Ep 3: Digestive Health Explained: The Root Cause of Bloating, Acid Reflux & Poor Digestion

Is poor digestion affecting your overall health?

In this episode of Get Healthy and Stay Healthy NATURALLY, Dr. Howard Pallay explains why healthy digestion is one of the most important foundations of long-term wellness.

Drawing from over 50 years of clinical experience, Dr. Howard discusses how digestion, nutrient absorption, and elimination work together to keep your body functioning properly. He also explains why digestive issues often contribute to fatigue, bloating, acid reflux, constipation, inflammation, and poor nutrient absorption.

If you've struggled with digestive discomfort, this episode provides practical insights into the natural principles Dr. Howard has used throughout his career.

In this episode, you'll learn:

• Why digestion is the foundation of good health
• The four stages of digestion: eating, digestion, absorption, and elimination
• The important role of the gallbladder in fat digestion
• Why bloating and cramping happen
• Understanding probiotics and digestive health
• The difference between probiotics and prebiotics
• Natural approaches to acid reflux (GERD)
• Why hydration and fiber are essential
• Foods and habits that support healthy digestion
• How digestive health affects your entire body

Whether you're dealing with bloating, constipation, acid reflux, gallbladder concerns, or digestive discomfort, this episode offers valuable education to help you better understand your digestive system.

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This podcast is intended for educational purposes only and should not replace professional medical advice. Always consult your healthcare provider before making changes to your diet, supplements, or treatment plan.

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:01

After 50 years in natural health, I'm Dr. Howard Palay and I'll show you how to get healthy and stay healthy naturally. Welcome to podcast number three of Get Healthy, Stay Healthy Naturally with Dr. Howard Pallet. In this episode, we're going to talk about digestion. This is the beginning point of being healthy. I said in an earlier episode, basically, you could put the elixir of the gods in your mouth. If you don't absorb it, you have an immortal toilet bowl. So to not discuss digestion, we got to be start from the beginning. Number one is what you're eating is so critical. Okay? We talked about in episode number two, but we'll touch on it as we go along. Number two is digestion, which means chewing and getting the food in and having it mix in your stomach with enzymes. Then we have absorption, which of course is the most critical phase. And then we have elimination, which causes big problems if that doesn't occur. So if you eat a healthy diet and you have digestive problems, which have been going on your whole life, usually, or recently, or it's a genetic tendency that runs in your family, it doesn't matter. Let's discuss the issues that occur. Assuming that you're eating healthy food, the primary issues that happen with digestion is number one, far and above all, is people don't digest fats properly. They have fat digestion problems, and this involves the gallbladder. The gallbladder is a little organ that sits on the bottom of your liver. It stores bile that's made in the liver from the broken-down hemoglobin of red blood cells, and it forms something called bile or bile salts. The bile is released through the bile duct and the duct of Vader into the duodenum. And in there, it helps to digest fats, and we're gonna explain how. In order to understand how bile works, we're gonna step aside and discuss uh grease, okay? So now you're a mechanic and you've been working on cars all day and you don't use gloves, okay? At the end of the day, you're covered in grease, right? How do you get rid of the grease? Can you wash it off with water? No, you cannot wash it off with water. What do you need? You need soap. Soap is called an emulsifier. And what soap does is it mixes with the grease and it allows water to wash the combination off. Okay? So water cannot wash off grease, it cannot mix with grease or oil or fat. But an emulsifier allows it to mix and then you can wash off the mixture. In the case of bile, you actually have fat-digesting enzymes made in the pancreas called lipases. But here's the trick: all pancreatic enzymes are water-based or water-soluble. So they cannot mix and digest and chomp jump jump fats and oils, even healthy ones like fish oils or vegetable oils or fats that come from fish. So, what bile dose does is it goes in, like the soap, like an emulsifier, it mixes with the fats and the oils and the greases, even the healthy ones, and it allows your digestive enzymes, including lipases, to digest these substances, some of which are very healthy, assuming that you had a healthy meal. What happens if you don't have a properly functioning gallbladder? Not only do you get stones and you get pain, and then medical people take out your gallbladder, but that doesn't fix the problem because you're still not getting bile properly released into the duodenum, but your pain source is gone, that's fine, but you're not fixing the problem. So the problem here is that you need to be able to digest and metabolize and absorb fats and oils without it coating the villi of the duodenum and small intestines, blocking absorption and causing cramping. Okay? This is where I always start with digestive problems. The next common thing that we find is people have inflammation of the mucus lining. Now, inflammation of the mucus lining of the stomach would be called a gastritis, okay? But the really the biggest thing I see most common in chronic conditions, gastritis happens more in acute situations, and it's really from not eating healthy food. Um, but the biggest problem I find with chronic conditions is inflammation of the mucus lining of the small intestines. You can think of it this way: food is begun to be digested by enzymes by chewing it up, and it gets mixed with salivary amylase enzymes, which digest some of it, goes into your stomach, it churns almost like a cement mixer without the actual action, and enzymes digest it even more, okay? And then as nutrients are released, they begin to be absorbed through the walls of the duodenum and the small intestines through the villi. Okay, so what happens is when they're not digested, you get cramping, you get bloating, you get spasms, and you actually swell. And people will eat a meal that they don't digest well and they'll swell up. Later on, it'll go down. But the answer is to not eat, okay? As a matter of fact, if you go to people, there were famines in Africa, they would have giant bellies. You know why? Is that if you're not eating, your body needs nutrients, it's going to start to digest your own insides, your own stomach and intestines, to get any kind of nutrients and treat that like it's food. So the answer is not to not eat. The answer is to eat healthier foods if you're having problems, much healthier food, and then get your body to function better, okay? Finally, you get to the large intestines and your colon, and that's where your body removes the the material that you cannot digest and the waste products that you cannot digest and that you don't want, and you absorb back some of the water to form a solid fecal material. You get peristaltic motion, which squeezes it and pushes it along, pushes it along, pushes it along, push it along, and then it comes out of your rectum and your anal sphincter, and then it's gone into your toilet bowl. Okay, that's a properly functioning digestive tract. So the most common issue is to figure out what's going on. The first step with all digestive patients is a lot of people don't have properly functioning probiotics in their system. The most important probiotic is acidophilus, okay? It's best taken in a supplement. It could be liquid, it could be powdered, it could be chewable. I prefer capsules that come in a special capsule that doesn't digest in the stomach, that it only releases when you get to the intestines. Because your stomach enzymes and acids will start breaking down the probiotic, and very little will end up in your intestines, which is where you want it. You want the healthy probiotics to inoculate your intestinal tract, small intestines, tuodenum, and large intestines, with healthy bacterium that help you synergistically to digest a lot of substances. Okay. But there's a number of different probiotics. The main one is acidophilus, okay? Acidophilus is really the key one. All the other ones, the bifiduses and all the other ones, piggyback on it. The dosage for probiotics is not important. You'll see bottles that say one billion, one million, three billion. It doesn't matter that much. It's more a wash that you get an exposure to. It's not about a dosage. Then there's prebiotics, and prebiotics is basically uh a sugar substrate. So there's really no such thing as prebiotics. All your food is a substrate that the probiotics will grow on and be happy, especially if the pH in your intestinal tract and stomach is good. Okay? I prefer people to take acidophiles or any other probiotic at bedtime. And the reason for that is very simple. I want it to go through your intestinal tract and your colon during the night without being diluted by food and drink. So you get your best effect, taking it on an empty stomach when you go to bed. That doesn't mean you can't take it other times. And an acute episode of intestinal issues and bloating, I will have people take it two or twice a day for a little while to get it into your system more. One of the key issues here is there are a lot of things that kill the probiotics. The number one being antibiotics and antifungals. These things wipe out your probiotics, okay? And as a matter of fact, a lot of people when they take antibiotics, they take probiotics with it. Waste of time. You take the probiotics when you get off the antibiotics. Otherwise, the antibiotic is killing them as they come out, and that's a waste of time and a waste of money. So you start uh probiotics, acidophilus in particular, as soon as you finish the antibiotic therapy, if you needed to even do the antibiotic therapy, and that's a discussion for another podcast, okay? Um, I use something called DGL or deglycerized licorice extract to calm down the inflammation of the small intestines. It's very, very helpful. It does work on the stomach, it does work on the large intestines, but especially calms down this bloating, assuming that we've already improved your fat digestion and fat metabolism. Let's jump back to the gallbladder for a second. One of the most important things to know about the gallbladder is don't drink things with ice in it. Don't drink extremely cold liquids, okay? Um, and what's very good for the gallbladder is half a lemon squeezed into a glass of water, room temperature or hot, whatever you like. You could drink that two or three times a day, once a day or occasional, but lemon and water, and and lemon and water is not going to rot your teeth because you're not sucking on the lemon. You put it in the water and you drink it. But lemon and water will help stimulate bile flow, okay? Now, one of the problems with digestion as well is people don't drink enough water. You're supposed to drink close to eight glasses of water a day. Close to it, a little more. Don't go too crazy. If you're drinking gallons a day, you're actually creating too much water, and that'll make you sick, okay? So you need to drink a lot of water, and a lot of people don't drink enough, but don't be crazy, okay? You don't want to drink giant, giant containers of it because that has its own problem. You start thinning out your um your mineral and mic and micromineral substrates, and that's not healthy either, okay? Um now we get to elimination. So with elimination, basically, again, it comes back to drinking enough water and then getting fiber in. Okay. The natural source of fiber is number one, green leafy vegetables, and number two is whole grains, like whole grain pasta, and um uh as well as apples and pears are a very good source of fiber. And there are others you can do a little more research if you want to get more of them. I think chia seeds are a very good source of that, as well as uh quinoa is another good source of a fiber content. Um, but basically, if you're having intestinal problems, I would probably want you to switch to directly eating fiber. And the best way to do that is get buy oat bran from the supermarket and Miller's unprocessed wheat bran, okay? And you take a heaping tablespoon, you could put it into oatmeal, which is very healthy if it's not full of sugar, like the packets are. Uh, you could put it into yogurt, I guess, or you could just shove it in your mouth and follow with a glass of water, a heaping tablespoon of oat bran, and a heaping tablespoon of wheat bran, and you do that in the morning, so it slowly pushes the food through all day, okay? Metamucil is touted as being a great fiber source. It's not really, it's just a if you add metamucil to water, it becomes this gooey, glattinous thing. And it is a bulking agent, but it's not truly a fiber source that's going to absorb waste products. It's something for your body to squeeze on for your peristaltic contractions of the of the lower bowel, the large intestines and the colon. But I don't find it to be a tremendous source of fixing these things long term. Oat bran, wheat bran, and oatmeal is number one. Or oat bran, wheat bran, just stick it in your mouth and swallow it down with some water. It doesn't really have any taste, it's not the end of the world. But this is the best way to do these things, okay? Um, so that discussed fiber. Let's go back up to the stomach now because this is kind of interesting. One of the things that happens with the stomach when people have chronic stomach issues, okay, is that there's where your esophagus goes through the diaphragm muscle, okay? There's a little valve there called the cardiac sphincter. It's anatomically near the heart, had nothing to do with the heart. In older times they said, oh, it's by the heart, we'll call it the cardiac sphincter. It's not a valve or sphincter that has to do with circulation or blood flow, okay? But what happens is that when the when you're not digesting well and you're always bloated and it's pushing everything up, the esophagus will get pushed out of position where it goes to the diaphragm. And remember, the diaphragm, you're breathing 14 to 16 to 18 times a minute in under normal respiration. And now this valve is not in the right spot, and the valve gets scrunched a little bit, and it's not blocking the stomach acids, hydrochloric acids that help you digest some things and enzymes from coming back up and regurging. And that's what they call GERD, is regurgitating up and burning the lower area of the esophagus. Your stomach is specifically made to handle these enzymes and these hydrochloric acids. The esophagus is not. So, especially when you lie down, but sometimes when you're standing, you're so bloated by your intestines, your stomach, or both, that it's literally you're swollen like this, and it's pushing up, and it's pushing up, and you get this problem. And then you develop a hyalhernia or pseudohyrohernia. But most of them can be fixed by fixing your digestion and taking some supplements that calm down this inflammation. DGL being one of them, uh, some digestive enzymes, plant-based, is a very good idea. I used to, when I first started treating digestive patients, occasionally add people extra beta and hydrochloride, but it tends, some people it doesn't, they don't do well with it. So I've I've really much gotten away with that. That's like a last resort. People are not digesting well. Sometimes we need to change the pH of the digestive tract. And in order to do that, if it's not working enough with the things that we just talked about, sometimes we would do some apple cider vinegar. You start with one tablespoon, build up to two tablespoons, and a half to full glass of water. It's better diluted. Patients ask me if they can just shove it in their mouth. I tell them it's much better when they dilute it in a half glass. It works better for what we want. And it also cleans and detoxifies the liver, but it also changes your pH a little bit. And that also helps skin problems, which is an episode we'll get to later on. So another issue to talk about here is that I'm sorry, but I'm not a believer in this uh pyloric um uh infection that they told, H. pylori. Uh, I believe that they are misunderstanding and misxplaining and misstating this to people. You will get an H. pylori overgrowth when the pH on your digestive tract, your stomach in particular, is wrong, or you're not getting good movement. Um, it's not the other way around. They are telling people, and one day they're gonna figure this out and go, oops, we were wrong. I'm telling you they're wrong. H. pylori overgrowth is because you're not digesting well. It's not H. pylori causes the ulcer and the infection. That's not true. Ulcers are another thing to discuss here. You get ulceration of the walls because the food is not digesting properly, and instead, it goes into an anaerobic digestion, and alcohol uh acids are the byproduct of that, and these undigested foods cause these ulcers. So that the proper digestion and the proper flow of the of your digestive material into the duodenum, small intestines, and then the the large intestines in colon and rectum, this flow is what keeps you from getting these ulcers. And the ulcers will heal if you take the right combination of herbs, especially DGL, some probiotics, some digestive enzymes. I have particular formulations that I like particularly, and they will eventually be posted on my website. And you'll also be able to deal with my main distributor and order it hopefully at a I'm gonna arrange a discount and free shipping if you want to try the exact protocols that I put my patients on, where I am most assured of getting the correct response for digestive patients. Digestive issues are so critically important. Not only do they make you feel not well, they affect your overall health. Toxins build up in your body and start poisoning your liver and other parts of you, okay? The bloating causes all these GERD and other issues with reflux, gastric reflux back into the esophagus. If you overeat and you have these issues, you'll actually, sometimes at night when you're lying down, you know, they'll regurge up and go into your uh mouth, and they can even then go into your stachian tube and into the top of your lung fields, which is a horrible thing and can cause infections, also cause breathing issues, even where you start choking on it. Okay. You can, especially little kids and infants, can choke on it in the middle of the night. So it's important what you eat. You can't just put anything in you. And you can't overeat because you went to your favorite restaurant, you went to your favorite uh wedding or bar bod mitzvah. You know, you can't like you can't eat well for three days and then go crazy hogwild for a day or two and eat some horrible meals and overeat the quantity because you're overwhelming the system, your body won't have enough digestive enzymes, and all hell breaks loose, and you don't feel well. You have to understand you can enjoy food up to a point, but food is the oil, gasoline that you put in your car to run your engine. It's the food is the oil and glass gasoline that that fuels your body for energy. You digest this food to have energy, okay? And you get more energy from the carb family, but complex carbs, and that's why you should eat them for breakfast and lunch when you want energy. You don't want to eat carbs for dinner because your metabolism is slow down, especially if you eat later at night, okay? And this this then there's all this extra carb which turns into energy. And we'll talk about that when we talk about sugar, which will be the next podcast. Um your body will then store it as fat. Fat is stored energy. It's stored in your liver and in your muscles as glycogen. And by the way, there's a little side note: glycogen will allow your body to get emergency energy, especially in a situation where there's no oxygen present. So it becomes non-oxygen or non-aerobic respiration. But when your body utilizes a lot of glycogen, you build up a side effect of lactic acid, which will cause cramping, especially in the legs, where the circulation is not as good as your intestinal area. Interesting little side note: people will get shin spleen'cause because they're using up too much glycogen and there's not enough oxygen and glucose in a healthy form, and your body's using up the glycogen, and there's limited circulation into the shin area. And people will get shin spleens where the muscle goes into lactic acid spasms and literally start tearing its way off the bone, which is extremely painful. It is fixable and treatable, but why get to that point? So that's really the basis of digestive issues. It sounds uncomplicated because it kind of is. If you do these things, you will get better and you will get healthier and you'll get better nutrient absorption into your body. Because by the way, obviously, if you get problems with the with the stomach and you get problems with the small intestines, you're not absorbing nutrients. So now you almost can begin to become malnourished because you have a malabsorption syndrome. When you're not digesting and absorbing, that's a malabsorption syndrome. But this is fixable with this protocol that we're talking about here. Okay? We'll see you on the next podcast.

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