After we have eaten a meal -- and often we do this in a hurry,
without much chewing, under a lot of stress, or in the presence
of negative emotions -- we give no thought to what becomes of
our food once it has been swallowed.
We have been led to assume that anything put in the mouth
automatically gets digested flawlessly, is efficiently absorbed
into the body where it nourishes our cells, with the waste
products being eliminated completely by the large intestine.
This vision of efficiency may exist in the best cases but for
most there is many a slip between the table and the toilet. Most
bodies are not optimally efficient at performing all the
required functions, especially after years of poor living
habits, stress, fatigue, and aging.
To the natural hygienist, most disease begins and ends with our
FOOD; most of our healing efforts are focused on improving the
digestion process. Digestion means chemically changing the foods
we eat into substances that can pass into the blood stream and
circulate through the body where nutrition is used for bodily
functions.
Our bodies use nutritional substances for fuel, for repair and
rebuilding, and to conduct an incredibly complex biochemistry.
Scientists are still busily engaged in trying to understand the
chemical mysteries of our bodies.
But as bewildering as the chemistry of life is, the chemistry of
digestion itself is actually a relatively simple process, and
one doctors have had a fairly good understanding of for many
decades.
Though relatively straightforward, a lot can and does go wrong
resulting in digestion problems.
The body breaks down foods with a series of different enzymes
that are mixed with food at various points as it passes from
mouth to stomach to small intestine.
An enzyme is a large, complex molecule that has the ability to
chemically change other large, complex molecules without being
changed itself. Digestive enzymes perform relatively simple
functions--breaking large molecules into smaller parts that can
dissolve in water.
Digestion starts in the mouth when food is mixed with ptyalin,
an enzyme secreted by the salivary glands. Ptyalin converts
insoluble starches into simple sugars.
If the digestion of starchy foods is impaired, the body is less
able to extract the energy contained in our foods, while far
worse from the point of view of the genesis of diseases,
undigested starches pass through the stomach and into the gut
where they ferment and thereby create an additional toxic burden
for the liver to process. And fermenting starches also create
gas.
As we chew our food it gets mixed with saliva; as we continue to
chew the starches in the food are converted into sugar. There is
a very simple experiment you can conduct to prove to yourself
how this works. Get a plain piece of bread, no jam, no butter,
plain, and without swallowing it or allowing much of it to pass
down the throat, begin to chew it until it seems to literally
dissolve.
Ptyalin works fast in our mouths so you may be surprised at how
sweet the taste gets. As important as chewing is, very few
people actually make an effort to consciously chew their food.
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