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The Brief Overview of the Digestive System and How It Works

Brenda Albano

November 6, 2023

The Brief Overview of the Digestive System and How It Works

What Is The Digestive System?

The digestive system is made up of the gastrointestinal tract, as well as the liver, pancreas, and gallbladder. The GI tract is made up of organs that are connected by a long tube that extends from the mouth to the anus. The GI tract is made up of organs such as the mouth, esophagus, stomach, and anus. The liver, pancreas, and gallbladder are the solid organs. Digestion is important because your body needs nutrients from food and beverages in order to function and be healthy. Proteins, carbohydrates, vitamins, and water are all nutrients. Your digestive system breaks nutrients down into small pieces that your body can absorb and use for energy, growth, and cell repair.

What Happens in the Digestive System Process

Down your throat by your tongue. To prevent choking, a little flap of tissue known as the epiglottis folds across your windpipe, allowing food to enter into your esophagus. When you start swallowing, it becomes automatic.

Peristalsis is when your brain sends a signal to the muscles of your esophagus. As food gets to the end of the esophagus, a muscle called the lower esophageal sphincter relaxes and allows food to flow into your stomach. This sphincter usually closes to prevent stomach contents from spilling back into the esophagus. When food reaches your stomach, the muscles of your stomach combine it with digestive secretions.

This produces a semiliquid substance called chyme. The stomach then releases these secretions into the small intestine. The small intestine muscles combine food with digestive fluids from the pancreas, liver, and gut to push the combination forward for digestion.

Now it’s the small intestine which absorbs these digested nutrients into your circulation. The waste products of digestion travel into the big intestine allowing peristalsis to proceed. Undigested food, fluid, and aged cells from the lining of your GI tract are all waste products from the digestion process. The large intestine absorbs water and converts liquid waste into feces.

A process called Peristalsis is what assists the moving of the feces to the rectum. The rectum, which is the bottom end of your big intestine, holds feces until it pushes it out of your anus during bowel movement. As you can see the digestive system is constantly hard at work, which is why you should consider giving your digestive tract a good cleansing with a 15 Day Cleanse capsule.

How One Can Boost their Digestion

People frequently believe that the food they eat comes out with their next bowel movement. In reality, it may take considerably longer. Food goes quite a distance
through the digestive system.

The transit time for the digestive process is the amount of time it takes to get from the mouth to the anus. This duration varies from person to person, but for someone who eats a fiber-rich diet, it is normally approximately 24 hours.

WFP Infographics 15 Day Cleanse 30ct

There are several elements that influence how long food takes to travel through the body. What was consumed, exercise level, psychological stress, personal qualities, and overall health are examples of these. If transportation time is an issue for you, there are certain actions you may take to expedite matters.

List of What You Can Do to Boost Your Digestion

30 minutes of exercise every day

By the process of muscular contractions digested food can be transported through and out of the body. Peristalsis refers to these muscular contractions. A couch potato or sedentary lifestyle greatly reduces peristalsis, which increases transit time. Constipation and overall pain often eventually follows. Exercising raises metabolism, which causes muscular contractions to become more frequent. This is why some people feel the need to use the restroom immediately following exercise.

Consume more fiber

Fiber-rich meals like whole grains, green vegetables, and fresh fruits will bulk up your stools and encourage the gut to move food along. It has been said that fiber is the broom of the digestive tract. As a sudden increase in fiber can induce gas, bloating, and cramps, it should be added into the diet gradually over a steady period of time.

Drink plenty of water

We’ve all heard that we should drink 8 glasses of water every day. This advice is made for a variety of health reasons. In this scenario, water keeps the feces wet, which improves transit time. Waste that lingers in your colon for an extended period of time has a larger chance of being reabsorbed back into circulation and irritating the gut walls. A transit period of more than 72 hours is considered sluggish and can irritate your colon and cause autointoxication and when it becomes a regular part of life, increases your risk of candidiasis, diverticulitis, and cancer.

Learn more from our blog

Know the 5 Digestive System Diseases

1. Enzyme Deficiency

Enzymes assist your body to efficiently break down food to obtain necessary nutrients. What exactly causes an enzyme deficiency? To start, not eating enough raw foods with readily available enzymes.

Certain illnesses, such as chronic pancreatitis, cystic fibrosis, and diabetes, might cause your body to create insufficient enzymes on its own. Aging and lifestyle decisions might gradually decrease your body’s ability to create an adequate level of enzymes.

In addition to certain chronic illnesses that impair your body’s capacity to manufacture enzymes, lifestyle factors have a role. Enzyme deficiencies and digestive system diseases can be caused by a variety of factors, including:

  1. Sugary, cooked and processed foods dominate the diet.
  2. Antibiotic usage on many occasions
  3. Smoking and Aging
  4. Pregnancy
  5. Stress (physical, psychological, or emotional)

Given the vital function enzymes play in the body and your capacity to absorb nutrients, there are several symptoms that might occur when you don’t have an adequate supply of enzymes. Let’s face it, if you’re having difficulty absorbing nutrients from your diet, it might have a significant impact on your health.

Digestion Specialist Best Complete Digestive Enzyme Supplements Infographics

If you are or believe you may be struggling with an enzyme deficiency check out Digestion Specialist: Best Complete Digestive Enzyme Supplement. It contains 15 natural digestive enzymes in one capsule, which is sure to alleviate your lack of enzymes. Our customers tell us, this unique multienzyme formula is simply the best digestive enzyme supplement they’ve used.

You may also have a low fiber level if you have experienced constipation, hemorrhoids, diverticulitis, irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), overweight/obesity, heart disease, diabetes, bowel cancer, or breast cancer. Even getting more fiber, through a psyllium seed powder or delicious fiber gummies, into your diet is sure to help.

2. Gut Bacteria and Indigestion

Furthermore, many additional disorders, such as inflammatory bowel disease, obesity, diabetes, liver disease, chronic heart disease, malignancies, HIV, and autism, have been linked to the amount and quality of gut bacteria. If you experience these symptoms, don’t wait, rebalance your gut flora with the natural probiotic supplement, Alive Probiotics.

Alive Probiotics Natural Probiotic Supplement WFP Infographics

Indigestion can manifest as upper abdominal pain or discomfort (dyspepsia) or as a searing ache behind the breastbone (heartburn). Dyspepsia and heartburn can occur simultaneously or separately. Symptoms typically manifest shortly after eating or drinking. Feeling full or bloated are common related symptoms. Learn more about our blog: Digestion Problem Solution: Beat Indigestion Naturally With Our Tips and Top 6 Food Choices.

3. Gastrointestinal Diseases

Gastrointestinal illnesses impact the digestive tract from the mouth to the anus. Functional and structural are the two categories of these kinds of illnesses:

4. Functional Disorders

Functional disorders are those in which the GI tract seems normal but does not move correctly. Of the two, functional disorders are the most frequent gastrointestinal issues. Common symptoms include constipation, lactose intolerance, irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), nausea, food poisoning, gas, bloating, GERD, and diarrhea. Many causes can disrupt your GI tract’s motility (ability to move), including:

  1. Consuming a low-fiber diet
  2. Inadequate physical activity
  3. Traveling or other adjustments
  4. Consuming a lot of dairy products
  5. Stress
  6. Refusing to have a bowel movement, maybe due to hemorrhoids or anal retention
  7. Overuse of antidiarrheal drugs
  8. Taking calcium or aluminum-containing antacids
  9. Taking certain medications (especially antidepressants and strong pain medications)
  10. Pregnancy

5. Structural Gastrointestinal Illnesses

Are those in which your gut appears wrong on inspection and also fails to function appropriately. Sometimes the structural anomaly must be surgically removed. Structural GI illnesses include stenosis, inflammatory bowel disease, hemorrhoids and colon cancer and may also be strictures such as anal fissures, polyps, perianal abscesses, anal fistula, and diverticular disease.

Chemicals / Toxins and the Effect on the Digestive System and the Digestive Process

Many dangerous chemicals can be found in water, food, cleaning products, and other environmental sources, and many individuals are constantly exposed to them. Toxins are also created in the body as a result of poor gut health, a process known as autointoxication.

Autointoxication is an ancient hypothesis which holds that digestive waste products can harm the body and have a role in many, if not all, illnesses. The digestive system may detoxify itself by removing harmful meals through vomiting or diarrhea.

Learn more from the related topics from our blog:

List of Highly Harmful Foods to Lookout For

Seed Oils

Many foods contain toxins and harmful chemicals, such as corn, sunflower, safflower, soybean, and cottonseed oils are examples of refined vegetables and seed oils. Unlike oils derived from naturally fatty foods like olive oil and avocado oil, those other oils must be extracted through a sophisticated process that requires the use of chemical compounds like hexane to extract and purify them. As a result, these seed oils have undergone extensive processing.

Oils include a lot of calories and fat. This is not usually a problem because fat is a macronutrient that supplies energy to the body. Some oils, on the other hand, are particularly rich in omega-6 polyunsaturated fatty acids. If ingested in high quantities, omega-6 fats can be dangerous since they are susceptible to degradation and rancidity when exposed to light or air. They may also be pro-inflammatory. Furthermore, one observational research discovered that women with the greatest omega-6 fat consumption and the lowest omega-3 fat intake had an 87-92 percent higher risk of breast cancer than those with more balanced intakes.

Trans Fats

Another harmful chemical reactor to the body is trans fats, created by injecting hydrogen into unsaturated oils such as soybean and maize oils, causing them to solidify. They used to be found in a variety of processed foods, including margarine, snack foods, and packaged baked products. However, animal and observational research have consistently demonstrated that trans fat consumption induces inflammation and has a deleterious impact on heart health.

Cinnamon

Coumarin is a poisonous chemical found in cinnamon. Coumarin has been associated with an increased risk of cancer and liver damage at large dosages. However, until you get your cinnamon tested, you won’t know how much coumarin it contains. Most people do not know what they are actually getting when they believe they are buying just plain cinnamon. Reach for organic and pure to be sure.

Sugars

Frequently referred to as “empty calories.” However, sugar’s negative consequences extend beyond that. Excess fructose sugar, such as high-fructose corn syrup, has been related to a variety of significant illnesses, including obesity, type 2 diabetes, metabolic syndrome, fatty liver disease, and cancer.

Fish

Although fish is a highly healthy animal protein, many deep sea fish can contain high quantities of mercury, a recognized poison. This is due to the pollution moving up the food chain in the water. Mercury is neurotoxic, which means that it may harm the brain and nerves. According to research, young children, pregnant and nursing women are more vulnerable because mercury can disrupt fetal and newborn brain and nervous system development.

The Takeaway

Obviously, you should not overreact to this knowledge by eliminating fish, cinnamon, and sweets from your diet. You can still indulge yourself, and a little chocolate or fish now and then won’t hurt your digestion. Don’t over consume fiber either.

For your daily nutritional and detox supplements, shop only at your trusted and affordable natural health supplements store online.

Although, if you’ve seen any of the symptoms stated in this article and think you could have an enzyme deficiency or bad gut flora, don’t suffer any longer; instead, try the items suggested in this article.

More reading:

The Key Role of Digestive Enzymes on the Digestive System

FAQs

1. What are the types of enzymes used in digestion?

There are many enzymes in the digestive system, the main five are Amylase, Maltase, Lactase, Lipase, Proteases, and Sucrase.

2. Who should not take digestive enzymes?

Antacids and some diabetic medicines may potentially interact with digestive enzyme supplements. They may result in adverse effects such as stomach discomfort, flatulence, and diarrhea.

3. What happens if your enzymes are low?

Low digestive enzyme levels can lead to poorly digested meals and malnutrition.

References:

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17205399/
https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/325822
https://www.healthline.com/health/chemical-digestion

DISCLAIMER: These statements have not been approved by the FDA and we do not make any claims that this product or ingredient will cure, prevent, treat or even diagnose any disease. Studies linked here were conducted by independent labs for informational purposes. Please check with your doctor of choice for information regarding your own personal health profile and needs.

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