Stomach Issues? Solve Digestion & Constipation by Doing This
Digestion is a process by which food is broken down into smaller pieces so that the body can use these nutrients to build and nourish cells, which provides energy.
As William Beaumont and Claude Bernard first discovered 150 years ago, digestion involves a chemical breakdown of the macronutrients (protein, carbohydrates, and fats) in foods and beverages into smaller and smaller nutrients that the body can absorb, assimilate, and utilize.
The digestive system is made up of the digestive tract, which consists of a long tube of organs that runs from the mouth to the anus—there’s the A word again—and includes the esophagus, stomach, small intestine, and large intestine. While we’re talking about what’s inside the gut, we might as well add the liver, gall bladder, and pancreas, which produce important secretions for digestion that drain into the small intestine. The digestive tract in an adult is about 30 feet long, or the length of a ten-yard sideline marker used on the gridiron. Think about how long your intestine is the next time you watch an NFL umpire stretch the “chains” to see if the team on offense gained enough yardage to earn another first down.
Digestion begins the instant you take a bite of an apple or lift a forkful of food into your mouth, even though digestive secretions can begin when you smell dinner being prepared in the kitchen. Like the choreographed chaos that ensues after a quarterback yells “Hut” to start a play, all sorts of physiological things happen when you begin chewing on food. Saliva, or spit, charges out of its three-point stance and floods the mouth when the salivary glands (located under the tongue and near the lower jaw) begin producing saliva. Saliva moistens food so that it will be easier to swallow and contains a digestive enzyme called ptylin, which is a salivary amylase. Ptylin gets to work breaking down the carbohydrates, or starches and sugars, in each bite of food.
One of the important functions of the mouth is chewing because chewing mashes the food into a soft mass that can be swallowed into the esophagus and travel on to the stomach. Movements by the tongue and mouth push the food to the back of the throat, where a flexible flap called the epiglottis closes over the trachea to ensure the food enters the esophagus and not the windpipe to prevent choking. As you can see, just the act of chewing and swallowing a bite of food is an amazing physiological process.
Down Time
Once chewed food enters the esophagus, wavelike contractions known as peristalsis push the food down through the esophagus to the stomach. A muscular ring called the lower esophageal sphincter allows food to enter the stomach. Then the lower esophageal sphincter squeezes shut to prevent food and fluid from going back up into the esophagus.
With age, stress, or poor physical condition, however, the lower esophageal sphincter can weaken, allowing food and acid to back up the hatch. Result: heartburn and acid reflux. Left untreated, acid reflux can lead to ulcers and bleeding of the esophagus as well as increase the risk of developing cancer of the esophagus.
This juncture where the esophagus and the stomach meet is where digestive distress usually rears its ugly head. Heartburn and acid reflux are quintessential American digestive disorders that have made over-the-counter antacid products like Tums, Rolaids, Pepto-Bismol, and Alka-Seltzer into household names and cloying jingles like “plop, plop, fizz, fizz, oh what a relief it is” impossible to get out of our cluttered minds. According to the latest government statistics, 25 million suffer from heartburn daily, while more than 60 million American adults endure occasional occurrences of heartburn. Men and women are affected equally, but the incidence of heartburn increases after age 40.
That’s not good news for a nation that loves to celebrate every occasion with food—and lots of it. From football weekends to festive, holiday dinners, we commemorate life’s richest moments—and even life’s worst times—with the mouth, tongue, and stomach. The problem is that we are indulging rich, processed, fatty foods six days a week and twice on Sunday while washing everything down with generous amounts of soda, caffeine, and alcohol. Maybe a glass of pasteurized milk and chocolate chip cookies for dessert, for all I know.
If the lower esophageal sphincter weakens for some reason, as it sometimes does with those who overeat, ferocious stomach acids can rise into the esophagus, resulting in a burning sensation behind the breastbone lasting from a few minutes to several hours. That’s why heartburn has nothing to do with the heart, even though many experience a quite-noticeable burning sensation in the cardiovascular area. The inflammation or irritation can feel like dancing flames in the upper chest. Some say that when they lie down it feels like lava is eroding their tonsils.
For those fortunate enough not to deal with heartburn or acid reflux, let’s continue to follow the food as the softened mass reaches the stomach, the J-shaped organ that has three functions. The stomach has three tasks:
store the swallowed food and liquids
mix the food and liquids with digestive juices produced by the stomach
and slowly empty its contents into the small intestine
A normal stomach can hold three pints of food or 24 ounces of food, which is a large plate of food. Only a few substances, like water and alcohol, can be absorbed directly by the stomach; the rest must undergo the “wash-and-spin” cycle that the stomach’s known for. The stomach’s strong muscular walls chum the food with acids and enzymes, breaking it into smaller pieces and eventually a semi-liquid form called chyme. About four hours after eating a meal, the chyme is released a little bit at a time through the pyloric sphincter, a thickened muscular ring between the stomach and the small intestine.
More digestion and absorption of food happens in the small intestine, which extends to about 20 feet of length, or two-thirds of the entire digestive system. The small intestine’s twisting tubes occupy most of the lower abdomen between the stomach and the beginning of the large intestine.
You’d think that the heavy lifting in digestion happens in the large intestine, but that’s not the case. Glands in the small intestine’s walls secrete enzymes to finish the breakdown of carbohydrates, fats, and proteins. Any undigested material—like fiber from fruits and vegetables—travels next to the large intestine.
The large intestine forms an upside-down U over the coiled small intestine. With a length of five to six feet—the length of your body!—the large intestine is comprised of three parts: the cecum, the colon, and the rectum. The cecum is a pouch at the beginning of the large intestine that allows food to pass from the small intestine to the large intestine. The middle part, the colon, is where fluids and salts are absorbed as the waste material makes its final journey to the rectum, and it’s also where the feces is stored before being expelled from the body through the anus as a bowel movement.
The storage of feces inside the body—or I should say, the excess storage—is half the reason why The Probiotic Diet needs to be read and followed. When transit time for feces slows to a snail’s pace, your body’s waste stays in the colon longer, where it putrefies and results in toxins entering the bloodstream through the intestinal wall. This can lead to a condition called autointoxification, which can cause everything from headaches to autoimmune disorders.
I’ve long felt that autointoxication is a form of self-poisoning that results in bloating, indigestion, gas, body odor, and a lengthy list of maladies. Colon cancer, the second leading cause of death in the United States, could result from years of autointoxication. Even the traditional medical community recognizes the connection between constipation and serious disease. The Lancet, a prestigious British medical journal, reported that women who are constipated are four times more likely to develop breast cancer.
When the eliminative system of the human body is not in top-notch working order, sluggish and clogged as a kitchen sink full of oatmeal, the digestive tract cannot properly process and eliminate food wastes and toxins.
This virtually guarantees toxic build-up in the colon, which, over time, results in serious illness or chronic degenerative disease. Health statistics show that more North Americans are hospitalized due to intestinal tract illnesses than for any other group of disorders. The medical costs of these diseases are estimated to be $20 billion or more per year, and the bloated market for laxatives, antacids, and antihemmorrhoidals tops $2 billion each year.
The idea that putrefaction of the stools causes diseases such as intestinal autointoxication originated with physicians in ancient Egypt, according to a National Institutes of Health study. The ancient Egyptians believed that a putrefactive principle associated with feces was absorbed into the general circulation, where it acted to produce fever and pus. “The ancient Greeks extended the concept of putrefaction to involve not only the residues of food, but also those of bile, phlegm, and blood, incorporating it into their humoral theory of disease,” the NIH study declared.
Many factors lead to a constipated colon, including a glaring lack of probiotics, which we’ll get into shortly. But let’s face it: autointoxication occurs because Americans have a love affair with crap, as signified by this acronym:
Coffee and cruddy foods
Refined sugar and starches
Alcohol
Processed foods
Autointoxication symptoms can also be extenuated by a lack of exercise, which cuts off lymphatic flow. A good workout has a way of stimulating a good bowel movement, although, in my experience, jumping on a mini-trampoline or rebounder for ten to 20 minutes is the best form of exercise to improve lymphatic flow and speed elimination. A brisk morning walk can also do the trick. President Harry Truman was famous for his “morning constitutional” walks around Lafayette Park next to the White House, accompanied by a single Secret Service agent. (Those simple days are long gone, of course.)
These days, many medications, especially antibiotics, cause constipation. Changing your routine—like traveling to San Francisco from the East Coast—can disrupt normal bowel habits. Not giving the body enough time to let peristalsis work—that series of organized muscle contractions that often occur after eating—is a common route to autointoxication. In the morning, too many people rush out the front door after grabbing a bowl of cereal, topped with pasteurized and homogenized milk. As they start up the car, they feel a slight urge to eliminate, but since they’re running late, they’re too busy to act upon that inclination. And so the seeds of constipation are sown.
We’re Talking Trillions
I hope you were taking notes during Human Digestion 101. Now that you have the basics of digestion down, let me add some technical information that will help you understand better why you need to intentionally add probiotic foods and supplements to your terrain.
Inside your digestive tract, you have trillions of microorganisms swimming around, colonizing every nook and cranny, every millimeter of surface space, from the tip of your tongue to your… well, you know what end I’m talking about. You’ve been living with these microorganisms ever since you were born. “You may have been a sterile, singular being in the womb, but once you entered the birth canal and then the world of nipples and hands and bed sheets, you picked up an ark of microbial handmaidens,” said Jennifer Ackerman, author of Sex Sleep Eat Drink Dream. “Soon the little buggers were everywhere, like words filling a page, in folds of skin, in orifices of nose and ears, and especially in the warm, cozy tunnels of your digestive tract, from mouth to anus.” Breastfed infants have significantly higher amounts of beneficial microbes in their guts than do formula fed infants. This is most likely due to a combination of contact with the mother’s skin and the contents of the breast milk itself.
Our son Samuel didn’t receive the beneficial bacteria that come from intimate contact with the mother and consistent breastfeeding. Samuel had developed a nasty case of eczema by the time we were able to complete the formal adoption arrangements, and his skin didn’t get better until I put him on a probiotic-rich infant formula. Samuel is not alone with his eczema problem: a study at Lund University in Sweden showed that children with only a limited variety of bacteria in their feces after birth often develop eczema by the age of the 18 months.
We know that when Samuel grows up big and strong, his body will consist of 10 trillion cells. To help you put a trillion in perspective—timely, since the politicians in Washington, DC, have no problem running a trillion-dollar deficit these days—here’s a good analogy: you could spend $1 million a day—every day—since the day Jesus Christ was born up to today and still not reach a trillion dollars. (The actual total is $734 billion, give or take a few billion.)
Yes, 10 trillion is an astronomical number, but your gut has ten times the number of microorganisms circulating in your terrain. We call these digestive tract microorganisms “intestinal flora.” Even though flora refers to plants, this term seems to have stuck for these microbial cells inhabiting the gut. Of these trillions and trillions of intestinal “bugs,” it’s been estimated that about 500 different bacterial species are swimming around in your abdominal area. These bacteria make up most of the flora in the colon and 60 percent of the dry mass of feces. Taken together en masse, the total weight of this microbial zoo is between two and three pounds.
These tiny microorganisms are your friends—or at least, most of them should be. “Your intestinal tract is surprisingly smart, versatile, and brain-like,” said author Jennifer Ackerman. “Your resident bacteria play a far larger role in digestion than ever imagined.”
Intestinal flora perform a host of useful functions, such as helping you digest and absorb your food, shore up your immune system, detoxify noxious compounds, and even contribute to the manufacture of essential vitamins that your body needs. All your intestinal flora need is a hospitable environment, where they can flourish, help with digestion, and deal with rogue bacteria roaming around your terrain.
Inside your terrain, however, billions of unfriendly intestinal flora lurk, like bandits crouched behind rocks, waiting to surprise the next pioneer wagon train coming around the bend. These impaired or imbalanced flora can take the form of bacteria, viruses, fungi, and protozoans, and their fingerprints are all over heart disease, allergies and asthma, skin disorders, obesity, irritable bowel syndrome, urinary tract infections—a whole host of acute conditions and chronic diseases. An imbalance of intestinal flora crops up after antibiotic treatments or when a powerful flu bug makes the rounds, resulting in constipation or diarrhea.
This Wild, Wild West scene is apropos to what’s happening in your terrain. At this moment, while you’re reading these words, there’s a white-hat-versus-black-hat standoff on Main Street in Dodge City. Over at the Crystal Palace Saloon, the good, bad, and indifferent bacteria are duking it out like one of those old-time Westerns where wingback chairs are tossed about, bottles of whiskey crash against heads, and haymaker punches are landed.
That’s a good description of the tussle going on every second of your life inside your terrain. Friendly bacteria in your gut are doing their darnedest to keep the bad bacteria in check as each side seeks an upper hand. When the good guys are winning, you should have a balance of 85 percent “white hat” intestinal flora and 15 percent “black hat” organisms in the intestinal tract.
The problem is that our modern lifestyle, with its heavy reliance on antibiotics, consumption of too much sugary foods, drinking too much alcohol and soft drinks, and cavalier attitude about chemical food additives kills off zillions of beneficial bacteria. I wouldn’t be surprised if you could flip that 85:15 ratio on its head for all the millions of Americans experiencing autointoxication or chronic digestive problems like irritable bowel syndrome or Crohn’s disease.
Following the Probiotic Diet will introduce live bacteria cultures into your gut and be a preventive and therapeutic measure to help you keep the balance of intestinal flora in your terrain tipped toward the positive side.
