naturally supporting each step of digestion
Although there is beauty in the supplement industry blooming and offering support and validation for so many issues that ail women today, I want to take time this week to really hone in on all the overlooked ways you can improve your digestion without adding another supplement bottle to your shelf. There are many root cause conditions that are going to lend you to need digestion enzyme support so that you are able to digest nutrients from your food in the midst of healing. However, there are also a plethora of things you can do in order to help ease and move along the digestion process along the way or in place of taking a supplement the rest of your life. Remember, it is not just what you eat, but how much of what you eat is actually being absorbed and utilized.
Breaking it Down: What is Digestion?
The human digestive system is arguably the most diverse and complicated system in the body. When you look at it part for part and how it all unfolds, it is truly an intersection of science and miracles taking place. A compilation of enzymes, nerves, hormones, and blood all work within 10 different organs (covering 9 meters) and 20 different specialized cell types together in unison to digest your food.
Most often, the first thing that comes to mind when thinking of digestion is the stomach. This is especially true because we localize all of our bloating and discomfort after eating and digestive disorders to our stomach area! However, when healing your digestion it is imperative to understand that it actually begins in your mind. We will touch more on this later, but the actual thoughts that you have about your food and your body and any outside stress you are under, is going to impact your ability to digest the food at hand.
The entire process lasts about 30-40 hours, roughly a couple days to fully move food from the mouth to the colon! This fact alone makes me pause and give so much respect and appreciation to my body and all the work it puts in to support me in simply eating breakfast. All completely unconscious once I stop chewing, may I add.
The entire gastrointestinal tract, a long twisting channel starting at your oral cavity and ending at your anus, transports the food you ingest and has a surface area of between 30-40 m2! It is supported and held in place by a layer of mesentery connective tissue, hugging the organs while they do their job
The trio, your pancreas, gallbladder, and liver! These imperative organs break down food using gastric juices into fuel that your body can use to make it through the day.
We produce 1.5 liters of saliva a day! When we put food into our mouths, our salivary glands begin production and chew food into a moist lump called a bolus
Enzymes in the saliva break down starch. Once you swallow the bolus, it begins a journey down the esophagus
Nerves in the esophageal tissue now sense this bolus traveling down, and trigger peristalsis, powerfully propelling the food into the stomach
Many things go on to break the food down once it reaches the stomach. Powerful muscular walls pound it into smithereens (truly) until it is broken down into small chunks. Then, more enzyme rich gastric juices begin to break it down further by targeting the proteins
Hormones now alert the pancreas, liver, and gall bladder to produce bile! Bile will digest any fats present in the foods you eat
Our food spends about 3 total hours in the stomach undergoing this destruction (maybe why we were always told as kids to wait a few hours after eating to swim?) until it is ready to move to the small intestine!
The liver will send that bile into the gallbladder, secreting it into the duodenum (first portion of small intestine) Here, fats are dissolved into a slurry of chyme, so they can be easily and completely digested by the pancreas.
Here, the enzyme rich pancreatic juices will break down fats into fatty acids and glycerol! Seemingly, biochemistry you learned in school may have some actual applicable knowledge….
In the jejunum and and ilium (lower half of your small intestine), proteins are broken down into amino acids, and carbohydrates into glucose. This is all so that it can be in a form easily utilized by the body for fuel
These areas of the small intestine are coated in vili. Villi is so much fun and so helpful. We have millions of them here, and they expand the surface area to maximize absorption and transfer molecules into the bloodstream when needed
FINALLY the molecules that were now transferred into the blood can feed and provide nutrients and fuel to the bodies organs and tissues! The whole reason we ate that dinner in the first place.
What are we left with now? Residual fiber, water, and dead cells that are sloughed off and find their way to the large intestine (or colon). Water is drained out through the intestinal wall along this journey, until we are just left with a mass of stool
Nerves now sense your rectum expanding as it reaches its final destination, and tell your body when it is finally time to expel the stool
Now that we understand digestion functionally, we can move on to to an understanding of when it is in dysbiosis, all of the symptoms you are feeling and likely why you are reading this blog.
The Stress Connection
That was long winded and a lot of info! However, it is important we actually understand processes and a step by step of what is going on, before we try and heal it. You shouldn’t have to see a doctor or buy a supplement just to understand natural systems within your own body and how to support them. Let’s talk now about stress, and how it impacts the steps and systems we listed above.
The gut-brain connection. How is our brain interpreting the food we are about to eat? Are we initiating digestion by telling our bodies that we should feel guilty about what we are consuming? Fearful of how our stomachs will ache immediacy after? Are we eating specifically to suppress sadness or grief? Do we trust ourselves? All of this matters. Every organ is listening in on your thoughts, and reacting accordingly.
When we are stressed out or in fight or flight mode, our bodies will actually signal to our enteric nervous system to shut down digestion and focus on survival. Similar to how our bodies will shut down ovulation when we are stressed and not properly fueled….
On the flip side, your enteric nervous system can also send signals of intestinal distress back to your brain, therefore being the cause of depression of anxiety as opposed to the result. There is such an intimate, back and forth relationship here between the gut and the brain
This is not to be twisted in a way that means symptoms are “all in your head” . Quite the contrary, there are biochemical pathways being very legitimately disrupted here. We cannot heal one without the other…experiencing something painfully “gut wrenching” is not just a phrase
Women suffer drastically more with functional GI issues than men. Why is this important? Because people with functional GI issues actually are shown to have more acute and sensitive reactions to pain, meaning stress makes the existing pain even worse
The autonomic nervous system controls salivary gland function, whereas the parasympathetic system controls secretion. Through the oral-gut-brain axis, crucial enzymatic saliva production can be impacted by stress and vice versa
Stress can interrupt normal nerve functioning in peristalsis, causing a spasm of these muscles resulting in constipation, diarrhea, and slow motility
Stress and depressive states actually impact the permeability of our gut lining. This is a cause of “leaky gut”, where unwanted bacteria are able to seep in and cause inflammation, pathogenic overgrowth, insulin resistance, and more
What can we do about this? Focus on vagal nerve toning and stimulation before eating. The vagus nerve is the longest nerve in your body and the main component of your parasympathetic nervous system. Via afferent fibers, it sends information about the gut to the brain, and the brain to the gut. By stimulating your vagus nerve before eating, you can activate your “rest and digest” nervous system
Humming and gargling. Your vagus nerve touches your vocal chords and can be stimulated indirectly this way
Deep breathing and short meditations
Probiotics! We will touch more on this in the next section, but keeping a flourishing microbiome and intact intestinal lining is crucial to maintaining serotonin production and therefore contact with the vagus nerve
There are still so many remaining questions outside of our external thoughts and stressors that impact our digestion. I want to touch on next tangible things we can do and add into our diets and daily lives to assist our motility so that you can have a firmer grasp on how to soothe these issues.
Looking internally: probiotics and natural digestive enzymes
There are so many components as to why your digestion may not be running smoothly. As we went over at the start of this blog, there are a lot of organs, steps, processes, enzymes, metabolites, and more that are all crucial in making sure we can digest our food. The good news is that after you chew and swallow, these are happens automatically and we don’t need to consciously control it. The bad news is that a lot of our underlying conditions, diet choices, of life factors can impact the ability of our bodies to do their job each step of the way.
Keep this in mind: your body knows exactly what it needs to do and it is always fighting to return to ease and balance. You can assist your digestive system in maintaining this intricately smooth system. You should be able to eat foods you love and you should feel like they love you back as well.
Instead of purchasing digestive enzymes, include ginger, pineapple, and papaya. These will help you digest proteins, improve motility, and fight inflammation. Pineapple contains Bromelain and papaya contain Papain, two naturally occurring enzymes!
Utilize bitters before eating an especially difficult to digest meal. Wild, bitter plants used to be a staple in the human diet. Bitterness is crucial to stimulating pancreatic enzymes and bile production (through the vagus nerve!) and our foods are now largely deficient in this taste profile. Include in teas with dandelion leaves, burdock root, or gentian root. You can also purchase bitters and drop them on your tongue
Do a simple at home stomach acid test with baking soda to determine if you are producing enough acid
Eating foods rich in Zinc can help to replenish low stomach acid, which ails so many people. These include pumpkin seeds and oysters. Without stomach acid, your digestive enzymes remain dormant. Consuming ACV before meals can also assist with this
Focus on foods that produce SCFA’s: Short Chain Fatty Acids. When the bacteria in your gut ferments soluble fiber, they produce SCFA’s which are able to mend and repair damage in your intestinal lining (leaky gut!!) that contributes to inflammation and discomfort. The best foods to eat here are beans and applesauce
On the topic of gut diversity, focusing in on probiotics and prebiotics. There are ways to do this without adding another bottle to your supplement cabinet! Consuming sauerkraut, goat kefir, pickles, just ripened/still green bananas, whole grains, tempeh, and green vegetables.
Specifics: Lactobacillus rhamnosus GG is very resilient to gastric juices and Bifobacterium Lactis boosts immune system, digestion, and reduces inflammation
Lastly….chew your food!! This is so simple and so important. Even better, eat undistracted as well. You want your food to get broken down as much as possible before you swallow, and give your brain adequate time to relax and start signaling to start digestion
Keep in mind that if you have a condition such as SIBO, this could be a major underlying cause of your gut issues, and you should consult an ND for proper testing and guided treatment. However, you can still utilize a lot of home remedies and work on toning your vagus nerve, including spore based probiotics, motility inducing fruits and herbs, and more.
I hope you learned a lot from this blog as always!
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