Several questions have come up this week about how hydration (the drinking of water and other liquids) affect digestion. We have all heard that we need to drink eight ounces of water every day. How many of us have ever understood why? In school we learned that we need ‘plenty of fluids’ because our body is made of water. That is still true. I remember (here I go showing my age again) an old Star Trek episode where the alien weapon took all the moisture out of the human body and left about two cups of dry powder. It is a great analogy, but really doesn’t tell us what our body does with all that fluid.
All of the activities that keep our bodies alive are the result of enzymes. If you take away the enzymes from the body the body will die. The picture that comes into my mind is not a cup of powder, but a cup of goo, but that’s my own imagination here. The fact is that numerous studies have shown that all cellular activity is really enzymatic activity. You take away that spark and you lose the spark of life.
Enzymes of all types, and there are more types than science has been able to count, need a minimum of two things to be active, some need more. The basic two things that enzymes need are warmth and moisture. An easy way to show this is to take three bowls and pour a packet of instant oatmeal into each. The first bowl you leave dry. The second bowl you add the recommended amount of water, but make it ice water, as cold as you can get it. In the third bowl add the recommended amount of hot water. Stir all three bowls. First of all the mixtures will look different, but for this simple illustration we are going to ignore that. In all three bowls we are going to add the contents of one Enriching Gifts Plant Enzymes. We are going to use this brand for two reasons, I have it available and I know it will work for our illustration. Some other brands may or may not work depending on the quality of the product. We are going to stir all three bowls, and then look to see what happened. In the first bowl nothing will have happened, there is a lack of moisture. In the second bowl little if anything will have happened, there is a lack of heat. In the third bowl the once thick oatmeal has now turned to a watery liquid, because both moisture and heat are available for the enzymes.
That illustration would make you think that you need to drink beverages with your meals, but you would be wrong. There are three stages to our digestion, actually four if you include the anticipation of the bite of food. That anticipation, the look and fragrance of the food starts your saliva flowing. There are enzymes in your saliva that allow you to digest the carbohydrates in that bite of food. The second step is chewing your food and mixing it with the saliva in your mouth. The more you chew the more two things happen. The first is that the pieces of food become smaller, so there is more surface area for the saliva to cover. The second is that the saliva is better mixed with those small pieces of food. When you swallow your food you go into the third step, and this is the one they neglected to teach me in grade school, high school or college. This is where the food sits in a warm pocket and allows the enzymes from the saliva and the enzymes in the food interact with that food and break it down even further. If you have chewed it well and have eaten great food this is an easy task. If you have made one of the common mistakes it makes this step difficult or even impossible.
The first common mistake is gulping your food. This is swallowing big bites. In this case your pieces of food are larger, and there is less saliva mixed with it. Since the saliva works from the outside of a piece of food the larger it is the more difficult it is to digest. The second mistake is drinking lots of liquid with your food. This causes the saliva to be diluted. Here are the saliva enzymes swimming around hoping to bump into something to digest instead of already coating the pieces of food. You compound this even further. Remember our bowls of oatmeal? Cold slows down the enzymes. Picture a group of kids. In the summer they are running around having fun. If the weather gets really cold they may run around for a while, but when that cold seeps in all they want to do is to huddle up and keep warm. Enzymes are the same way. The third common mistake is to eat cooked and processed food. Remember I said that this stage in the process is for the enzymes in the saliva and the enzymes in the food to interact with the food? If you are eating cooked and processed foods there are no living enzymes in them. They have all been killed. The enzymes from you saliva is all you have to do the job.
If the food is not broken down in this stage of digestion it makes the next stage even more difficult, and again potentially impossible. The next stage is where the food is mixed with the hydrochloric acid. Many people have been taught that the hydrochloric acid then breaks down the food. They have been taught wrong. Scientists now know that the purpose behind the hydrochloric acid is to provide an acidic environment for the enzymes that break down the food. I have heard of an experiment that was done, but I haven’t done it myself because I don’t like the idea of playing with acid. In the experiment they took two burgers, meat buns and all, and broke them up into really small pieces. Then they put them in individual bowls. In one bowl they added hydrochloric acid; in the other bowl they added hydrochloric acid and enzymes. If I had been doing the experiment I would have had a bowl with just enzymes, but that’s me. The bowl with just the acid just sat there. Within, I think it was an hour, the bowl with the acid and enzymes the burger was totally liquefied. To me this shows which is actually doing the work.
But let’s go back to our mistakes. Let’s say you made all three mistakes. You gulped your food, and drank a huge glass of ice cold beverage with it. Your body doesn’t sense when the food is ready to be mixed with the acid, it is more of a timing thing. So you have these huge pieces of food floating in an ice cold soup, and no digestion is taking place. The acid is added and because there were no enzymes in the food there is nothing for the acid to activate. Everything just sits there. It eventually starts to warm up, but the original enzymes from the saliva has been deactivated by the acid. Your body is pumping as much enzymes as it can make from your pancreas, but it isn’t going to be enough to digest those huge lumps in a timely fashion. Your body then goes into plan B and puts in more acid, because that is all it has left to do. If you make a regular habit of this you are heading to two distinct possibilities. The first is Diabetes, because you are overworking your pancreas. The second is heartburn or acid reflux disease, because your body is pouring more and more acid into your stomach to try and help digestion.
The third thing you are heading for is something called MARS or Multiple Allergic Response syndrome. It has also been called Leaky Gut Syndrome. Remember your body does a lot of things by time. Eventually those large pieces of food will be pushed into your intestines. By now they are small enough that if someone opened you up they wouldn’t recognize it as food, but it is still large enough that it is not individual nutrients. These pieces have also begun fermenting because they haven’t yet been digested. The toxins given off by the fermentation, the bacteria that is now growing and thriving in this food mass, and the size and shape of all these pieces begin working together to wear out or damage the lining of the intestine. Eventually holes will appear in the wall of the intestine. On the other side of that wall is your blood stream. What is supposed to happen is that only nutrients can get through the wall, but now pieces of food, toxins and bacteria start making their way into your blood stream. Your immune system steps in and tries to deactivate these invaders. This is what I refer to when I say your immune system is acting as a secondary digestive system. Part of the immune system’s job is to identify invaders and build antibodies against them. This is why there are some diseases you can only get once, and the basis of vaccinations. Unfortunately what your body is building antibodies for is your food. This is where you become allergic to different foods. Once your immune system gets worn down badly enough it starts overreacting and starts making antibodies for everything it encounters. In rare cases you can even become allergic to yourself.
I started off talking about how important hydration was, and then told you not to drink with meals. So what are you supposed to do? Well the first step is to truly understand how much fluid your body really needs. The rule of thumb of eight glasses a day doesn’t cut it. The size of your body matters when it comes to hydration. You wouldn’t try to get a twenty pound child to drink as much as a two hundred pound adult. It wouldn’t happen. To know what you as an individual needs in water take your body weight in pounds and divide it by two. The resulting number is the number of ounces you need per day. Sounds pretty simple, but it does get a little more complicated than that.
Half of those ounces need to be taken during your first four waking hours. This is because you aren’t drinking while you are sleeping, and you need to refill your reservoirs. You already learned that you don’t want to drink during meals, so space your water so you have a window of twenty minutes before and thirty minutes after your meal. The exception to this is the one gulp you need to take your Enriching Gifts Plant Enzymes with your meals.
You may have noticed that I switched from fluids to water. There has been much debate on this over the years, but for me the evidence shows that the quality of your fluids really does matter. The optimum water is one where the water has been highly filtered or distilled, but that the minerals have been added back. Many people think they are getting this when they buy bottled water. If you have been paying attention to the news you will have learned that bottled water is not optimal for your body. The plastic bottles give off a substance called BPA, which is not good for you. The warmer the plastic has gotten the more BPA is in the water, and we never know under what conditions those bottles have been stored and transported. In some areas bottled water may be safer than tap water, but the reverse may also be true. Sodas, coffee, sports drinks, energy drinks etc shouldn’t be included in your water calculation. It takes almost as much water for your body to filter out the toxins and digest the nutrients that have been added as you are taking in.
I hope this has shed a little light on the subject of hydration and how it effects digestion.
Sources:
Wholistic Skin and Body Rejuvenation Level One Certificated Course Material by Gloria E. Gilbere, N.D, D.A.Hom., Ph.D, Wholistic Rejuvenist, copyrighted 2008 by Gloria E. Gilbere, LLC.
Enzymes the Fountain of Life by D.A Lopez, M.D., R.M Williams, M.D., Ph.D and K. Miehlke, M.D. copyrighted 1994 by the Neville Press Inc.
Invisible Illnesses by Gloria Gilbere, N.D., D.A. Hom., Ph.D., copyrighted 2nd edition 2005, 2002 by Gloria Gilbere, N.D., D.A. Hom., Ph.D
Conversations with Ron Schneider
