The digestive experience starts with how you chew your food and how your saliva interacts with it. The next stage of digestion lands us in the stomach where our stomach acid breaks down food and an enzyme called pepsin gives us a little extra help with the “tough to digest” proteins. The next stop on our little train ride is the duodenum. This is the connector of your stomach and small intestine. It takes all the food that was sitting in the acidic stomach and makes it safe for the more intestines which isn’t built to hold acidic things. Once the food is in the duodenum our liver/ gallbladder help us out by giving bile to help break down food and then our pancreas joins the party by giving us some more enzymes to do the same. Now that we’re in the small intestine our probiotics go to work at breaking down the food even further. This is where the bulk of our absorption happens. Once we are done with the small intestine what’s left of our food will get dehydrated in the large intestine and then we poop and live happily ever after, right??? WRONG!!!

Inflammation in the gut is the birthplace of: disease, brain fog, weight gain, and just about everything else that you don’t want for your health. There are so many things that can go wrong from top to bottom (pun intended). Our gut gets beat en up from a lot of different things, but most commonly from stress, lack of sleep, eating foods we have sensitivities to, and drinking stuff like coffee and/or alcohol. 60% of our immune cells live in the lining to our gastro intestinal wall and they are ready to rush into action at any sign of irritation. If/when our gut gets irritated, we get inflammation. Our immune cells require this swelling/inflammation because they are large cells that need lots space to go to work. Things go wrong when immune cells are overactive because Immune cells are like humans, they need rest and recovery; they don’t perform as well when they are working in overdrive. As the immune cells get tired the extra space in the gut wall will allow undigested food to end up in the bloodstream and throughout the body, this is the birthplace of systemic inflammation and systemic inflammation is the mother of bad health.

When it comes to digestion, it’s so important to be aware of the things that are inflaming you, and to know how to equip your gut with the acids and probiotics necessary to help this process happen with as few problems as possible. At Sandbox fitness, our personal trainers look far beyond the calories in versus calories burnt equation. We use this extensive knowledge of the digestive system, hormonal profiling, and proper supplementation to develop a simple approach to healthy living that will work for you.

Interested in learning more? Drop us a line!

 

Learn more about how we approach supplements