Breaking Down Digestion
Did you know that your digestive tract is home to the largest part of your immune system? On today’s episode, join Bob Gilpatrick and Rollie Culp as they break down the digestive system and how it protects our bodies and helps produce the energy we need to stay on our A game.
They also share some of the reasons why indigestion starts to happen as we get older and how to keep your digestive system healthy and performing at optimal levels. Learn what foods to eat and which to avoid, and some of the common misconceptions people have about antacids and acid reflux that can actually make indigestion worse.
Inform yourself for your health and get ready to Live Forever Young.
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Breaking Down Digestion
Increase Digestion, Increase Energy
Here we are post-Lightning, having won their second straight Stanley Cup. That's right and we are celebrating still because we were in Tampa Bay and that's something we've come accustomed to. It's great to be here.
Now that the Lightning has that second cup securely in hand, we've changed our attention to the Tampa Bay Rays. We're tied for first place with the Boston Red Sox. The Red Sox will be coming to town.
We'll have a little in-town Boston visit that will just spank them while they’re there. Similarly, you're going to have football season start and the Super Bowl champion Tampa Bay Buccaneers will begin their quest for their second straight championship. They're going to play the team from Boston, also known as the New England Patriots.
It'll be a meeting of Tom Brady with the former Bill Belichick coach. It's going to be one for the ages. It's no coincidence that these champion athletes are here close by in the morphic field of the Boomers Forever Young Superstar Nutrition Company. The fact that they're in the same city helps them perform better.
I could say it's something like an energy bubble. It's what we all feed into. We're going to talk about how to increase your energy by improving your digestion. It's easy to do. You got to actually think about it. Most people don't think about what they're doing when they're eating and that's part of the problem. We'll get to that.
Why would we want to do this? It's because so many people have trouble with their digestion. People eat their meals and afterward they don't feel very good. They have gastric reflux, they have bloating and it can carry on into the night it can even cause trouble sleeping. A lot of people show up at the doctor complaining of problems with digestion. We're going to talk about what we can do about that.
We're using some common sense but also some more sophisticated knowledge about how parts of the digestive system work. They can make it so you'll be someone who has good digestion, does not have any of the problems that people get who have poor digestion, including things like allergies and bloating and leaky gut.
You were talking about sleeping too, how it affects when you're sleeping. I know a couple of people, one of them lives here in town. She's got to sleep sitting up because she's got a bad problem. When she lays down, all the issues with digestion and the esophageal flux come into play.
Increasing Digestion: Someone with good digestion doesn't have any of the problems that people who have poor digestion get, including allergies, bloating, and leaky gut.
One of the things is when you eat. Many people will eat way too late at night and they'll eat snacks right before they go to bed, which you don't want to do. You want to eat your meal at 6:00, 7:00, 8:00. If you're going to bed at 10:00 or 11:00, your food will be mostly digested by then. You can avoid this up all night in a sitting position.
It’s hard when you want that ice cream before you go to bed. I guess you do that earlier. You get a little bit earlier, don't need a whole bunch of ice cream. Use the emotional freedom technique to help break your addiction to ice cream at nighttime. It's not necessarily an addiction. It's a treat. Anyway, you're right. We can always tap on that. We can work on that. You’re right, Bob.
If it keeps you up at night, it's an addiction. Digestion starts before people eat a meal. Just saying, "Let's go get some dinner or let's start making dinner," already you start to produce digestive enzymes in your mouth. Certainly, as you're cooking and you begin to smell the food, you're making digestive enzymes in your mouth.
When you put the food in your mouth, it already begins to digest it. You have to make sure that you chew really well so that the food has an opportunity to partly digest because of the enzymes that are in your mouth. A good majority of your digestion happens in your mouth. If you're gulping your food and not chewing it or if you're drinking a shake or a smoothie, for example, you are not allowing it to sit in your mouth at all. It's making it much harder for you to digest that food.
Your mom probably yelled at you, "Chew your food. Slow down." It sounds cliché, but it's one of those things that's extremely important because it's your pre-digestive period here. Once they get the mouth saliva going, you got the mastication and you're getting ready to eat and chew. That's a big part of it. Most people, if you're eating something, you’re in the car, you're on the go, processed food, which is something bad and we'll get to that later, but if you're shoving that in your mouth, it's horrible.
It’s not properly digested and a lot of people's terrains of their mouth is not conducive for digestion because there are also good bacteria in your mouth that digest food. If your mouth is overrun by bad bacteria and you have gingivitis, it makes it more difficult to digest your food. A good practice for people is to do what's called oil pulling. You can get coconut oil and put it into your mouth when you wake up in the morning. Swish it around and keep it in your mouth for as long as you can.
Do something else while you're swishing the coconut oil like shave, whatever, iron your shirt, whatever you're going to do and spit this out and rinse your mouth well. There are other things you can do because now you're going to have a lot of this bad bacteria that's been pulled up out of your gum. You can use hydrogen peroxide to put into your mouth or we have a product called Hydrolite, which will put one drop onto your tongue and it'll kill all the bacteria.
Once you kill all the bacteria, you have a fresh palette and that's good to be cleaned, but you want to recultivate it. What I do is I take a pinch of our powered Probiotics, put it into my mouth and let the saliva dissolve it. I swish it all around and then swallow that. You never want to swallow the oil that you've been doing oil pulling with because now all those bad bacteria are going to end up in your stomach.
That's how you want to take care of your mouth and, of course, flossing, water pick and brushing. All of that is critically important as well. You want your mouth to be a great shape to help with your digestion.
It's funny that you say your mouth. We were talking to somebody and he was having an issue with his mouth and it ended up giving them some issues with his cardiac system. You don't realize how much your mouth has to do with your whole-body health. Clean your toothbrushes.
The second part of that digestion is the food now arrives in your stomach, hopefully partly digested, chewing it. Now in your stomach, you're going to be digesting the food further with digestive enzymes, some of which will digest fat and proteins and carbohydrates. You're also going to have stomach acid that's going to be produced to break down the food.
Before you begin to release that, what's called chyme, which is the liquid now that's in your stomach, you are going to release it to your small intestine. Before you do, you're going to alkalize it with pancreatic enzymes so it doesn't arrive in your small intestine too acidic and you're going to cough it back up. If it arrives too acidic, your small intestine will reject it. That's this gastric reflux that we’re talking about.
The first one we were talking about, which was gastric reflux, in this step is where they have an issue but a lot of people think that the issue is that they're making too much acid, especially when you get older because as you get older, you make less and less digestive enzymes to break the foods down.
That's why like people in their late ‘30s and ‘40s that didn't have stomach issues before, they start eating things. They have gas and bloating. Reflux, it starts happening then because that's naturally when the amount of enzymes you're making inherently in your body goes down. We've got a lot of things that you can buy that are actually trying to pump down the amount of acid you make from the drug store.
That's actually can sometimes make things worse because the real thing here is you might need more of the enzymes and you're trying to push the acid that may help break it down and the enzymes down.
Increasing Digestion: Digestion starts before people eat a meal. As you cook and smell the food, you start to produce digestive enzymes in your mouth.
When you take acid-reducing products, it's going to make your digestion even more difficult. The other thing you want to be sure to avoid is drinking lots of water, particularly alkaline water, with your meals because you're now diluting your stomach acid and making digestion more difficult.
The alkalinity will knock out the acidity, so you got to be careful with that. It's something people don't think about. The next step from there is you're going to release that chyme into your small intestine, where almost all of your absorption of nutrients occurs in your small intestine. You have these little hair-like structures called villi, which is where the nutrients are absorbed. The villi are very active and work well when you're younger.
As you start to age, 40 years old, 50 years old, those villi don't work as well. They get coated over with a plaque that makes it hard for absorption. We like to help people with that issue. There's a compound in our sprouted barley seeds that helps to cleanse away that plaque. They'll be restored. The villi will be restored at that point. Now you can have absorption of nutrients as if you were a younger person. Even at a very old age, people can absorb their nutrients like a young person using this technique.
A lot of the people that have had stomach issues like the standard IBS and those types of things that have had issues like that have used the barley. They've actually had a lot of relief because it’s going at those villi, which is part of the reason they can't absorb anything. It's hard to move through and break anything down and use the nutrients from.
It helps to solve a lot of malnourishing issues as well because you can eat stuff and not absorb any of the nutrients because your villi are coated over. You might be taking some of the best vitamins, but if you can't absorb vitamins, they're not going to do any good. By cleansing the villi with the Gladiator Heirloom Barley, that's going to help to give you more nutrition, absorption and a healthier digestive system at the same time.
The other thing you know about your small intestine is not only the villi but the balance of bacteria in your small intestine because they're the bacteria that's in your small intestine helps with digestion. If you have an overgrowth of bad bacteria in your small intestine, you're going to be really sick. They call this SIBO, Small Intestine Bacterial Overgrowth, and what they mean it's overgrowth of the bad bacteria. People can be very sick with this syndrome.
Taking good bacteria by mouth, it colonizes your mouth and helps colonize your stomach with good bacteria, which helps to kill pathogens that come in through your food. Also, it colonizes both your small and large intestine so that the good bacteria will keep the bad bacteria colonies down, so you don't get things like this bad bacterial overgrowth.
A lot of the people that call, they say they have issues. It's funny, but I've had people who talk who have toe funguses that won't go away and they have things like that. That's something that I've seen as a symptom of candida overgrowth because it's got nowhere else to go. He's got so much overgrowth in the gut that it starts expressing itself in other ways.
The other thing that happens in the small intestine is your gallbladder comes into play, where it begins to release bile into the small intestine to help with the digestion of fats. You also want to tend closely to your gallbladder. The best way to tend to your gallbladder is through your diet. People's gallbladders will become diseased from eating too many processed foods, too much sugar, too many foods with toxins in them, gliotoxins and the like.
You want to be sure that your gallbladder is healthy enough to participate in digestion. Otherwise, when you can't digest fats very well, you feel sick or nauseous. That's why people don't feel good when they're having trouble with their gallbladder because they're not digesting their fats. It tends to go through you and create diarrhea, bloating, pain and upset.
A lot of people think the gallbladder is something you can live without because we don't use it the way we used to, but it's one of the things that a lot of people I've heard they get it taken out and they have worse problems than they had before because they're missing that piece of the puzzle in their digestive system.
If you're missing the gallbladder, you want to pay even closer attention to using digestive enzymes. You can take digestive enzymes from a pill form with your meals. If you do not have a gallbladder, you might want to take a little more digestive enzymes, particularly the type that digest your fat. Once you've done absorption of nutrients. The bacteria have interacted with your chyme. It can now move into your large intestine, where a whole separate set of reactions are going to occur.
You have lots of good bacteria and some bad bacteria in your large intestine. Between your large and small intestine, you have ten times as many bacteria as you have human cells. Even though we are considered to be human beings, we have human DNA, but we also have ten times as many bacterial cells as we have human cells.
More bacterial cells, but the human cells have more robust DNA. You want to pay attention to your gut bacteria all the time. You want to make sure you're taking good bacteria in because it helps to prevent leaky gut. It also creates your metabolites.
We talked about in our last show what's with leaky gut. We talked about how the gut itself has to be tight so that it doesn't let any of the toxins out. The cells are tight together without an alleyway for things to leak out and having good bacteria is the key to that. In your large intestine, the good bacteria are going to interact with components of the food that you ate, particularly fiber. It's going to create metabolites.
The plant foods that you ate have components in them called polyphenols that are going to activate the genome of these bacteria in your large intestine, which in turn creates metabolites that activate the human genome. This is how you express the instructions from your DNA for the purpose of making all the proteins that we need.
A healthy balance in your large intestine and the right amount of fiber is very critical. What we like to do is give people a powdered probiotic, which is already made into metabolites.
We call them dumb for you metabolites because that's the process you're trying to get to by taking in regular probiotics and undigestible fiber or prebiotics, as a lot of people call them. Combining those two in the gut makes the metabolites. The process we put ours through, those metabolites are already in there. You get to skip a process of that.
Increasing Digestion: A good majority of your digestion happens in your mouth. If you're just shoving food in, it’s doesn’t get properly digested.
Even somebody who does not have a large intestine can absorb those metabolites in their small intestine and have them available for their metabolic pathways. People who've had issues and had that gone, they have the actual ability to create it even though there's nowhere to create it because it comes in the bottle already.
That's pretty much it, Raleigh, about the outline of digestion. Pay attention to the bacterial colonies in your mouth. Make sure your mouth is clean and you don't have any bacterial infection in your mouth or gingivitis. Pay attention to the digestion in your stomach, to the digestion and absorption in your small intestine, and to the creation of metabolites and keeping your large intestines sealed, so you don't end up with a leaky gut.
One of the easiest ways to literally think about what you're eating. The processed foods, the sugars, all those things that you know you probably shouldn't be eating, the trans fats, those are all causing a lot of this issue. Look for a good diet. It's easy to say but it's hard to do, but that is one of the things that is the main cause. Sixty percent of the diet we eat as the standard American diet are all these things I named off that we shouldn't be eating. Let's look a little bit deeper.
Rollie, I think that's it.
Thanks very much for being with us and thank you for reading.
We'll see you on the next show.
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