Digestion: The Seat of Health

The All-Important Digestive System

Digestion may seem like an odd topic for Phase 1: Essential, but I assure you it isn’t. In the Water article I said, “We are what we eat and drink.” It would be even more accurate to say, “We are what we eat, drink, absorb and eliminate.” The last two – absorb and eliminate – refer to the digestive system and will be the topic of this step.

Digestion is the most important system of your body. Sure, you’d keel over and die without your circulatory system or nervous system, but without digestion those systems couldn’t even exist! All life forms must have a way of obtaining nutrients and energy from the outside world, but not all life needs a brain or heart. The simplest forms of life, like the jellyfish, aren’t much more than eating and digesting machines.

A study by Dannon in 2007 found that almost 90% of Americans have digestive problems, while 70% of women deal with serious digestive issues every day. Abdominal pain is the second leading reason why people go to the doctor and heartburn/indigestion drugs are one of the best selling drugs in America. Considering the importance of digestion this is a major problem.

In Eastern medicine the first investigation of a person’s illness begins with digestion. They know that it is the underlying cause of most chronic diseases. Often, when people correct their digestive issues other illnesses mysteriously disappear.

Ok, now we know how important it is…but how do we begin to correct our digestive system? There are several important aspects of digestion that we will cover throughout the phases, but we’ll focus on just a two basic parts here. At its core the digestive system has two functions – obtaining nutrients from food and getting rid of the waste (absorb and eliminate). Let’s look at each part individually.

DIGESTION AND ABSORPTION

The way we break down food to unlock nutrients is fairly complicated so I’ll spare you the details. It is helpful to know that we need many different juices (stomach acid and bile), enzymes, and probiotics (friendly bacteria) to do the job properly. Without all of these components you could eat the best diet in the world and you’d still be undernourished because the body can’t extract the nutrients from the food.

The topic of optimizing digestive juices is too specific for this initial step, but will be covered in steps soon to come. It will be more beneficial to make sure we have the two other two ingredients included in system – digestive enzymes and probiotics. Here’s why:

Probiotics

Probiotics (aka Belly Buddies) are cousins of bad bacteria, and are so important to us that we’d quickly die without them in our body. Probiotics prefer a simple life to raise their families and call your intestines home. This living world in our digestive system contains over 800 species of probiotics that weigh an astonishing 3-4 pounds. Over a few million years we’ve developed a symbiotic relationship with probiotics. They get a nice warm place to live and in return they allow our digestive and immune systems to work effectively.

Modern medicine and hygiene does a pretty good job keeping us clean and infection free. However, antibiotics, chlorinated water, food preservative, etc. are murdering our probiotics. Nearly every American is suffering from a lack of these essential creatures. Supplementing with a high quality probiotic helps in nearly all of the Phase One: Essential topics - regulating digestion (especially helping diarrhea and constipation) and absorption, eliminating heavy metals, balancing the body's Ph levels and regulating hormones. You can't correct the deficiency fast enough!

**Click Here to read the full probiotics article.**

Digestive Enzymes

In Greek enzyme literally means “life”. Enzymes are the spark plugs that allow the chemical reactions in your body to break down food. Without them we couldn't unlock the nutrients from food to be absorbed into our system.

Food naturally contains enzymes that help it break down and digest in our stomachs. Over millions of years of evolution our bodies learned to supply a small amount of extra enzymes to speed up the digestive process. However, in today's modern culture we cook most of our food which destroys all natural enzymes in food. Our bodies are forced to supply the entire amount of enzymes needed to break the food down, which puts a huge strain on our body. We're simply not equipped to produce so many enzymes. Sadly, by the time we are 30 years old its taken such a toll that we are only able to produce 40% of the enzymes that we could in our youth. Every 10 years we lose an additional 13% enzyme capacity, meaning most seniors have a mere 3-5% of their enzyme capacity left.

Although our digestion suffers, the more critical problem occurs in the rest of our body. The same system that produces digestive enzymes also produces systemic enzymes, which are the spark plugs for every chemical reaction that occur in our bodies. Without systemic enzymes our heart can't beat and out brain can't think. We age rapidly and our skin shrivels like a raisin.

The only way correct both the problem of aging and poor nutrient absorbtion is by taking a digestive supplement with every large cooked meal. When you do this the burden is taken off the body. You extract a lot more nutrients from the food you eat and your remain healthy and youthful throughout your life.

Both digestive enzymes and probiotics are recommended included in the Essential Nutrients Pak at a discount.

CONSTIPATION

You should be going #2 at least 1-3 times per day to be healthy. It should be smooth and effortless. It is shocking to hear that many people go 7-10 days between bowel movements. The list of problems that causes is too long to name, so I’ll explain it in a more graphic way.

To drive my point home I need to gross you out. I apologize in advance. Picture in your mind a rotting road kill carcass on the shoulder of the highway that has been laying there for a week. The smell could kill an elephant. It’s filled with milky white bacteria and the slimy flesh is releasing toxins from decay.

Now imagine putting that in your stomach and holding it there for a week. It would be horrible for your health. Well, guess what…that exact same thing is happening when you don’t move your bowels regularly. That’s why poop smells so bad. When you eat flesh and plants they decay in your stomach after your body removes the useful energy and nutrients. The rest of the nasty stuff sit and rots in your large intestine until you push it out. The problem is your intestine isn’t a sealed plastic bag, it has lots of holes that toxins can pass through and get into your blood stream. 

Stagnant fecal matter is also inflammatory. Think of a baby with a diaper rash. That is happening in your intestines when decaying waste just sits there. You need to get it out of your body!  

Tim's Routine for Constipation Relief

There are several remedies for constipation. Much of it has to do with the foods we eat, but again, I’ll cover that in a subsequent step. The best thing you can do now is to remember these three steps.

1. Drink more water
2. Take probiotics and digestive enzymes
3. Use Super Bowel Cleanse when needed

The most common cause of constipation is dehydration, so be sure to keep drinking your water regularly. Probiotics and digestive enzymes aid in the flow of fecal matter through your system. If that's not enough, using the Super Bowel Cleanse will assist you in eliminating toxins quickly and without discomfort.

Combine all three supplements and your digestive tract will be humming like a well oil machine in no time!

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