Understanding Digestion

The basic principles as required to be understood at this stage of your healing journey, it changes a touch as you evolve in health.

You can think of digestion as burning wood in a fire place. Let me paint you a visual…

• The fireplace represents your gut.
• The fire represents your digestive energy.
• The wood represents the ‘vehicle’ (fuel/food source, or ‘source of nutrition’)
• The particles comprising the wood represent the nutrition contained within the vehicle, with the heat produced being representative of the gut’s perspective on nutrition quality. i.e., the hotter it burns, the higher the quality.
• The gasses given off through the process of burning the wood represent the ‘process pollution’, and
• The remaining ash left over once the burning is complete represents the digestive wastes that would go on to become poop.

One of the best burning woods you can offer a fireplace is the rare Mallee root. This hardwood burns clean, hot, produces minimal ash, and offers lasting energy when its combustion is unhindered by residual wastes, such as the environment found in a well-kept fireplace.

This analogy, when applied to our digestion, would be the equivalent of fuelling ourselves primarily with the fruits. The fruit vehicle itself is energising, as it is broken down it ‘gives’ its energy freely as opposed to enervating the digestive power. This energy generates more heat in the digestive fire. The hotter it gets the cleaner it burns, allowing the nutrition to be extracted without effort, and the ash left over is both minimal and alkaline (harmless), therefore the fireplace remains unburdened by excessive residues.

Conversely, if you were to offer the fireplace something like fir or spruce, it would have a much harder time breaking it down, expending barrow loads of energy to do so. The increased expense and effort required on this fuel is due to the complex nature of the resins and pitch contained in the vehicle. Far more energy is required to combust it, resulting in an enervation of the fire. By virtue, the heat generated is sub-par, process pollution is significantly higher and the ash that remains is sticky, impactive, higher in volume, hinders subsequent burns, and clogs up the fireplace like hair in your showers drain grate.

The digestive equivalent of fir and spruce would be vehicles high in starch or complex proteins such as rice and meats. The load these guys place on the digestive system is enormous and, if consumed consistently as a primary food source, produce a profound overall negative impact on stomach and bowel health. Biome balance, hormone health, nutrition extraction, absorption, cognition and mood are all negatively affected, and eventually the internal environment of the body becomes unstable.

The deeper level issues are explained under the next heading, however the grand take away here is that your choice of fuel determines the ‘heat’ of the fire, and you want that furnace as hot as possible!