Restoring your digestive health

Maintaining and restoring your digestive health is critical to your health and longevity.

Digestive problems are some of the most common disturbances.

• Some digestive problems may affect significantly quality of life, without being dangerous to your health such as irritable bowel syndrome and dyspepsia.

• Other digestive problems are potentially lethal such as colon cancer, inflammatory bowel disorders, and diverticulitis.
• Many digestive problems lead to immune system challenges, such as allergies and autoimmune disorders.

• You start your digestion by chewing your food in your mouth, and mixing it with saliva. Saliva contains an enzyme called, ptylase, that starts the digestion process of starches.
• Then, your food travels to your stomach through a tube called: esophagus.
• In your stomach, your food mixes with the acid in your stomach, to help digesting your food. This mixture is called the Chyme. After being well mixed with your stomach acid, the chyme travels to your bowels.
• In the bowels, the chyme mixes with the alkaline secretions of the pancreas gland, and with pancreatic digestive enzymes. Those digestive enzymes role is obviously to digest the chyme to small microscopic units absorbable through your bowels.

Proteins are digested to simple amino acids.
Fats are digested to glycerol and fatty acids.
Starches are digested into glucose.


During the same process, vitamins, minerals, phytonutrients, foreign hormones and foreign chemicals are extracted as well.

• Those simple units are then absorbed into the blood stream through the bowel walls.

• The undigested part is usually the fiber component, that stimulates the bowel muscle contraction.
• In the bowels, billions of friendly bacteria, called the bowel flora, are present to help digestion and body detoxification.
• The bowel flora interact continuously with the immune cells around the bowel walls, Payer’s patches, and keep those immune cells on high alert. Payer’s patches play a major role in keeping a healthy immune system.

Understanding the causes of the digestive system problems is a pre-requisite to restoring your digestive health.

So what are these causes?

• Eating food in a hurry without chewing appropriately.
• The quality of food: food depleted of digestive enzymes, low in fiber is more difficult to digest.
• Excess or lack of acid in your stomach may hinder the digestive process.
  Excess acid is induced frequently by high stress levels, and may lead eventually to ulcers.
  Lack of acid is induced frequently by age and prescription medications.
  

  Eating food depleted of digestive enzymes, difficult to digest, with excess acid leads eventually to heart burns and indigestion.

• Deficiency of digestive enzymes: Eating frequently food depleted of digestive enzymes, leads our pancreas to secrete higher amount of digestive enzymes, and eventually the pancreas cease to keep up with the demand. Deficiency of digestive enzymes manifests as indigestion, excessive gas, bloating, lactose intolerance, as well as allergies and immune system challenges.
• Antibiotics and chlorinated water: Using antibiotics kill the good bacteria in the bowels, and leave fungi and yeasts to proliferate. This imbalance leads to what we call: Dysbiosis of the gut.
• Lack of appropriate amount of fiber: leads to constipation, and subsequent complications: hemorrhoids, diverticulitis, and colon cancer. Constipation hinders the body detoxification process.

A comprehensive approach to restoring your digestive health, commonly referred to as the “4R” approach, comprises four basic clinical steps: Remove, Replace, Reinoculate, and Repair.

• Remove

  “Remove” focuses on eliminating fungi, pathogenic bacteria, and toxins. This phase is accomplished with short periods of fasting, using natural laxatives, natural antibiotics, and high amount of fibers.

• Replace

  “Replace” focuses on replacing the digestive enzymes with high quality broad spectrum digestive enzymes supplements.

• Reinoculate

  “Reinoculate” refers to the reintroduction of desirable bacteria into the intestine to establish micro floral balance.

  This phase is accomplished directly by supplementing with high quality probiotics: refrigerated liquid supplements containing live bacteria, or freeze-dried bacteria packaged in powder, tablet, or capsule form.

  In addition to directly introducing bacteria, this step may involve indirectly bolstering the re inoculation process through foods or food products that enhance the beneficial bacteria growth without simultaneously enhancing pathogenic bacteria growth. Supplementing with fructooligosaccharides derived from foods like Jerusalem artichoke illustrates this indirect bolstering process.

• Repair

  The final step in a 4R approach. This step involves direct nutritional support of the intestinal cells through the use of supplements containing nutrients known to be critical in intestinal wall structure and function.

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