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Hello and welcome to the Own Your Health podcast, I'm Cyndi Lynne and I can't wait to help you step into your health power. Today we're going to talk about the fact that it's not just what you eat. In fact, what you eat can have very little impact if your body is not able to digest and use all of the components of what you eat.
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So it's not just what you eat, it's what you process, it's what you assimilate, it's what you can digest. And as we age as well as as we have different types of procedures for people who have had their gallbladder out, or for people who have had other gastric procedures, stomach surgeries, we may not make enough or even all of the enzymes we need to properly break down food.
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So what are digestive enzymes? Digestive enzymes are actually proteins. And these proteins help with the breakdown process of the foods we eat. They help break down fats, proteins, glucose, and they're really needed because our body doesn't use the size molecule that we actually chew up and swallow.
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The food needs to be broken down into smaller and smaller pieces so that we can actually make use of them. In the case of protein as building blocks for our body, in the case of fats, carriers for fat soluble vitamins and other nutrients, our body really needs to use the small broken down pieces of the food we eat.
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And if we're not able to do that, then the food will pass through undigested. So I've heard many clients say as they age, for example, you know, I just can't eat much meat anymore. It feels like it just sits in my stomach.
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And that's not uncommon because especially when it comes to creating the stomach acid we need in order for the enzymes to work, as we age, it becomes more difficult, and I'll repeat that part again because very often people assume that it is the acid in our stomach that breaks down things like proteins, when in fact it's the acid in our stomach that has to change, that has to drop low enough, the acidic level has to drop low enough in order for our body to produce the enzymes for our stomach walls to release the enzymes to digest meat.
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So if that's flagged anything for you, you may be one of those people thinking, oh, wait a minute, we actually need stomach acid in order to produce enzymes or release enzymes that will digest our food.
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What if I take a lot of antacids and what if I don't take antacids and I get a lot of acid reflux? So there's really, there's probably three separate shows wrapped up in this and I may go into it more detail, but I want to give you the overall view now so that you can think about what you're doing and what will help you make more nutritious use of the foods you're currently eating.
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And this is important because if we are eating but we're not nourished, we'll continue to be hungry. Our body sends signals. It wants fats, it wants proteins, it probably wants carbohydrates.
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If you're on, on the traditional American diet, it sends those messages because it doesn't feel it's getting what it needs. And yet we eat and we eat. The key is to process, to digest, to absorb what we eat.
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So I have a couple of recommendations that we can talk about. One of them is fairly simple. We can take digestive enzymes. They're very, they are these broken down pieces of protein and there are specific enzymes that help break down sugars.
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Amylase, for example, that's something that's made in our salivary glands in our mouth. So when we eat carbohydrates or starches, we send a message from the time it comes into our mouth to our body that this is what we're consuming.
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Sugars, carbohydrates go in, amylase gets released. The digestion process starts in our mouth first for carbohydrates. As we chew and swallow, then our stomach has the opportunity to digest proteins.
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And it's not, you know, absolute clean cut line where each of these things happen, but it's how the process works, ideally in flow. So as the, as the food protein specifically enters our stomach, then our stomach wants to, or intends, is intended to release enzymes to help break down those proteins.
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And like I said earlier, in order to do it, it has to have a very acidic environment. If you take antacids and you take them regularly or you take prescription or over the counter medication that prevents the stomach from producing and pumping this acid, then you are not going to release these enzymes and you're not going to be able to adequately digest protein.
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And that's just simply how it works. So if you've been on antacids long term, if you've been on other inhibitors, pepcid, those kinds of things, you may want to think about your digestion, you may want to think about your nutrition, you may want to look at things like muscle mass and are you losing muscle mass?
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You can supplement two things. You can supplement the acid so that if your body is not producing it you can take capsules and they're very safe. Acid sounds scary, but even orange juice is acid.
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Vinegar is acid. You can take supplemental acid with your food that will set up the stomach in order to adequately release the enzymes you need to digest the protein.
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In addition to that, you can take enzymes that help with that, with that breaking down of the protein. Now both of these probably sound a little bit scary and it's probably, you're probably wondering why all of a sudden I'm start starting to recommend that you take drugs.
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And these aren't drugs. These are fairly simple compounds that our body makes or is supposed to make if we haven't short circuited it or if it hasn't kind of died down over time.
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And very often it's simply a process of reinitiating this, of getting enough nutrition so that the body can get started doing this on our own. Being able to stay away from antacids long enough that our body can rebound and start doing this on their own.
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So very often these enzymes or these digestive acids are temporary, they're a bridge to healing, which is ideally what I like to see with most supplements or anything that I recommend. For some people, for example, if you've had your gallbladder removed, then you may always need some support in digesting fats.
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And that's perfectly fine. There's nothing wrong with that if you take something like ox bile and it helps you actually digest those fats so that you can make the best use of that energy and you can make the best use of the fats as a carrier for fat soluble nutrients.
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There are maybe other times where long term is best. I have a couple of clients who are in their mid to late 80s, early 90s. It's pretty safe to say that they're going to be most comfortable and best nourished if they continue to take their digestive enzymes on a daily meal by meal basis.
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But for the most of us, it can be a good bridge to get our digestion back so that we can make changes. And that's one of the things we talk about here, is what are the best changes we can make to own our health. Well, it's hard to eat well if our body's not accustomed to that food and our body doesn't seem to tolerate that food.
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And so this is one of the ways that we can make that bridge, that we can make that transition to eating better, to being better fed from a nutritional standpoint and not being hungry all of the time.
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So I will put a couple examples from my store in the show notes, or you're welcome to give me a quick call and we can talk about what may work for you. So until next week, let's go out and own it.
