Digestion: Sight & Smell

Digestion Begins with Your Eyes & Nose

Have you ever heard the saying, “Your eyes are bigger than your stomach?” This means that of all the food your eyes can see, what you desire to eat is so much more than could ever fit into your stomach.

This saying also hints at the important ways in which your senses can affect your eating habits. You can do many things that impact or protect your digestive tube by looking at your food before it ever touches your lips. This can make all the difference between becoming sick or being healthy.

Look At Your Food

Before you eat anything–look at it! You can start while it’s still on your plate and before it gets to your fork. Does it look okay? When you are eating out or on the run as we often do, we rarely take the time to inspect our food. We neglect to give the café/restaurant serving the food a quick once over to see if it passes some basic hygiene tests.

Smell Your Food

Sometimes food may look fine, but when you get a whiff, you realize that right away something is wrong. Trust this feeling. Scent is nature’s biological alarm system that goes deeper into the brain than conscious thought can ever go.

If something smells bad, it’s impossible to get an animal to eat it, but humans, to their detriment, seem to have dulled this survival mechanism.

Modern food processing is designed to mask the spoilage and texture of food; many foods are processed using chemicals and preservatives to extend their shelf life. Foods have added colors and other additives to look appealing. Unfortunately, this can mask the natural smells of what may be potential trouble.

Brain Management

I hope that you will become much smarter and aware of the things you might be doing unconsciously to make things more difficult for your digestion than necessary. “Brain Management” is my way of describing good advice for you to take to assist your digestive system.

Some lessons in the course will also describe the type of symptoms you might experience when your digestive organs are starting to complain. This will give you things to look out for and the approximate times after eating that you could notice such symptoms.

For now, with eyes and nose, just integrate these simple steps into your eating lifestyle before letting any suspect food inside your digestive system:

• Look at your food for obvious signs of spoilage or decay
• Smell your food for anything that might be tainted
• Pay special attention to the texture and taste of your first bite
• Stop eating immediately if something seems bad or unusual

This advice would apply any time of course, but if you are making your own food at home, you will have done this as part of preparation. This is specifically for “take away” or “to go” food that you eat when outside your home environment.