You Are What You Eat

You are what you eat. Have you ever wondered if there was any truth behind that cliche. The fact is we’re not only what we eat but also what we digest, absorb, and assimilate. Optimizing our health is really about making our digestion as effective as it can be.

You’ll know your digestion could use some fine tuning if you routinely experience nausea, heartburn, indigestion, constipation, diarrhea, gas, bloating, abdominal distension, or cramping. Poor eating habits, recent antibiotic treatments, or frequent use of antacids may cause your symptoms, prolong them, or actually make them worse.

So, how do we do that fine tuning? Let’s focus on a couple of the basics for digestive health: enzymes and probiotics.

What’s an enzyme?

An enzyme is a substance that plays the role of a go-between during a chemical reaction between two other substances. It often makes the chemical reaction happen faster. Our bodies use enzymes for many purposes, but one of the most important is digestion.

Digestive secretions produced by salivary glands, the stomach, small intestine, and pancreas help to reduce large molecules of carbohydrates, proteins, and fats into smaller ones that can be absorbed.

If we’re not producing enough of these enzymes, we won’t be able to fully digest the food we eat or absorb the nutrients we need in adequate quantities. Incomplete digestion can be a significant contributor to uncomfortable symptoms such as heartburn and bloating.

Enzyme deficiencies

Lactose intolerance, caused by a deficiency of the enzyme that digests sugar in milk, is one of the most common of these. It can produce symptoms such as gas, bloating, cramping, and diarrhea.

Incomplete digestion of proteins may be implicated in conditions as diverse as food allergies and cancer. Partially digested fats alter the water balance in the digestive tract, leading to a type of diarrhea (steatorrhea). If untreated, this can result in dehydration, adverse changes in blood lipids, as well as deficiencies in vitamins A, D, E, and K.

Enzyme deficiencies can result from genetic causes or be a consequence of other diseases. Sometimes considered to be a natural part of aging, they occur frequently and can be created through poor eating habits.

Making the most of enzymes
Start your meal by eating a few mouthfuls of your protein source (meat, poultry, fish, eggs, dairy, legumes) to trigger your stomach to start to produce more of its secretions.

Eat slowly and chew, chew, chew to ensure the enzymes in your saliva are mixed thoroughly with the food you are eating.

Limit beverage consumption during meals to about a 1/2 cup (125 mL) to prevent overfilling your stomach and diluting your digestive secretions. Have something to drink 30 minutes before eating or 60 minutes after your meal.

How to treat
While we can obtain some enzymes from foods that we eat, such as pineapple and vegetable salads, a deficiency in a specific enzyme, or multiple enzymes, will probably require treatment with a supplement. Look for a broad-spectrum supplement that provides support for the digestion of carbohydrates, fats, and proteins.

What are probiotics?

Another basic digestive health practice is the consumption of probiotics, living cells, usually bacteria, that are similar to beneficial bacteria found in our bodies. Carbohydrates that stimulate the growth of probiotic organisms are called prebiotics.

Infections, or the antibiotics we use to treat them, can disrupt the balance of different types of bacteria in our bodies, resulting in dysbiosis, which can alter the way the intestines absorb nutrients and may contribute to bad breath, body odour, bloating, gas, nausea, and constipation.

Dysbiosis

Dysbiosis has been associated with many conditions:

• mood problems such as anxiety and nervousness
• feeling confused or foggy
• chronic digestive problems such as irritable bowel syndrome and inflammatory bowel disease
• immune or neuroimmune disorders (autoimmune disease, allergies, recurrent infections, chronic fatigue syndrome)
• liver dysfunction
• muscle/joint pain
• skin conditions such as eczema and psoriasis

It’s easier to understand how dysbiosis can contribute to so many conditions when you realize how much the gastrointestinal and immune systems interact. Special immune system cells called gut-associated lymphoid tissue (GALT) are actually embedded along the digestive tract. The reactivity of the GALT cells is modulated by probiotics in a beneficial way that reduces the risk of acute and chronic illnesses.

How to treat
Keeping up our levels of beneficial bacteria is easy to do by consuming foods such as yogourt and sauerkraut or through supplementation. If you choose to take a supplement, here is what you should look for:

• a supplement that provides more than one type of micro-organism
• a supplement that guarantees to provide several billion live cells and must therefore be refrigerated
• A few words of caution: taking probiotics at the same time of day as any antibiotic drugs or antimicrobial herbs you have been prescribed may reduce the effectiveness of the probiotics.

If you take any supplements, such as enzymes or probiotics, be sure to follow the manufacturer’s instructions unless otherwise instructed by your health care practitioner.