This is the second in our series of three Big Mistakes [almost] Everyone Makes as they try to achieve better health. Last week we looked at why “Assuming that by eating healthy, you will, therefore, BE healthy” was an inaccurate assumption.
The next assumption we may not even be aware we are making is this: ASSUMING that what you put in your mouth, a healthy item, goes straight to WORK in your body as you expect it should. What is the problem? As Dr. Wallach puts it, “it used to be said, ‘You are what you eat’, but that’s not really true. It’s what you absorb. You are what you absorb.”
Maybe you purchase organic, non-GMO, quality foods. And you choose food stuffs that are “good” for your body. And you even take nutritional supplements. Even if you are taking the 90forLife as recommended by Dr. Wallach — there is a problem just waiting to make all these good actions “void” and ineffective!
What is it? Absorption!
What is the problem?
Here is how your body is supposed to break down food (hang with my, I will over simplify it):
·
Digestion actually starts in the mouth – a
mechanical process of grinding and breaking things up. Your saliva has tylin (a carbohydrate busting
enzyme) in it which begins to break down carbs into sugars and sugars into
simple sugars and so on.·
The chewed food then goes down the esophagus to
the stomach where the pH changes from an alkaline environment in the mouth to a
very acidic environment. The stomach
continues this mechanical breaking down actually dissolving the connective
tissue and separating the fibers and cells of your food. The goal is to get down to the simplest amino
acids which make digestion and absorption easier.·
This food then moves into the duodenum (first
part of the small intestine) while the pancreas and the liver both empty into
the common bile duct coming into the duodenum. Bile helps you absorb things. The pH levels then shift to alkalinizing
mucus and bicarbonate because the pancreatic and intestinal enzymes only work
in an alkaline environment. So you
switch from being very, very acid to very alkaline. The purpose?
To get the digested food stuff down to their simplest components for
absorption down the pike.·
At this point, your food is kind of like a soup
– it is called chyme. If the stomach,
duodenum, pancreas, liver and the bile have done their job, now you have this
soup moving through the intestines.·
Here’s the important part –the intestinal
absorptive surface is covered with villi. To the naked eye they would look like velvet
but magnified they look more like carpet fibers. There is muscle in them creating peristaltic
waves to help move things along. But the
crucial part is that the space between the villi open up so the chyme can go
down in between them. Plus, each villi
(carpet fiber) has lots of individual hairs that stick out increasing the
surface area 85 times. Thus, the chyme
is exposed to more surface area and gets absorbed into the little blood vessels
in the villi. The molecules of fat,
proteins, amino acids, fatty acids and simple sugars are absorbed in the villi
hairs, go through cells in the intestine right into these little blood vessels
or little capillaries. Then this goes
into the blood stream, through the liver which pulls out what it wants and
distributes everything else.
