The Eater's Digest

We all know what happens when we take a bite of something, chew it up, swallow, and repeat until full. Do we really know what happens when the food gets beyond the stomach?

First, it hits the small intestine, where more fluids meet it to aid digestion—bile from the gall bladder, as well as enzymes that can’t exist in the acid environment of the stomach. Absorption also takes place in this area—this means water for making urine (kidneys), fats for energy (liver), sugars for energy and maintenance (pancreas), and vitamins and minerals to the blood for general maintenance.

Next, when all the “good stuff” had been drained and absorbed out of the digested food, the remains move to the large intestine for further gathering, “composting”, and eventually makes an exit. The large intestine is called “large” for two reasons: diameter and length. What you eat today may take 12-24 hours to completely clear your system, most of that time spent sitting in your large intestine (putrefying and becoming more acidic) waiting for the next train out. The constant acidic level and backup of the bowel makes you susceptible to cancers of the “train platform” (bowel, rectum, and colon).

If you don’t eat a good diet consisting of lean meats, lots of fresh fruits and veggies, and fiber, and some sort of water, things get backed up, start clogging, and affect your system all the way back to the starting point—your mouth. When this sort of episode happens in the home bathroom, we call Roto-Rooter® or grab a plunger and start our plumbing workout, but unfortunately we can’t do that with our own bodies.

To employ some Roto-Rooter-like tactics on our own bodies every day to keep them cleaned out and running smoothly, we need to lubricate the system from the inside—this means water in all its forms: drinking, and eating foods rich in water content (meaning produce).

Sometimes, we get a little careless with our drains, and pour grease down them in the form of fats and cholesterol. As in regular plumbing, this will lead to a clog that is really nasty to clean out by hand. In our bodies, the liver acts as the “J-trap” collecting all this fat and cholesterol from the blood, and occasionally needs a good dose of Drano (or in this case, fiber) to clear it. Continual doses of fiber with every meal help ensure a clear J-trap and no fat or cholesterol backups in your body. This is why you should choose your food with care—for every gram of cholesterol and fat consumed, there should be a corresponding amount of fiber consumed as well.

You know that little hole at the top of your sink near the counter edge? That’s called an overflow, and it helps to ensure you don’t overflow your sink onto the floor. Our gall bladders act in this same way by capturing and storing cholesterol (especially from dairy products) when the liver’s backed up and overflowing. The gall bladder then compresses it into “stones” and stores it for times when your cholesterol is low (like low-fat dieting, fasting, or times of famine).

Since we know no famine in this day and age, it’s just more “body clutter” we have to get rid of either through a detox program, or by watching what we eat to prevent this junk from entering the system in the first place. A simple act like adding apples or apple juice to our diet can help dissolve and eliminate these stones from our bodies (through malic acid). Malic acid supplements are also widely available.

The liver itself produces cholesterol, and this is a human biological event. The kind of cholesterol the liver produces is LDL, so it pays to know that your LDL levels are not rising solely because of diet, and also helps to know that there is something one can do about it besides take statins—the liver releases cholesterol into the blood when it senses that your overall cholesterol level is low, and filters it out (or tries to) when the levels are high. You can counteract this event by adding fats of your own (fish oil supplements, high oleic oils, and other “good” fats). Adding “good fats” to replace the body’s own “bad fat” factory is a way to lower your LDL and raise your HDL without succumbing to Big Pharma and all the drug industry has to offer—the trick is knowing how much your body produces, so you can take in enough of your own fats to compensate, and not many people can do that.

Exercise and vitamin B-3 supplements also raise your HDL.

When both the liver AND gall bladder are backed up, the fat gets stored in our bodies: the hips, the abdomen, the thighs, etc. If you clean out (and keep clean) your organs’ fat and cholesterol collections, your body is then forced to burn the stored fat from throughout your body for energy. This means weight loss—slow, continual, sustained, and effortless.

Think of fiber as the “Mario Brothers” of our digestive system.

Our kidneys, on the other hand, serve many purposes: to filter our blood AFTER digestion, to regulate hormones, vitamins, and minerals, and to help control our blood pressure. When we eat foods rich in good nutrients, the kidneys help to make sure the excess is filtered out and sent to the bladder for storage and eventual exit. Sometimes we consume too much salt, sending our kidneys into overdrive trying to get rid of it. Sometimes we consume too much protein, which also sends the kidneys into overdrive, because excess proteins tend to clog up the filters. Too much overdrive for extended periods of time will eventually lead to the formation of stones, or worse—kidney failure.

We must consume plenty of liquids to keep these built-in blood filters working smoothly, and the liquids come from our food and drink. Caffeine, salt, certain salt-bearing foods and drinks, and certain medications have a “diuretic” effect—this means “to remove excess water form the body faster.” How do you know if your body is getting enough water? By the color of the urine—it should be clear. The darker the color, the more dehydrated you are, and need to add more liquid into your diet (preferably through fruits, veggies, and clean, filtered water). The more liquid flowing through the kidneys, the less likely you are to get stone formation and infection.

The toilet will be the biggest, most obvious indicator of whether or not your digestive system is functioning properly: your stools should be big, full, stinky, and sink to the bottom of the toilet, and your urine should be crystal-clear with no odor. If you have “floaters,” then you should consume less grains—the human body was designed to get its energy from fats, not carbohydrates.

A diet rich in fruits, vegetables, lean meats, and water-based beverages (tea, etc.) are all your body really needs to operate correctly. You don’t have any need for dairy products, grains, and most nuts, because they don’t feed your body what it needs—these foods are habits borne from hunter-gatherers getting desperate or lazy. When you think about it, cavemen didn’t exactly have access to cows, wheat fields, or nut trees—they ate plants they could reach, animals they could hunt and kill, and drank water from the streams and lakes. Agrarian Man came up with bread, milk, and other “convenience foods” because of the ease of getting the raw materials, and that’s where our society, genetic code, and biology met their first match and succumbed. Continued manufacture and ingestion of convenience foods keeps on leading us down the path of disease, destruction, and malfunction to the point that we're now able to predict the health of people three generations out.

If you want to have healthy grandkids, start by cleaning up your own act BEFORE you have kids of your own!