and does go wrong resulting in digestion problems.
The body breaks down foods
with a series of different enzymes that are mixed with food at various
points as it passes from mouth to stomach to small intestine.
An enzyme is a large, complex molecule
that has the ability to chemically change other large,
complex molecules without being changed itself. Digestive enzymes perform
relatively simple functions--breaking large molecules into smaller parts
that can dissolve in water.
Digestion starts in the mouth
when food is mixed with ptyalin, an enzyme secreted by the salivary
glands. Ptylain converts insoluble starches into simple sugars.
If the digestion of starchy foods
is impaired, the body is less able to extract the energy contained in
our foods, while far worse from the point of view of the genesis of
diseases, undigested starches pass through the stomach and into the
gut where they ferment and thereby create an additional toxic burden
for the liver to process. And fermenting starches also create gas.
As we chew our food it gets mixed
with saliva; as we continue to chew the starches in the food
are converted into sugar. There is a very simple experiment you can
conduct to prove to yourself how this works. Get a plain piece of bread,
no jam, no butter, plain, and without swallowing it or allowing much
of it to pass down the throat, begin to chew it until it seems to literally
dissolve.
Ptyalin works fast in
our mouths so you may be surprised at how sweet the taste gets. As important
as chewing is, I have only run into about one client in a hundred that
actually makes an effort to consciously chew their food.
Horace Fletcher, whose name has become
synonymous with the importance of chewing food well
(Fletcherizing), ran an experiment on a military population in Canada.
He required half his experimental group to chew thoroughly, and the
other half to gulp things down as usual. His study
reports significant improvement in the overall health and performance
of the group that persistently
chewed.
Fletcher's report recommended that every
mouthful be chewed 50 times for half a minute before
being swallowed. Try it, you might be very surprised at what a beneficial
effect such a simple change in your approach to eating can make.
Not only will you have less intestinal
gas, if you're overweight you will probably
find yourself getting smaller because your blood sugar will elevate
quicker as you are eating and thus your sense of hunger will go away
sooner. And if you are very thin and have difficulty gaining
weight you may find that the pounds go on easier because chewing
well makes your body more capable of actually assimilating the calories
you are consuming.
A logical conclusion from this data is
that anything that would prevent or reduce chewing would be unhealthful.
For example, food eaten when too hot tends to be gulped
down. The same tends to happen when food is seasoned with fresh Jalapeno
or habaneo peppers.
People with poor teeth should blend
or mash starchy foods and then gum them thoroughly to mix them
with saliva. Keep in mind that even so-called protein foods such as
beans often contain large quantities of starches and the starch portion
of protein foods is also digested in the mouth.
Once the food is in the stomach,
it is mixed with hydrochloric acid, secreted by the stomach itself,
and pepsin, an enzyme. Together these break proteins down into water-soluble
amino acids.
To accomplish this the stomach muscles
agitate the food continuously, somewhat like a washing machine. This
extended churning forms a kind of ball in the stomach
called a bolis.
Many things can and frequently do go wrong
at this stage of the digestion process.
The first potential digestion problem,
the stomach's very acid environment inactivates ptylain,
so any starch not converted to sugar in the mouth does not get properly
processed thereafter.
The most dangerous digestion
problem comes from the sad fact that cooked proteins
are relatively indigestible no matter how strong the constitution, no
matter how concentrated the stomach acid or how many enzymes present.
It is quite understandable to me that people do not wish to accept this
fact. After all, cooked proteins are so delicious, especially cooked
red meats and the harder, more flavorful fishes.
Proteins are rarely water soluble. Digestion
consists of rendering insoluble foods into water-soluble substances
so they can pass into the blood stream and
be used by the body's chemistry. To make them soluble, enzymes break
down the proteins, separating the individual amino acids one from the
other, because amino acids are soluble.
Enzymes that digest proteins work as though
they are mirror images of a particular amino acid. They fit against
a particular amino acid like a key fits into a lock. Then they break
the bonds holding that amino acid to others in the protein chain, and
what is so miraculous about this process, is that the
enzyme is capable of finding yet another amino acid to free, and then
yet another.
So with sufficient churning in an acid
environment, with enough time (a few hours), and enough enzymes, all
the recently eaten proteins are decomposed into amino
acids and these amino acids pass into the blood where the body recombines
them into structures it wants to make. And we have health.
But when protein chains are heated, the
protein structures are altered into physical shapes that the enzymes
can't "latch" on to. The perfect example of this is when an
egg is fried. The eggwhite is albumen, a kind of protein. When it is
heated, it shrivels up and gets hard. While raw and liquid, it is easily
digestable. When cooked, largely indigestable.
Stress also inhibits the
churning action in the stomach so that otherwise digestible foods may
not be mixed efficiently with digestive enzymes causing indigestion.
For all these reasons, undigested proteins may pass into the gut.
Along with undigested starches. When starches
convert best to sugars under the alkaline conditions found in the mouth.
Once they pass into the acid stomach starch digestion is not as efficient.
If starches reach the small intestine they are fermented by
yeasts.
The products of starch fermentation are
only mildly toxic. The gases produced by yeast fermentations
usually don't smell particularly bad; bodies that regularly contain
starch fermentation usually don't smell particularly bad either. In
otherwise healthy people it can take many years of exposure to starch
fermentation toxins to produce a life-threatening disease.
But undigested proteins
aren't fermented by yeasts, they putrefy in the gut
(are attacked by anaerobic bacteria). Many of the waste products of
anaerobic putrefaction are highly toxic and evil smelling;
when these toxins are absorbed through the small or large intestines
they are very irritating to the mucous membranes, frequently contributing
to or causing cancer of the colon.
Protein putrefaction may even cause psychotic
symptoms in some individuals. Meat eaters often have a very unpleasant
body odor even when they are not releasing intestinal
gasses.
Adding a heavy toxic burden from misdigested
foods to the normal toxic load a body already has to handle creates
a myriad of unpleasant symptoms, and greatly shortens
life. But misdigestion also carries with it a double whammy; fermenting
and/or putrefying foods immediately interfere with the functioning of
another vital organ--the large intestine--and cause constipation.
Most people don't know what the word constipation
really means. Not being able to move one's bowels is only the most elementary
type of constipation. A more accurate definition of constipation is
"the retention of waste products in the large intestine beyond
the time that is conducive to health."
Properly digested food is not sticky and
exits the large intestine quickly. But improperly digested food (or
indigestible food) gradually coats the large intestine,
making an ever-thicker lining that interferes with
the intestine's functioning.
Far worse, this coating steadily putrefies,
creating additional highly-potent toxins. Lining the
colon with undigested food can be compared to the mineral deposits filling
in the inside of an old water pipe, gradually choking off the flow.
In the colon, this deposit can become rock-hard, just like water pipe
scale.
Since the large intestine is also an organ
that removes moisture and water-soluble minerals from the food and moves
them into the blood stream, when the large intestine is lined with putrefying
undigested food waste, the toxins of this putrefaction are also steadily
moved into the bloodstream and place an even greater
burden on the liver and kidneys, accelerating their breakdown, accelerating
the aging process and contributing to a lot of interesting
and unpleasant symptoms that keep doctors busy.
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