Following Your Gut Podcast #6, Gut Instincts: The Science & Art of Digestion

In this engaging episode of the “Following Your Gut” podcast, host Roland Pankewich delves into the critical topic of digestion and its significance to human health. This solo venture away from conventional interviews shines a light on the intricate processes that begin before the first bite and continue through to the elimination of waste. Roland’s approachable style combines humor with science, ensuring listeners both understand and appreciate the complexities of digestion.

The episode highlights digestion’s pivotal role in nutrient absorption and overall wellness, debunking common misconceptions and introducing listeners to phases often overlooked, like the cephalic stage. Roland elaborates on how digestion is not merely the mechanical breakdown of food but a sophisticated process that requires mindfulness to support optimum body function. The journey through the digestive system is enriched with insights into the microbiome’s importance, the various phases of nutrient assimilation, and why poor digestion could potentially be more toxic than beneficial if not aligned with the body’s needs.

Key Takeaways:

• Digestive Awareness: Understanding and consciously engaging in all stages of digestion can enhance health and prevent issues over time.

• Cephalic Phase: Digestion starts with the anticipation and sensory experience of eating, not just the act of consuming food.

• Role of Microbiome: A healthy gut microbiome plays a crucial role in breaking down fiber and protecting against pathogens.

• Impact of Stress: Stress and lifestyle significantly affect digestion, highlighting the importance of a relaxed ‘rest-and-digest’ state for optimal nutrient absorption.

• Nutrition Education: Awareness about digestion aids in making informed decisions on using digestive aids like enzymes and probiotics effectively.

“The microbiome of our digestive tract is like the soil of our body."

Chapters

• 0:02 Exploring Health Topics for Better Living
• 1:30 Understanding Digestion: From Cephalic Phase to Conscious Eating
• 9:33 The Journey of Macronutrient Digestion in the Human Body
• 14:55 14:55 The Journey of Digestion and Its Microbial Allies
• 19:28 The Importance of Healthy Digestion for Overall Well-Being

Transcript

0:00:02 Roland Pankewich: Welcome back to the following your Gut podcast, where health science meets clinical wisdom. At least that’s what we try to do every episode. And thus far every episode has been an interview with an incredibly brilliant person, typically highlighting a topic. And as much fun as that is, I do enjoy the aspect of diversity in terms of what podcasts offer. So I thought today I would take a crack at something more digestible. Haha. Pun intended.

0:00:31 Roland Pankewich: I promise you I’m not a comedian on weekends. I’m much better at helping people with their health than I am cracking jokes, but it doesn’t mean that I’m not going to try every now and again. So what I wanted to do today was take a topic, highlight the topic, dive deeply in a way that hopefully allows whoever’s listening to know a lot more about the topic than before they started to listen. And it empowers you and arms you with information that helps you make your life better in some way, shape or form from a health perspective. But let’s be honest, anytime your healthier life in general gets better.

0:01:03 Roland Pankewich: So what I would like to highlight today is the topic of digestion. Doesn’t sound super exciting initially. You know, most people think digestion, especially if you have digestive issues, you know, your mind might go back to those Tums commercials that are highlighting the ability to eat chicken wings, drink beer and pizza around football games. But digestion is so important to the overall health and well being of the human body because of a few reasons.

0:01:30 Roland Pankewich: Number one, everything you eat must be digested. And most people assume that simply eating implies that the food you eat is being digested. Once food is properly digested, it is supposed to nourish you. So you essentially strip away the calories and the nutrition in the food, break them down to the smallest possible constituents, and absorb those and utilize those to actually power you to be able to continuously sustain your health and all the activities that you do in your life.

0:02:01 Roland Pankewich: And the third aspect about digestion is everything that you eat, the bacteria, the lining of your gut, the entire gut microbiome is also exposed to. So it’s really about a question of what is it you’re eating and what are you exposing your inner ecosystem to? That is a really important question when it comes to long term health and wellness as it relates to the digestive system. So let’s dive in, because how I want to introduce this is probably something very few of us have ever thought about. Maybe you have, maybe you haven’t.

0:02:34 Roland Pankewich: We were given this human body, but no one gave us an instruction manual on how it works, which I find hilariously ironic because it is the most important thing you own in your lifetime, in my opinion. We don’t understand how the physical body interconnects. We don’t necessarily understand the infinite wisdom in terms of how the body operates itself. And when it comes to our digestive systems, if we knew at all what is required to keep your gut healthy, we would so shake our head about what we’ve subjected our guts to in the past. I know I would. Specifically, especially through, oh, I don’t know, late high school, college years.

0:03:12 Roland Pankewich: So I want to teach everyone the fundamentals of digestion. I’m going to try to do it in a way that is as, I don’t want to say the opposite of dry as moist, because that’s a disgusting description of a topic of conversation. But I don’t want to make it dry and boring. I want to try to make this something where everyone can haha, digest it, but also understand it to the point of embodying it, embodying it in a practical sense. So I’m going to give it my best shot.

0:03:40 Roland Pankewich: When we think of digestion, we have to fundamentally define what we’re talking about. Digestion is the act of breaking down the large constituents of the food we eat into smaller and smaller pieces until they are the ideal form or the ideal size to be absorbed through the lining of your gut to be taken into the bloodstream and transported to wherever those nutrients, calories are needed in order to sustain how the body is operating.

0:04:08 Roland Pankewich: So when we think about digestion, the average person probably thinks about chewing as the first step of digestion. That is not true. Someone may think about smelling food. That might be the first step of digestion. You’re getting closer, but also not true. The first step of digestion is actually merely knowing that you’re going to eat because the neurons in your brain, the unconscious sense of you, starts priming your nervous system to switch into digestive mode, which is taking your body supposedly out of a fight or flight state and putting it into a rest and digest state so that your nervous system can redirect energy to the organs of digestion so you can properly break down and assimilate your food.

0:04:50 Roland Pankewich: The first phase is called the cephalic phase of digestion. So I want you to picture this. You’re super hungry, you know you’re going over for a meal, so you’re going to unconsciously start thinking about what you’re going to eat, how good it’s going to taste, the experience in and of Itself. That’s when it starts. You walk into the place where you’re going to eat. Could be a restaurant, could be a house.

0:05:10 Roland Pankewich: You smell the food. All of a sudden, your mouth starts to salivate, your hunger pangs increase, and you become very focused and fixated on the smells, things, thinking about the taste of the food. That is the first step of digestion. And that needs to be highlighted for most people, because if you don’t allow for that part to be processed and recognized, then digestion becomes a very unconscious thing. And unconscious digestion is oftentimes poor digestion.

0:05:40 Roland Pankewich: Something that I recently learned that kind of blew my mind is, have you ever stopped to think about the word digestion in front of gestion? Is this di and di references to. And I never thought about that. Someone asked me, have you heard of trigestion? And I said, what are you talking about? Apparently, trigestion is adding a third element of interacting with your food in order for your body to be most optimally primed.

0:06:11 Roland Pankewich: And that is, at the tips of your fingers, there are nerve endings that relay information about what it is you’re touching at all times to your brain. And he was explaining to me, and this may be useful for some people, because the action might not be necessarily socially acceptable in all cases, but he was explaining to me that the act of eating food with the hands, as cultures have done around the world for as long as humans have been around, is actually the missing component that we no longer get these days because we’re stabbing things with a fork or we’re scooping it with a spoon.

0:06:47 Roland Pankewich: So if you’re wanting to be as present as possible and you have the opportunity to do so, eating food with your hands further establishes a better connection between the food that you’re eating and the information that your body and your brain are taking in about that food. And possibly it might relay some things to your brain about how to more optimally coordinate the sequence of digestion based upon the food you’re touching. Because think about it. When you eat food, have you ever stopped to think, how does your body know exactly how much protein needs to be broken down and what you’ve decided to eat? How many carbohydrates are in that meal? How much bile is needed for the gallbladder to release in order to digest the fat?

0:07:27 Roland Pankewich: We never eat the same meal exactly twice. Some people might, but even there’s differences between the contents of macronutrients and the same foods eaten at separate times. But the body has this incredible ability to always know how to properly provide the necessary catalysts to break down whatever it is, no matter what time of day you eat it at, no matter how much you eat. Although that could probably be debated over the long term as the digestive system weakens.

0:07:55 Roland Pankewich: But I’m going on a little bit of a tangent. But all that is to say that before you even bite your food, the process of digestion starts. And if we don’t bring awareness to that, we can never really optimize the process of digestion and make it more of a conscious or mindful ritual as it should be, rather than just something that has to get done as a checklist item. So now that we’ve smelt that food, our body is making more saliva, it’s priming our internal organs.

0:08:23 Roland Pankewich: Body starts to release salivary amylase and we start chewing. The average person chews like a duck, which is very little, if nothing at all, if you’ve ever watched a duck eat, if you fed ducks at ponds before. And the reason chewing is so important is because chewing is a multifactorial benefit to the body. First and foremost, chewing starts to mechanically break down food, because as one of my teachers told me in nutrition school, Roland, your stomach doesn’t have teeth. And she said that after she watched me eat my lunch.

0:08:54 Roland Pankewich: And let’s say I didn’t eat like that ever again. At least I try not to. Chewing not only takes the load off of the internal organs that can’t mechanically break things down, they use chemical breakdown. But chewing also exposes more surface area because our saliva has carbohydrate digest, digesting enzymes, and in some cases, probably a little bit of lipid or fat digesting enzymes. So the more you chew your food and the more you mix the saliva with the food, not only do you get a better physical breakdown, so you’re not stressing your stomach as much, but you’re also getting a better mixing and pre digestion of certain foods before they get into your stomach.

0:09:33 Roland Pankewich: Once you’ve swallowed the food, food goes into your stomach. And this is where the principal site of protein digestion takes place. Carbs, fats and proteins are the three major macronutrients, each of which has a slightly different process of digestion. And each requires its own chemical catalyst in the form of proteases for protein digestion, lipases for fat digestion, and amylases for carbohydrate digestion. I wish they called them carbases for simple word association, but you know, there’s a root word in there somewhere that’s probably far more accurate and technical.

0:10:09 Roland Pankewich: When you swallow food into the stomach, the stomach makes something called hydrochloric acid. And hydrochloric acid is there to start denaturing proteins. So what a denaturation of protein is, is it takes a complex protein structure and it starts to simplify it, it starts to break it down so that the enzymes that digest proteins, they can turn them from these long chains of amino acids, think like a beaded necklace, into smaller and smaller, what are called peptides.

0:10:39 Roland Pankewich: And eventually we want proteins to be so small that they’re a single amino acid long, up to three amino acids long, because that’s how the body wants to properly absorb them. So the protein digestion phase is contingent upon making sure that your stomach is making enough hydrochloric acid, because without hydrochloric acid, which is a very corrosive substance, it’s a very harsh environment in the stomach.

0:11:02 Roland Pankewich: And it’s necessitated to do so because protein is a very, very hard nutrient to dig. If we make enough hydrochloric acid and if we denature the proteins properly, the PH of our stomach drops. It gets quite low, and it also activates the major protein splitting enzyme in the stomach. And while this is happening, the carbohydrates and the fats are still there, but they’re just kind of lying in wait, because their time to shine is the next part of the digestive process, when food leaves your stomach and starts to enter the small intestine.

0:11:36 Roland Pankewich: So now that we’ve initiated the cephalic phase of digestion, we’ve interacted with our food, we’ve chewed thoroughly, we’ve swallowed the food, our stomach has done its job. The next aspect of digestion is to get into the small intestine. And this is where we mix the different macronutrients with bile from the gallbladder and enzymes from the pancreas, and we make a veritable chemical soup where the principal site of total macronutrient digestion takes place.

0:12:08 Roland Pankewich: And what’s so important about digestion is each prior step determines the success of the subsequent step that follows. What that means is your stomach has to work extra hard. If you don’t chew well, if you don’t make enough stomach acid, your pancreas and your gallbladder have to work harder. But at the same time, without an adequate hydrochloric acid release, without an adequate drop in ph, it doesn’t trigger an optimal release of bile and enzymes from the two organs that assist the stomach in digestion. In the small intestine so we compromise digestion even further.

0:12:45 Roland Pankewich: In the small intestine, we’re taking medium sized molecules. So think of the stomach as large molecule breakdown, specifically protein. In the stomach, we’re having all three macronutrients interact with their relative catalysts. So proteases are digesting medium sized proteins, breaking them down into smaller and smaller peptides. Amylase, carbohydrate. Digesting enzymes are interacting with moderate chain glucose molecules, or not glucose, rather, they’re.

0:13:18 Roland Pankewich: The word I’m looking for is polymers. That’s another way of looking at them. They’re little glucose units linked together in the same kind of beaded necklace analogy. And they are optimally broken down into simple sugars and small units of sugars in the same way that proteins are broken down into small amino acids and small little peptides and fats are digested a little bit differently. Fats first have to be emulsified because a fat globule is a really hard thing to break down.

0:13:51 Roland Pankewich: So when the fat mixes with bile, and this is why people who don’t have a gallbladder know all too harshly what happens when they overeat fat without taking a supplement, or if they don’t take a supplement at all, they have to be very careful because bile acts as an emulsifier. So the little droplets of fat can get broken down to small enough particles that the enzymes can then act upon them, and they get broken down from triglycerides into free fatty acids before they’re absorbed directly into the lymphatic system.

0:14:20 Roland Pankewich: So now in the small intestine, food starts to move through. And as you’re breaking down these macronutrients, you’re also helping to absorb vitamins and minerals through the lining of the small intestine. As the food moves through the 26 odd feet of small intestine, which is an incredible thing, anatomically, our bodies knew that nutrient absorption was such a priority that it made our digestive system have so much surface area to maximize the chances and opportunities of being able to absorb food.

0:14:55 Roland Pankewich: If you take cut someone’s. I’m not ever saying do this, but this is a hypothetical. If you cut someone’s small intestine from start to finish and fold it flat, it would cover two tennis courts. That’s how much surface area is inside of us. Because as it rolls up into a tube, there’s these little finger like projections that maximize surface area for absorption. So this is why the body is always trying to make sure that it can optimally nourish itself, because before the days of grocery stores and refrigerators and things that provide food security, we had to rely upon possibly going hours, if not days, without food, so that when we did eat food, we needed to maximize the opportunity of pulling all that nutrition in that we possibly could to sustain ourselves.

0:15:44 Roland Pankewich: So now that we’ve gone through the small intestine phase, here is where all the absorption happens. The small proteins and amino acids get absorbed into the bloodstream, the small carbohydrates and glucose molecules get absorbed into the bloodstream, and then the triglycerides actually get packaged up and absorbed into the lymphatic system. And that’s as far as we’ll go with that, because then we’re getting into the dynamics of metabolism, which is cool, but not necessary for the rest of this topic.

0:16:14 Roland Pankewich: So then what happens with everything that’s not absorbed in the small intestine? It continues the journey down the tube, and it enters the large intestine, the famed colon. Dirtiest job of every organ in the body, because the colon is principally there to concentrate waste and help remove and evacuate waste molecules, toxic compounds, and various other things from the body that are detoxified through the gut and pushed into the waste material that goes into the colon.

0:16:47 Roland Pankewich: But the colon is also where most of our microbiome lives in the form of the highest concentrations of microbes inhabiting our system. They say we have hundreds of trillions of bacteria inside of us, and the vast majority of those bacteria are concentrated in the colon, because there’s one macronutrient, kind of a macronutrient, not necessarily to us, but. But it’s a source of fuel for the bacteria because it is what they feed on, and that’s fiber.

0:17:17 Roland Pankewich: Fiber is technically a carbohydrate. And the only reason humans can’t break it down is because we don’t have the enzymes to do so. But that’s likely by design, because the multiple species of bacteria that live in the colon have a multitude of different fiber digesting enzymes. And they break these fibers down in the process, called fermentation. And they create nourishment for themselves, but also, which is really awesome, they create these chemical byproducts for us via nourishing the internal environment of our colon. Because we want to make sure that the.

0:17:49 Roland Pankewich: The cells of the colon are working optimally, they’re healthy, so that they can continue to keep the barrier of integrity sealed. So nothing gets into our bloodstream through the process of leaky gut. And the fermentation process also creates an acidic environment in the Colon, which nourishes the good bacteria in an environment they love to live in. And believe it or not, prevents the likelihood of things like pathogenic bacteria, fungus, yeasts and parasites from being able to live inside of us.

0:18:26 Roland Pankewich: Because the bacteria are always working with us in order to make sure that, that we are healthy so they have a nice place to live so they can remain healthy and they can continue to give birth to their next generation, which happens in a matter of hours to days. It’s a very fast replicating environment in there. So now that we’ve understood that the first part of the entry into the colon is actually really about making sure that the bacteria that support our health via managing their ecosystem are taken care of.

0:18:56 Roland Pankewich: Now you can assume what the last phase of digestion is. This is the concentration of waste material in the form of fecal matter. Poop for the scientifically minded person. And that concentrates it enters the rectal area. And hopefully one or multiple times a day we are releasing waste material. Because doing so not only keeps the process running smoothly of in and out, most people have a lot going in and very little coming out. Relatively speaking, that’s a long term problem.

0:19:28 Roland Pankewich: But making sure that you’re moving your bowels on a regular basis is also a very important way of not keeping the body increasingly exposed to higher levels of toxicity than is necessary. And this process from start to finish, although I described it as multiple processes operating at the same time, it is one seamless process. And I think it’s important to mention that this process is a sign of few things. It’s a sign of overall health. If you’re able to intake food without symptoms, no negative consequences, through the process of digestion, absorb food through the process of knowing that you feel good, you’re energetic, your body is operating well, and releasing waste material on a regular basis, and what’s coming out of you doesn’t look like a massacre in the toilet bowl, then that’s a good deal. That’s a sign that your system is working well.

0:20:22 Roland Pankewich: If there are any of the opposite scenarios that I mentioned happening during this process of digestion to waste release, it’s a sign that your body’s not necessarily healthy or working optimally. The second thing is it’s a sign of how well your nervous system is able to regulate you as a person, because the process of digestion is very much mediated on this very important nerve in your body called the vagus nerve. And it’s called vagus not because it likes to party, because it is called the wandering Nerve, it’s V, A, G, U, S.

0:20:58 Roland Pankewich: And the vagus nerve is this very important nerve that comes out of your 10th cranial nerve and extends all the way down. And it innervates every single organ of digestion. And it is a parasympathetic process which is synonymous with rest, recover and digest. Because when we’re digesting food, it’s an energy intensive process. If we’re digesting food, we should not be doing things that are strenuous, mentally stimulating, excitable.

0:21:28 Roland Pankewich: Anything that takes energy and focus away from the process of digestion compromises our ability to digest food. And as time goes on, and the average person who lives in North America listening to this, will probably not necessarily realize the amount of unconscious stress they carry. All of those things unfortunately contribute to, to the antagonistic process of digestion. What I mean by that is the more fight or flight dominant we are in our day to day, the more stressed we are, the less aware and conscious we are, the less optimally we can allow our bodies to nourish themselves.

0:22:08 Roland Pankewich: And I cannot tell you a single time I have memory of working with someone who had a physical condition that wasn’t digestive in origin, that also had a sign or symptom or a problem with their digestive system in concert with the thing that they were working on. Because I do believe that compromised digestion is one of the most powerful initiating points to throwing the body out of alignment from a perspective of health and the ability to tolerate stress and recover adequately from that stress.

0:22:42 Roland Pankewich: Because the nervous system, specifically the fight or flight and the rest and digest are kind of like a gas pedal and a brake pedal. The fight or flight system is the gas pedal, the rest and digest system is the brake pedal. Our body wants to nourish itself when we can hit the brakes. Because when we hit the brakes and we nourish ourselves, our body can get back into a resource accumulation phase and offset or balance out the resource depletion phase that most people are living in.

0:23:13 Roland Pankewich: And if you think about it, if that process goes on over the course of months and years, it’s no wonder the body starts to throw symptoms. Because after a while it doesn’t have the ability to tolerate stress because it’s breaking down too quickly. And we get sick when we break down tissue faster than we can heal it. And one of the fastest ways to stress our tissues is to not digest our food well. Because every opportunity for you to nourish your body is also an opportunity for you to increase the toxicity in your body.

0:23:44 Roland Pankewich: This may Sound weird. Eating can be the most toxic thing to your body if your digestive system does not work well, if you are not absorbing your food or breaking it down adequately, if you are absorbing incompletely broken down things into your bloodstream, which is going to cause your immune system to be pissed off, which is going to cause an inflammatory response and the possible development of food sensitivities.

0:24:08 Roland Pankewich: And the last thing is, if you’re not digesting your food and you’re bringing undigested food constituents into the colon, that is going to feed the potential for bacterial overgrowth. Change that internal environment that I was describing before from an optimal environment to house healthy bacteria to one that attracts parasites and fungus and yeast overgrowth and pathogens. And think about this over the course of days, weeks and months in conjunction with food choices.

0:24:38 Roland Pankewich: We didn’t even talk about that. The digestive system is looking for food as close to nature as it was meant to be. Not something that came out of a package, that came out of a drive through window, that was eaten in your car while you’re trying to speed to work in traffic. All of these things matter. So that was a hopefully interesting and fun. Fun for me remains to be seen on your end, but I’m feeling the thumbs up and the claps from people because I’m hoping that all of this made everyone really give a cr.

0:25:10 Roland Pankewich: Haha. Pun intended. I’m on a roll today. Give a crap about digestion and why the process is so important to bring awareness to. You know, there’s these old sayings in life. Never eat alone. Various things that allude to the fact that food should be ritual, the process of of picking the food in the grocery store, the process of relating well with your food as you cook it, the process of eating the food that you love in its optimal state with the people you love, or doing things that you really enjoy is a really powerful thing when it comes to your ability to nourish yourself physically, mentally and emotionally. Every time you eat your food, eating is probably the most common thing you’re going to do in your life next to drinking water and breathing.

0:25:58 Roland Pankewich: So every time you eat, if you can make a little mental note that eating and digestion, although assumed to be, you know, a tag team, a synonymous duo, is one of the same. They are not. And giving yourself the time and bringing awareness to this process of digestion is really an important thing to keep your health in good working order long term. I say this to all my clients. It doesn’t matter what you’re dealing with if we can get your digestive system to work better and you’re digesting your food to some degree, everything gets better because your body is going to be nourished.

0:26:32 Roland Pankewich: So I hope you enjoyed that. Thank you for the opportunity to allow me to share something that I really love with everyone. I hope this information was useful and interesting and we will be back with other interviews in the future. And I will be back doing some other solo ventures here because I think this information, although for some of you maybe review, is important to brush up on. And for those who are hearing this for the first time, I really encourage you to commit some of this to memory because this information is super powerful to know from a fundamental perspective, because it also allows you to know why you would use a digestive enzyme, why you would use a probiotic, why you might want to use a hydrochloric acid supplement.

0:27:13 Roland Pankewich: And it’s knowing the process and where these things take place that ultimately lends you to being super accurate with your supplement choices and those supplement choices yielding the best possible outcome of supporting your body in whatever your journey is. I wish you all a great day and we’ll talk to you again soon.