You are what you Eat

“Digestion” is about so much more than simply eating food and pooping what’s leftover. There’s more variables to it than the chewing and nutritional composition of food, though those are both very important factors in the digestive process.

It’s about what we eat, how we eat, when we eat and what else is going on in our day, our environment, in our gut and in our bodies. The state of our mind can affect our digestion, the state of our gut lining can impact what we actually are able to absorb and utilize. A gut that is inflamed by shitty foods or pro-inflammatory ingredients (vegetable oils for example) won’t be able to sift through what’s nutritious and selectively absorb the best materials to make a better, more optimally healthy us. A gut that’s “on fire” might not absorb enough of the nutrients as they pass through, or may indiscriminately absorb anything that’s moving through the tube. It’s incredibly important that we are able to eliminate the wastes that we don’t want to absorb or reabsorb. Note: Did you know there can be bacteria in the gut that change the waste the liver has prepared for exit, and instead allow for reabsorption of those more toxic wastes? So the flora in the gut also have relationship with the state of toxicity in our bodies, not only relative to neurotransmitter production as I’ve discussed before, but also the elimination of, or failure to eliminate waste by-products, old hormones, dirty cholesterol (as compared to healthy cholesterol) etc.

How do we support healthy digestion?

The simple practice of saying grace & giving thanks before a meal can help bring us into a parasympathetic state, facilitating rest & digest,  which will help our digestion and metabolism. This bi-directionally helps us better access our calm states. Before a meal I like to say “Bless all the hands that touched this food.” If you think about it, that’s you, the bagger, the grocer, the trucker, the farmer, it’s a long list of gratitude to share. Maybe you’re simply thanking your farmer or neighbor, it all matters.

Walking after big meals can be another game changer for helping optimize the digestion. Get the blood moving through the body and helping balance blood sugar levels before bed, & can even help with sleep as we unwind from our day. Going outside ironically can help us get more “inside” ourselves and tune in a little better. & This benefit can be obliterated if we then watch the news before bed or start scrolling on the phone.

When we are watching or listening to something stressful, even simply thinking about something provocative or distressing, this can pull the blood away from our digestive organs and reduce our capacity for digestion and absorption. Literally causing indigestion and irritating the bowels as well as our brains.

Be alert to everything you are consuming and when, even what you put on your skin counts as absorbing and then needing to process via digestion, liver and emunctories.

Techniques that can help include gentle abdominal massage, slow breathing exercises, singing and chanting can help calm the system, and limiting or avoiding the news, the phone, or excess information - especially while eating or before bed

The foods we choose, the foods that are available to us, how we store them, prepare them, enjoy them -these are all parts of nutrition, digestion and metabolism. It’s fascinating and concerning, how we’ve found ourselves in a place of an overabundance of food but lack of actually nutritious food. Even the macronutrients are getting skewed in their consumption. The average American eats more grams of sugar in a day than grams of protein. This is directly responsible for our declining health and greater risk for cardio-metabolic disease and the decreasing life expectancy in the US.

The foods most commonly consumed these days pale in their nutrition composition compared to the foods we used to eat. Add in the commercials and lies from Big Ag and the food pyramid & we’ve been groomed to equate macronutrients on the label as equivalent across source types. Vegetable oils are not a good cooking substitute for butter, ghee, or beef tallow- in fact they are disastrous. The Framingham study was funded by the seed oil companies, and ever since folks gave up saturated fat to reduce heart attacks, the number of heart attacks has skyrocketed. Is it time to reconsider our sources of health information?

Even sugar in different forms can have wildly different effects in the body. A glass of orange juice will spike the blood sugar and wreak havoc, while a whole orange with the pulp and fiber included will be healthful with less damage. Add pasteurization and that juice is now comparable to a soda in the sugar without benefits equation. Not all proteins are the same,  as far as meat vs. protein shakes, it turns out science has now shown (reference?) that plant based proteins are not interchangeable with animal based proteins. Your body can’t quite rearrange them the same, and then can’t build the same. Sure you can supplement carnitine, and B12 and folate- but how many supplements and isolated ingredients will it take to realize there’s a reason we historically ate the foods the contained all the ingredients already, no procession or plastic packaging needed.

I understand we’ve all been conditioned to recoil at the thought of the rainforests burning, and I’m not numb to that, I’m simply suggesting it might not be so simple.

Unpopular opinion: Veganism kills animals too.

The whole marketing schema for the past 100-200 years has been geared to selling us unhealthy shit. And we’re in a pickle.  Our taste buds have been shocked into an altered state, and we are no longer able to tell by taste, smell or feel, the actual nutrition value of foods. Most people are eating non-foods and calling it good, then also complaining about deep fatigue, an unsettled sense, restlessness or anxiety.  If we don’t have the materials to build healthy bodies, brains, immune systems and healthy muscles, then we aren’t going to be able to be our healthiest selves and will age and decline faster. We might not even notice it’s a problem because everyone around us is also getting sadder and soggier, this does not have to be this way and we don’t need to simply accept how it is as how it will be.

There are known carcinogens in our food in the US, and there’s been lawsuits going on for decades about it. If you look at what’s allowed in foods in the US and come to find many of the common additives and ingredients are BANNED in other countries because they are known neurotoxins and carcinogens, I hope this makes you pause for a moment and take note. A well known sunscreen just got recalled for containing known cancer causing toxicants. Be alert to everything you are consuming and when, even what you put on your skin counts as absorbing and then needing to process via digestion, liver and emunctories. If you wouldn’t eat it don’t put it on your clothes or skin. I’m also asking you to take a very real look at what you do eat. Is it truly building a healthier you?