Your Path to Healthy Living and a Healthy Life

Gut Health

Gut health, not necessarily a pretty topic, but one that is dear to many hearts!  Gastrointestinal complaints are one of the most common reasons individuals visit naturopathic physicians.  They can be painful, mysterious and a real puzzle for medical doctors.  For naturopaths however, who view healing and the health of the body from a causal perspective, GI complaints are not so difficult to treat.

Digestion begins before you start eating and continues for hours afterwards depending on what you have eaten.  The process of digestion extracts nutrients and energy from the food you eat.  It starts when you first smell what you are about to eat.  Saliva, containing digestive enzymes, is excreted and starts the digestive process.  Chewing encourages more enzymes to be excreted and swallowing sends the masticated food down the esophagus via a process called peristalsis.

The stomach is at the end of the esophagus and serves three important roles:

1. Stores food you've eaten.
2. Breaks down food into a liquified mixture.
3. Moves the mixture to the small intestine.

It performs all these jobs with the help of strong muscles and gastric juices containing hydrochloric acid and pepsin. Once the stomach is finished with the food, 22 feet of small intestine take over.  It's responsible for breaking the food down even more so your body can absorb the nutrients in the food: vitamins, minerals, protein, carbohydrates and fat.  It gets help from your liver, gallbladder and pancreas. 

All three of these helper organs send more juice to the small intestine that help break down specific compounds in the food so the body can absorb them.  The pancreas is responsible for helping break down fats, carbohydrates and protein.  The liver sends out bile to help absorb fats into the bloodstream.  And the gallbladder stores the bile until it is needed.

After the food has been processed by the first third of the small intestine, the latter two thirds, absorb nutrients into the blood stream.  Even with the most efficient digestive system, there is bound to be waste left over.  As it enters the large intestine, this waste is gone over for the last time to remove any remaining minerals and excess water. As it moves along the intestine it becomes more solid and eventually stool is formed and is  excreted from the body.

Each stage of the digestive process plays an important and vital role in the health of the body.  If any of the steps in the above chain of events fails, the whole system may become inoperative causing a cascade of failures.  For instance, if the stomach is not producing enough hydrochloric acid, the breakdown of protein and the absorption of vitamins and minerals will be suboptimal, resulting in deficiencies. 

Also, gut flora or good bacteria, protects the body from alien microbes.  According to an article in the February 2003 Lancet, "normalized gut flora may help prevent multisystem organ failure, colon cancer and inflammatory bowel diseases."

When gut health fails the risk of disease rises.  It makes sense.  If your body isn't breaking down or absorbing nutrients, deficiencies can occur leading to everything from weak immune function to muscle pain and weakness.  If the body isn't being fed the right nutrients in adequate amounts, systems begin failing.  This is seen dramatically in patients after surgery.  Sluggish digestion with malnutrition occurs in approximately 50% of all hospitalized surgery patients1.  And of those patients with malnutrition, death rate increases dramatically.

How do you take care of your gut at every level?  Here are some simple tips from top to bottom.

1.  Create food that stimulates your visual and scent senses.
2.  Chew food well.
3.  Don't drink excessive amounts of water with your meal.
4.  If you find undigested food in your stool, take digestive enzymes.  Your primary care provider can help with choosing the enzyme combination that is right for you.
5.  If you suffer from flatulence after consuming a meal, take digestive enzymes and ask your primary care provider about supplementation for healing the gut.
6.  Take probiotics, 1-2 capsules per day between meals.
7.  Drink 8 glasses of water per day away from meals to help prevent constipation.
8.  Develop regular bowel habits.
9.  If you experience pain after eating consult your primary care provider immediately.
10.If you have a history of chronic constipation consider a course of enemas or colonics under the care of your primary care provider.
11.Acid reflux is a serious condition that can lead to serious disease.  If you have challenges with reflux more than once a week you may be causing permanent damage to the lining of your esophagus. There are natural solutions!
 

1 "Perioperative Nutritional Support", Ellis, Lee, et al, Current Strategies in Surgical Nutrition/Surgical Clinics of North America, June 1991;71(3):493-507.
.