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Spotlight: Greatest Kept Strategies To Healthy Aging – Healthy Digestion: The Key To A Healthy You - Purity Products

Monday, January 24, 2011

Today’s topic: Healthy Digestion: The Essential to a Healthy You

The correct digestion from the foods you eat and the beverages you drink requires the integrated cooperation of vastly complex chemical and physical machinery. Only when each element is operating efficiently can your food be converted into your good well being. It is amazing how integral correct digestive perform is to well being general. Optimizing digestive perform impacts the well being of so many other systems throughout the body. We all know the saying, “You are what you eat!” This is indeed true as digestive well being is the essential to general wellness.

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As one thinks about this link, it makes sense. After all, the digestive tract, stretching from the mouth to the rectum, is a major website of contact using the outside world. Our food, toxins, microbes and other environmental substances all enter our system through the digestive tract. This system plays a critical role as an immune barrier in two major ways. Firstly, it acts as being a structural barrier merely by keeping poor issues out and good issues in, only allowing issues to pass through for specific reasons. Second, it’s a major element of our immune system and the initial line of defense for our bodies. Main immune structures and immunoglobulins reside in the digestive tract or are manufactured there. These elements play an important role in sustaining our general immune defenses. Therefore the dual role played by the digestive tract, by acting as being a physical barrier and an immunological barrier, is critical to our well being. Given this crucial perform, it’s easy to see how the well being from the digestive tract can impact so many other areas throughout the body.

Now that we understand the significance of digestive well being, let’s look at how we can greatest maintain it. To be able to do that, we need to explore the perform from the numerous elements of this system. Digestion literally begins using the sight and smell of food. These senses initiate the production of enzymes in the mouth that prepare for that arrival of food and to start the process of breaking foods straight down. Needless to say, chewing is a critically important step as this permits the salivary enzymes to start acting on the food. From here, the food moves straight down through the esophagus and in to the stomach.

Stomach

The stomach mixes food using the acid and enzymes it adds to what you’ve eaten; the acid partially dissolves large food particles into much more compact ones and the enzymes start the digestion of those more compact fat and protein particles. Together with stomach acid, pepsin plays an important role by breaking straight down proteins into more compact particles known as peptides.

Small Intestine

The small intestine is where most food digestion and nutrient absorption occur. Most food digestion happens in the upper small intestine and most from the absorption from the individual vitamins happens in its lower regions. Anything remaining right after traveling straight down the length from the small intestine goes in to the large intestine for a different type of processing prior to being expelled in the stool.

Pancreatic Enzymes

Meals leaving the stomach stimulates the pancreas to send a package of digestive enzymes to the small intestine where they join the bile from the gallbladder. Together these enzymes can digest just about something we’re likely to eat except fiber. They serve to further break straight down fats, carbohydrates and proteins into their elements and vitamins for assimilation. But there’s a catch – all of the digesting compounds sent to the small intestine could digest our pancreas and gall bladder, so they are initially sent in inactive forms. Once they arrive, the small intestine releases a “master enzyme” that activates all of the others and will get digestion truly rolling.

Bicarbonate

There’s another catch – all that stomach acid could deactivate the enzymes. To prevent this, the pancreas sends together with its enzymes some bicarbonate. This neutralizes the excess acidity and serves to protect the enzymes and lining from the small intestine from stomach acids. The small intestine itself does its part by covering its inner lining with a layer of bicarbonate-rich mucus.

Water

In order for that digestive process to perform smoothly, water is a necessary cofactor. Copious quantities of water are required to keep everything dissolved. This water comes from the beverages we drink during meals and snacks and out of your blood. A number of cups of water are moved out of your circulation into your digestive tract with each meal or snack. Although in younger people the hydration from the circulation is maintained by the entry of water from other parts from the body, studies published lately in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition and the Journal of Applied Physiology found that in older adults the body surrenders less of its total water to the circulation, increasing the risk for bouts of dehydration right after meals

The Colon

Your large intestine, or colon, is required to perform one major and essential task above all others – retrieve back in to the body the water that has been added to your food by your saliva and digestive secretions. This water was taken out of your bloodstream (about 1 to 2 cups per meal) and added to the material in your alimentary tract (the “digesta”) to help your body digest food and absorb its vitamins relatively rapidly and, for that most part, extremely efficiently. However, if that water is merely lost through your stool you would dehydrate extremely rapidly a few hours right after each meal – definitely not a wholesome outcome!

The cells lining the colon are responsible for recapturing the water and restoring it to your blood. Usually they are extremely efficient. And, like anybody else, these tough workers need to be fed. Here’s something you probably don’t know: Unlike just about each other cell in our body, the cells lining our colon are not fed through the bloodstream. They get their nutrition directly from whatever will get to them from the small intestine – the leftovers from the digestive process. If they are undernourished, they can't operate successfully. This leads to abnormal stools and inefficient digestive perform.

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Recently, the colon has also been recognized as being a major immune organ. It contributes to general immunity by functioning as the reservoir for wholesome (and unfortunately, unhealthy) bacteria and yeast. Numerous studies shine light on the positive well being benefits associated with wholesome gut ecology and adequate numbers and strains of probiotic organisms. Likewise, the chronic presence of unhealthy bacteria and yeast lead to unhealthy digestive perform and detrimental effects on immune functioning. Sustaining wholesome gut ecology by supporting colon well being is necessary for our well-being.

Our colon depends on two major elements to keep it wholesome:
A wholesome stability of probiotic organisms, as the intestines, particularly the colon, are where the majority of these beneficial organisms reside, and
Sufficient quantities of fiber in the diet. This ought to be in the form of both soluble and insoluble fibers.

Changes with Age

Research suggests that this entire process might work less and less nicely as we get older. And needless to say there’s no justice – this age effect doesn’t mean we can eat much more with out gaining as much weight; it means that as we age the stability between what we eat, what we absorb and what our body needs grows increasingly out of whack. Therefore, with age it becomes much more necessary to ensure that our digestive tracts perform at an optimal level. This often requires nutritional support.

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