The digestive process: problems & troubleshooting

To get to the bottom of these symptoms and hopefully fix them, let’s look at the actual process of digestion. We’ll go step by step down the line to identify and offer solutions for various issues that can arise at each one.

What happens when you’re eating something? The stops along the digestive route involve:

1. Sensing and signalling

2. Oral digestion, or chewing

3. Mechanical digestion in the stomach

4. Duodenal digestion

5. Small-intestinal digestion

6. Colonic digestion

chewing is still important because it breaks apart the fibres and makes the nutrients contained therein more accessible to protein-digesting enzymes (proteases) in the stomach.

3. MECHANICAL DIGESTION IN THE STOMACH

Leaving the mouth, the food travels down the oesophagus on into the stomach, where hydrochloric acid and a protein-degrading enzyme called pepsin break the food down into a big semi-fluid mass of partially digested food components, water, enzymes, and acid known as chyme. The stomach walls undulate (move up and down) and mix the chyme.

HOW TO OPTIMISE STOMACH DIGESTION

• Get your thiamine levels

up Thiamine is a B-vitamin involved in hydrochloric acid production. If you want optimal stomach acidity – and you definitely do want it – you need to be replete in thiamine. The best source of thiamine is pork.

• Watch the antacids While heartburn meds can make a person feel better in an acute case of heartburn, they do so by inhibiting production of hydrochloric acid, which makes the stomach more alkaline and worsens your digestion in the long run. Pepsin cannot work without adequate acidity.

• Try bitters Post-meal bitters stimulate production of hydrochloric acid and assist many of the digestive organs, making the whole operation run more smoothly. But they must be bitter. Covering up the bitter flavour with something sweet mitigates the beneficial effect on digestion.

• Get enough sodium Low sodium levels reduce hydrochloric acid production. Make sure you’re salting your food to taste, as our moment-to-moment desire for salt is a good marker for sodium requirements. As long as you're not eating packaged junk food, you won't crave too much salt.

• Try supplemental hydrochloric acid

A little betaine HC1, especially with protein meals, can really help if your acid production is too low. If you take betaine HC1 and you feel a burn, you probably don't need it.

4. DUODENAL DIGESTION

Since the stomach is too acidic for amylase to work, the chyme migrates down to the duodenum, the first section of the small intestine immediately after the stomach, where the pH is more alkaline. The pancreas produces protein-digesting enzymes as well as amylase and delivers them to the duodenum, where the full range of digestive enzymes can get to work liberating nutrients for absorption down the line. This is also where bile is introduced to assist in fat digestion. • Eat meals rather than graze The human digestive system operates best when it encounters whole meals with plenty of time between subsequent meals rather than a steady stream of incoming food. It even tries to enforce this: when a bolus of chyme enters the duodenum, the opening leading from the stomach to the duodenum tightens up to prevent more food from coming in. Overriding this with constant snacking will only impair your digestion and back things up. Go for a walk A short walk e eating speeds up the tion of food from mach through the um into the small e. It ‘gets things

’ in a beneficial way.

5 SMALL INTESTINAL DIGESTION

After softening up in the duodenum, the chyme passes on into the small intestine, where the bulk of nutrient absorption occurs. All along the intestinal walls lie villi — microscopic finger-like projections that increase the surface area of the intestinal lining and pluck nutrients from the passing slurry to be absorbed and assimilated. (You may have heard of villi in the context of gluten. Gluten can wipe out the villi in some people, leading to nutritional malabsorption.)

• Optimise your serotonin About 95% of the serotonin in the human body occurs in the gut; it’s one of the primary regulators of intestinal peristalsis – the muscular contractions that move and mix food through the digestive tract.

• Fix leaky gut Leaky gut isn’t just about allowing pathogens and allergenic food components into your

bloodstream. It also impairs nutrient absorption and digestion in the small intestine. Make sure you’re practising excellent tight junction hygiene.

• Pay attention to FODMAPs FODMAP stands for fermentable oligosaccharides, disaccharides, monosaccharides and polyols. Not everyone with digestive issues has to do this, but anyone who gets bloating, belly pain, excessive gas and many of the other symptoms of poor digestion after eating should analyse their diet for FODMAPs and do an elimination trial. FODMAP foods include a wide range of fermentable fibres, sugars, vegetables and fruits that have been shown to provoke uncontrollable and uncomfortable gut issues. These are often foods we consider to be healthy.

6. COLONIC DIGESTION

You don’t actually digest anything in the colon. Rather, you gather and expel the waste – mostly fibre – that’s left over from digestion. Some of that waste is food for the gut bacteria who live in your colon. So someone’s digesting the stuff, just not you.

• Eat some prebiotic fibre Ironically, sometimes you need to eat stuff you cannot digest in order to improve your digestion in the long term. Fermentable prebiotic fibres like inulin and resistant starch are some of the beststudied examples. They feed the (mostly) good gut bacteria, which in turn produce shortchain fatty acids that power your colonic cells and improve your metabolic health.

• Take probiotics Certain probiotics have been shown to reduce bloating and stomach pain, improve gastrointestinal health, ease irritable bowl syndrome (IBS) symptoms, alleviate leaky gut syndrome and reduce antibioticrelated diarrhoea.

Digestion must be approached as a single unit. You don’t just pick one of these tips to try. You do them all, together, if they apply to you.

Fermentable prebiotic fibres like inulin and resistant starch are some of the beststudied examples. They feed the (mostly) good gut bacteria, which in turn produce short-chain fatty acids that power your colonic cells and improve your metabolic health.