Function and Physiology

Talking to Clients:
They may have been told that what they eat has nothing to do with
how they feel. And when you connect what they’re experiencing with what you know about their
body, you’ve made a connection — built a bridge

• Helping client’s internal organs heal and regenerate
• Diet alone will not do it
• The small intestine is most affected by Celiac Disease
  

Our major functions in the digestive system happen in a series of integrated steps. Those
steps include (and write this down because you’re going to want to come back to it later):
● Ingestion
● Mechanical processing
● Digestion
● Secretion
● Absorption
● Excretion

Ingestion Process
Ingestion occurs when materials enter the digestive tract via the mouth. This is an active
process. It involves, or should involve conscious choice and decision-making. Ingestion is the
stage of functional digestion that I know we already all pay a lot of attention to. We bring the
food being consumed and the practice of consuming food to personal and global consciousness.

Mechanical Process
Mechanical processing is the crushing and tearing of food that makes it easier to
mobilize through and along the digestive tract. We discussed this a bit last week, but not through
the lens of the FUNCTION of the mechanical processing. The Function of mechanical processing
is to increase the surface area of the food by breaking it down. This makes the food particles
more susceptible to enzyme reach or activity, some might call it more accessible to enzyme
attack.

Liquid foods — whether they be soda or green juice — do not need much mechanical
processing. Solid foods, like kale salad or sashimi do.
Examples of mechanical processing that we touched upon in our anatomy section were:
● Shearing and mashing with the teeth.
● Compaction and squashing with the tongue.
● Peristalsis in the esophagus.
● Swirling, mixing and churning in the stomach and the intestines.
Those are all mechanical processes. They require the use of muscles.

Digestion Function
The third function is Digestion and it refers to the chemical as opposed to the mechanical breakdown of food. Remember we have both the chemical and the mechanical happening at once in the digestive process, at nearly every stage.

Chemical Function
The chemical breakdown is what actually splits the food molecules into the small organic fragments that are suitable for digestion. This is a really important point that we’re going to come back to later with regards to the digestive system and its response to gluten and casein, so put your listening ears on in high fidelity for a moment.

• Simple molecules in food — such as the glucose and amino acids and fatty acids that we
  spoke about in our anatomy section — can be absorbed into the bloodstream intact.
• BUT molecules the size of proteins or peptides, polysaccharides (which are long chains of sugars) and
  triglycerides (which are branched fats attached to a glycerol molecule) CANNOT be absorbed
  into the bloodstream intact — at least not without causing problems

In other words, the molecules from your food must be chemically disassembled by digestive enzymes in order for absorption (one of our coming functions) to take place.

So the starches or sugars from a potato, for example, are of absolutely no nutritional value until the enzymes in the mouth and small intestine (where carbohydrate digestion happens), have broken them down into simple sugars that the body can absorb and distribute to the cells (along with some help from some other hormones and enzymatic friends).

The next functional step is Secretion. It’s the release of several substances from the
digestive tract and glandular organs. The substances, that are secreted, include:
● Water
● Acids
● Enzymes
● Buffers
● Salts

• Water is a component of most foods we eat. Of course, it’s more abundant in plant foods and particularly in raw plant foods.
• Enzymes are those proteins that act like keys that we just discussed and I’m going to show you a video about those so you can see just how they work.
• Buffers are the compounds that stabilize that pH balance that we also hear so much about in terms of acidity and alkalinity.
• Salts here are referring to substances like bile salts — which are secreted by your liver and gallbladder —
• Absorption is the functional phase where those digested molecules, electrolytes, vitamins and water cross into the interstitial fluid of the digestive tract.

Absorption
Absorption is when things move from the outside world of the tube inside of you (that hole within the doughnut), and keep traveling through that tube into the bloodstream (the doughnut itself). Getting absorbed into you, into your cells.

What’s the major organ of absorption? It’s the small intestine.

And the blood is continuously washing the exterior of the small intestine so that it can make more room for more nutrients — it sweeps those nutrients or particles away to the liver (by way of the hepatic portal vein) for cleansing and cleaning.

Nutrients are absorbed in one of three ways:
● via simple diffusion (like the fatty acids that just pass through freely)
● facilitated diffusion (such as the water-soluble vitamins that hitchhike onto a carrier to get transported into the blood)
● or active transport for the glucose and amino acid molecules that require some energy for that facilitated diffusion to take place

• Electrolytes are actually the minerals, sodium, potassium and chloride.
• Electrolytes can change when the level of water in the body changes, which is what happens when we sweat. This is why athletes need to refuel their electrolytes.

*Do you know what the best, most natural source of electrolytes comes from? That’s right,
it’s coconut water.*

Excretion Process:
Excretion, is, of course, the removal of waste products — the stuff we don’t need. And this removal happens through defecation in the form of feces or poop! Excretion or elimination is your body’s way of cleaning up!

Basic Body Analysis Tools:

• Food
• Mood
• Poop