Digestion

Eat as you would in the Garden of Eden. Eat as close to nature as she had intended for you.

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I wrote the following article this morning, inspired by Noah's brother Nate. He has a desire to expand his knowledge of health food and wants me to go health food shopping with him. To start him off on his quest, I'd like to say this: You can buy all the health foods available and miss out on one main reason you are buying them: the nutrients. Those are obtained through digestion.
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Digestion

The key of digestion is to be able to make available all of the nutritious parts of your food.

It is our job to break down and separate the nutrients in our food, and sort them and send them to places in our body that can use them best. The good thing about this is our body is so smart that it has left only a few things to us to handle in this process while we are enjoying our meal & the people we are sharing it with.

Can you imagine going out to dinner with friends and family and having to sort out your nutrients, choose the correct break down enzymes, know where the nutrients need to go and ship them off to those places in a timely matter, all the while having conversation with people who are doing the same digesting process? Sounds like chaos, and I bet that not everything would reach its final destination. Good thing we only have a few details to pay attention to!

Digestion all starts in your mind. Just thinking about a delicious meal will get the digestive juices flowing in your mouth. This saliva contains enzymes to break down carbohydrates.

Along the same lines, your eyes feed images to your brain. Make your food beautiful, and it will be easier to digest.

Teeth and tongue are our own personal, top-of-the-line cuisinart. It is extraordinary how well they can break down food and mix in enzymes. You just have to use them. They are not on autopilot like your heart is when it pumps. Chew, Chew, Chew & your body will get the most out of what you are spending top dollar on.

For food you drink, like juices and smoothies, you would think there is no reason to chew, though, that’s not what God intended in the Garden of Eden. There wasn’t a blender hanging from the apple tree, and there wasn’t a juicer in the field where carrots and beets grow. Liquefied food needs the enzymes from your saliva too. You want to be able to drink your food and chew your smoothies. Remember this and your stomach will gladly accept it’s featured role.

You can set your stomach up to win by having a winning nutrient line-up. Think of this: what you put into your stomach first will digest first. Fruit & vegetables are quick to digest. After being in the stomach for a short period of time, they are ready to go to the small intestine to release all of the amazing nutrients they have to offer. The small intestine is the site where most vitamins and minerals are absorbed into your body.

Second in digestive speed to fruits and veggies are carbohydrates. Then you have proteins and fats… much slower by themselves. Proteins need to be combined with stomach acid for a longer period of time to breakdown into user-friendly particles.

If you were to put the protein in first, and then the vegetables on top of it… what would happen? The vegetables would sit on top of the protein, and cook in all of that stomach acid. Have you ever cooked broccoli too long? It turns brown and the nutritional value goes down. Same as in your stomach. By the time the protein digests and the over-cooked broccoli reaches the heaven of vitamin/mineral absorption, the small intestines, there are few nutrients left for the broccoli to release. In a meal, think salad first, then grains/starches, and then protein.

Consider a smoothie that is all combined together. I like to think that it is ok since everything is broken to super-duper tiny particles anyway. I don’t think the whey protein will sit in your stomach as long as that big ole red steak.

Now, there is something called food combining. This synergy allows for greater digestion, though I don’t recall enough about it to teach it to you today. The best way to learn about it is to look at a food-combining chart. You will see which foods are optimally digested together and which to avoid mixing. What I do know is that most fruits should be eaten alone not to be combined with your total meal. Apples and pineapples are ok to combine with some things. In the fruit category, you can combine most fruits with other fruits. The exception is that melons should always be eaten alone. Also I have heard that steak & tomatoes are good to eat together… hmm, do you eat a lot of steak?

Fusion is a popular form of cuisine where fruit is added to salads and on pizzas, and all combining theories go out the window. This is what I say to fusion; enjoy it, just not every day.

Okay, after all of this being said about your food line-up and food combining, don’t stress about it. Stress is one of the worst things that you can do to your digestive system. And, if you are stressing for reasons other than which foods to eat, don’t stress that you are stressing. No worries, do your best and your body will do the rest. Prepare, eat and enjoy your food with a calm mind and open heart.

Breathe deeply and dig in!!

Tess

In your meals throughout the day, choose foods that will give you the most colors from the rainbow.

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