4 important things that can go wrong during digestion
4 Important Things that can go Wrong During Digestion
This article is Part 3 of the digestion series:
Digestion is a north to south process.
There are many steps in digestion. Each step must be performed correctly, and in the right order, for the system to work.
Let’s recap how your digestion is SUPPOSED to work.
The way digestion *should* work:
Your brain sees food and sends signals to the mouth to produce saliva and the stomach to produce hydrochloric acid.
Your teeth chew the food into a tiny bits and coats them in enzyme rich saliva.
The hydrochloric acid in your stomach converts pepsinogen into pepsin which acts like a meat cleaver on your proteins.
Your stomach churns up the food and coats it in an acid bath, chemically breaking it down further.
Once the food is thoroughly acidic a sphincter opens up and the food gets moved down to the small intestine.
The high acidity triggers the small intestine to secrete protective mucus and two enzymes, Secretin and CCK.
Secretin triggers the pancreas to release bicarbonate to neutralize the pH and pancreatic enzymes to continue carbohydrate breakdown.
CCK triggers the gallbladder to secrete bile to emulsify the fats.
By the time your food has reached the middle portion of the small intestine it has been broken down into tiny, individual molecules.
Millions of villi on the walls of your small intestine wave around like tall grass in a breeze grabbing nutrients out of the watery fluid and transferring them to your bloodstream.
Next the food is moved into the large intestine where water is absorbed back into the body.
Beneficial bacteria eat the insoluble fiber and help convert some nutrients into more a usable form.
Any remaining nutrients are absorbed.
Any remaining fiber is... eliminated.
Whew! Thats a busy day! You can see how each step builds on the last. If one step isn’t performed correctly, everything farther south suffers.
This is why it’s so helpful to take a look in the toilet before you flush. The finished product says a lot about the manufacturing process 😉
What happens if something goes wrong during digestion?
The Brain and Mouth
We’ve all done this - it’s a busy day, it’s time for lunch, and you stand at the kitchen counter or at your desk and inhale your lunch. Your brain isn’t the least bit concerned with digestion, it’s focused on meetings and projects. This means not enough saliva is produced, your food doesn’t get chewed well, and your stomach hasn’t even started producing acid by the time you’re halfway done eating.
The Stomach, Pancreas, and Liver
Now you have big pieces of food sitting in a stomach with very little acidity. That means pepsin isn’t activated and your proteins don’t get broken down. Your stomach doesn’t know what to do with this mess so it churns it around a bit waiting for the acidity to get high enough to trigger the sphincter to open. Eventually the food starts fermenting, gas bubbles cause acid reflux, and the sphincter opens up just to get rid of the stuff.
The Small Intestine
Now you’ve got half digested food in the small intestine. The walls of the small intestine are covered in villi.
Imagine the villi as tall grass. Now imagine a boulder rolling through the grass. It flattens and damages the grass blades, and it can take a while to recover. The boulder is like a piece of undigested food. Imagine what would happen if boulders rolled through the grass every day, for many months, even years. Eventually the grass would become short and sparse. There would be patches of bare dirt. The same thing happens to our intestinal lining if our food isn’t fully broken down earlier in the process. The villi are too damaged to absorb any nutrients!
The Large Intestine
Now the food has to pass into the large intestine - the last processing department. The biggest problem that can happen here is that a chunk of undigested food gets stuck in the ileocecal valve, the doorway between the small and large intestines. This jams the door open, allowing bacteria from the colon to migrate up into the small intestine, where they are not supposed to be!
The Good News
There is a lot that can go wrong during digestion. But good news! - Digestion is a north to south process, just like a waterfall. And that means that making a few improvements up north will benefit everything down south!
Next week we’ll talk about simple at-home strategies for supporting your digestion! If you haven’t already signed up for email updates, let’s stay in touch!