Settle in... this is going to be a long post.
I have a lot on my mind.
Let me ask you a few questions... What do you know about yourself? I'm not talking about just your likes and dislikes, I mean, what do you know about the body underneath the you-suit? What do you know about how your digestion works, what do you know about your adrenal glands? What do you know about how your neurons fire or what oxidation does to your brain (and what foods and lifestyles cause this oxidation). My old answer was not much... For 32 years I didn't know a thing about myself. Well I knew that Fishfood and Americone Dream were my favorite Ben and Jerry's and I knew if you bought me a slim-jim and a bag of chips you loved me (why yes, my dad always got me "food-prizes" at the store). But I didn't know a thing about my amazing machine, that drives me around every day.
You all know from my first blog what set me out on the paleo trail, around the same time as I discovered paleo I discovered The National Instituteof Whole Health, and in March of last year I started on my road to being a whole health educator.
This is a brief description from their website:
The NIWH organizational mission, in creating this transformational education model, is to invite people into the process of their own healing and self-care. It provides the basis for a new health care modality, Whole Health Education which expands on the context and contents of existing holistic health education programs.
Whole Health Educators and Whole Health Coaches are medical, allied health, wellness and education professionals trained in a Whole Person Health™ model of health education and behavioral change; this model invites individuals to understand how the physical, emotional, nutritional, environmental and spiritual aspects of their lifestyle affect their health and well-being or impact disease states.
I've been going through my classes sort of slow because of all that has been going on in my life (Gareth's return from Afghanistan, Rugby, Opening my own business, moving etc.) however with my timeline for completion too quickly approaches I am delving in and I am confused as to why all of us aren't taught more of this through our lives.
So today you are going to get a little education. (I am very edumacated but if you don't trust what I say PLEASE educate yourself and dedicate 1 night of your tv time to learning about yourself.)
Digestion and a bit about "leaky-gut" syndrome-
Before I started to learn about the body I never ate for a purpose other than I was hungry and what I was eating needed to taste good. I inhaled food (a habit that is still unbroken) and I never cared much about what else I was doing while eating, typically driving down the street or standing in a break room somewhere. I never really understood WHY I was eating. I was told things like consume less calories, eat less fat etc. No diet I tried worked and it wasn’t because I was eating too many calories, it was because I was consuming the wrong things. Things my body (and most bodies) can't use as fuel.
Here is a quick primer... This shit is complicated and I would lose you if I made this much longer so I linked all the terms for you... if you want to understand a word more just click on it.
Carbohydrates need to be hydrolyzed (broken down) to monosaccharides, prior to absorption, by a group of enzymes – maltase, isomaltase, sucrase and lactase. The digestion of carbohydrates starts briefly in the mouth with ptyalin or salivary amylase (saliva), though that is quickly stopped once the bolus(glob of food) goes to the stomach. Most of the digestion of carbohydrates takes place mostly in the small intestines with the help of pancreatic amylase. Some heavier starches aren’t absorbed until the large intestine, requiring more time for break down.
Protein digestion takes place in the stomach, the stomach is designed to break down high concentrated protein (that of animal meat) pepsinogen is converted to pepsin by hydrochloric acid, and continued by the enzymes trypsin, chymotrypsin and carboxypolypeptidase in the small intestine. Before absorption in the small intestine most proteins are already reduced to single amino acid or several amino acids.
Fats stimulate the release of Cholecystokinin from intestinal epithelium in response to fats and causes the release of bile salts from the gall bladder and lipase from the pancrease into the small intestine. The bile emulsifies, all the fats in the intestines. The emulsified fats are then split by enzymes pancreatic lipase and enteric lipase into fatty acids and glycerol. At this point, the fats can be absorbed through the intestinal mucosa.
A little side note. Carbohydrates are really heavy and your body only needs so many (and that number is not very high) for survival. (If your body needs more carbohydrates for fuel your body will make them from protein and fat... AMAZING!) When we get too many carbohydrates our body turns them into fats because fats are easier to store... seems to me that our body likes fats more than carbohydrates, so remind me again why you are on a low-fat diet? (expect a post on fat pretty soon.)
The biggest thing that sticks out to me from digestion (which you got a tiny fraction of) is our stomachs are designed to break down high concentrated proteins, that of animal meat (this is important to know because there are a lot of proteins that our body can't completely break down, see "leaky-gut" syndrome below). Nothing else is processed in the stomach accept for protein. So do you think protein is an important part of staying satiated? (paleo recommendations... 1 gram of protein for every pound of body weight you have.)
“Leaky-Gut Syndrome”. This is actually a subject that I have been looking into quite a bit. In the “paleo” world people like Robb Wolf and Mark Scisson make claims that eating “the original human diet” can reverse and keep you from auto-immunedisorders, cure diabetes and keep you from getting cancer. The reason why is because eating a “paleo” diet wipes out “Leaky-Gut Syndrome”.
Here is some of the science that I have learned about this whole process…(read Robb Wolf's book, "the Paleo Solution The Original Human Diet" better yet, listen to his pod cast, it's amazing and free.)
Certain foods contain lectins, and lectins are not broken down in the normal digestive process. This leaves large, intact proteins in the intestines. There are certain foods that contain proteins with large amounts of the amino acid proline, making very difficult to digest.
Making the problem worse some foods that are commonly consumed contain proteaseinhibitors, which further block the digestion of lectins. Lectins find receptors to attach to in the intestinal lumen and are transported INTACT through the intestinal lining. This allows the lectins to infiltrate our bodies. Once in the blood stream our bodies think these lectins are either bacteria, viruses or parasites and our body goes into attack mode. When our bodies make antibodies to combate the lectins, the antibodies are very specific to the shape of the foreign protein, but unfortunately these proteins often tend to look like proteins already in our bodies.
If the lectins look like the protein of a betta cell in your pancreas, it could lead to the body fighting your pancreas, which could lead to damage and destruction of the pancreas and thus type 1 diabetes. If the lectins look like the proteins found in the myelin sheath of the brain, this could easily lead to multiple sclerosis.
In addition when the larger lectin proteins squeeze their larger girth through the tiny microvilli, they damage the intestinal lining. This allows other proteins, and really any other content from the intestines, to make it out of the gut and into the blood stream (which causes more damage and inflammation, there will be a post on that soon too).
This is a syndrome that many American’s are facing every day… it can lead to irritable bowl syndrome, lupus, Infertility, Autism, Depression, Rhumatoid Arthritis and much more.
It seems to me that without proper nutrition our bodies can’t function correctly and proper nutrition is the foods that our bodies digest and assimilate properly... Real food... meat, fruit, veggies, nuts, seeds and good fats (almond, coconut, olive, avocado to name a few) We are machines and our food is the fuel on which our machine runs.
