Digestion: The "Big Idea"

Family, friends, or even doctors can advise you on what they think are the right foods for you to eat or not to eat. The trouble is you won’t pay any attention. Not unlike smoking, how many smokers have heard how many times from how many sources that they shouldn’t smoke? Intellectually, they know it’s harmful to smoke. But until they decide emotionally and mentally it’s time, they are not going to stop smoking, regardless of the cost to their health or wallet.

In reality, this course is not about food, but HOW your body processes what you do eat. Obviously, the better quality food you eat, the more your digestion and body will approve. My hope is that as you become more aware of your digestive processing, you will be more likely to provide healthy and “real” food for your body to create your new cells and future health.

Digestion Is Quite Amazing Actually

Digestion is a bit like breathing: it keeps us alive; we do it without conscious attention, yet most of us know very little about what goes on during the process. This course will connect you to your digestive system in an emotional and visceral way. We are going to follow the full journey of food from beginning to end, as it makes its way through your digestive system.

When you understand how your digestion works on a gut level (pun intended), you will find it easier to make conscious decisions about what is right and what is not right for your body. When you decide to make a change, it’s going to be a lasting change.

Your Digestive Tube

Your digestive tube is the source of life. From the perspective of the evolutionists, we human beings started life on this planet a few million years ago as a tiny tube (worm) wriggling around looking for food to make it grow.

As this organism got bigger and stronger, it evolved a skeleton, so that it could wander further a field to find more food and grow even bigger. You can be sure that over these millions of years of evolution, this digestive tube became ultra sensitive and extremely picky about the type of foods it would allow inside. One mistake and that was the end of that single organism’s life on earth.

We all want to be as healthy as possible, yet many of us rush our meals, eat questionable foods, and then ignore the consequences to our energy, vitality and mood. When you learn how prevalent the signs and symptoms of digestive distress are, you may be surprised to discover how many of your family, friends or co-workers suffer with these exact same problems.

As you review your own eating habits according to The Digestive Awareness Diet principles, you will start connecting the way that HOW you eat is affecting your body with aches and pains that you’ve learned to accept as “normal.”

Do I need to remind you that simply because you experience a pain every day, does not mean its “normal?” Pain or discomfort is never normal. Unfortunately, for many people, it is “normal” for them to experience pain or discomfort every day. Many of these pains are caused by their diet, so it is “normal to hurt every day” because they do the same thing every day.

Digestion In 100 Words or Less

I find it helpful to start with a summary type statement of digestion. From there we will look at each “stage” of digestion and then discuss each step in sequence as it occurs. Read through this next paragraph and see how much you might know at the moment. Here we go:

Digestion is:

Chewing your food to liquid, which travels to your stomach for storing, mixing, and partial protein digestion. As food enters your small intestine, it gets a squirt (of enzymes) from the pancreas and a squirt (of bile) from your gallbladder for further digestive breakdown. Once the digestive enzymes in your small intestine have broken the food down to microscopic size, the nutritional bits are absorbed through the walls of your small intestine and go to the liver for further processing. The remaining materials travel through the ileocecal valve (preventing back flow) to your large intestine for recycling and/or elimination.

Don’t worry if you don’t understand every part of the paragraph. That’s what this course is about! At the end you will read that and say, “Of course it is, I know all that!”

Please reread this definition and see how much you can understand. This is the big picture. It represents a verbal road map of the complete stations of digestion as the food you eat travels through your system.

Now that you have a brief overview of the true digestive process, let’s take a deeper look at your digestive system to see what’s happening in more detail. Here’s an even easier description, but without all the technical details.

Digestion is the process that breaks down the food you eat into smaller particles so it can be absorbed and used by your body’s cells to produce energy.

Starting next lesson we will dig deeper into your understanding of How Digestion Works.

Digestion: How Your Body Gets Energy

Each cell in your body is like a mini-factory. It orders and inputs raw materials, manufactures and distributes new products for use in the cellular factory and needs to eliminate any waste materials caused by the process. Inside the workings of each cell are many control systems and complicated feedback mechanisms to ensure that all this functions correctly and efficiently.

These cellular functions operate under the overall control and coordination of the brain and nerve system. Each cell needs raw materials that must come from outside the cell itself. These particles, smaller than the eye can see, travel within the blood stream and are absorbed as they come in contact with the cell wall.

Therefore, the big chunks of food we eat must be transformed into microscopic particles in the blood so they can be easily absorbed into your cells. Anything that prevents this process is detrimental to the cell, and by definition, the rest of the body.

The definition of a tube is a hollow cylinder, especially one that conveys fluid or functions in a passage. From this point of view, you can understand that your digestion takes place inside a living tube. Think about this; what you swallow is still “outside” your body. It is just being stored in a tube waiting to get processed.

It takes a complex and well-coordinated system to break down food inside the tube, absorb the nutritional parts through its walls into the blood stream, as well as be able to eliminate the waste by-products that derive from this process.

Your digestive system performs this amazing chemical transformation in an admirable fashion. Scientifically we have learned many aspects about digestion, but there is much we still need to learn. Yet, this daily process of our digestion takes place day-in and day-out inside our bodies without any conscious attention.

This biochemical process is the key to continually rebuilding our cells, providing our energy and allowing us to think and function. If food is not broken down completely, the particles in the blood can be too large to be absorbed into the cell. In fact, these particles of food can then be attacked by the immune system. This is because the immune system works by identifying and attacking what it considers to be foreign molecules.

Researchers say that 70-90 percent of the immune system is located within your digestive tube for the exact purpose of protecting your system from outside invasion.

Keep in mind that the inside of your tube is still outside of the body. This means that if you are suffering from a gut related immune disease there is a very good possibility that it may be your body’s own attempt to fight your own food particles that you are not digesting properly.

This course is going to teach you the key functions of your digestive tube as they relate to your daily life. You are going to learn how to cooperate with your body’s digestive tube to make life easy for it to function rather than difficult to impossible.

Not only your energy, but also your mood, thoughts and decisions are all subject to the healthy functioning of your digestive tube. If you want a healthy life, you have to have a strong and healthy digestive system. Not only is this true scientifically, I hope this makes common sense to you as well.

Think about this again for a minute. “Inside” your tube is still “outside” your body. The food that you have just swallowed is held outside your body as it waits its turn to be processed. What happens next? Stay tuned for the next lesson.