Today we're going to talk about stress and digestion. A lot of people are
concerned with nutrition and what they put in their mouths, but they don't
understand how stress and digestion plays a big part of that whole picture.
So today we're going to go over all of what that entails and we're going to
show you exactly how it works and what you can do to handle it better hey I'm
Dr. Ekberg with Wellness For Life and if you'd like to truly master health by
understanding how the body really works make sure you subscribe and hit that
notification bell so that you don't miss anything. So I had a patient come in the
other day and he said I have all these allergies I have all these digestive
issues but I haven't changed anything what's going on? so we checked him out
and we found that he was sensitive to a few things and he says oh but I
haven't changed anything I've eaten those all along and then I asked what
else has changed and he said well you know I've been really stressed I've had
a lot of stuff going on so we're gonna talk about how all of those things fit
together so number one when it comes to nutrition the first thing that people
think about and sometimes the only thing they think about is the diet meaning the
food choice what is the type of food that you put in your mouth and yes
that's important but there is so much more to nutrition that makes more of a
difference than even what sort of foods you put in so first once you put it in
your mouth you have to start breaking it down so the first part of breakdown
happens in the mouth so there's two things that happen you chew and you
produce enzymes so that's step one already in the mouth you're starting to
break down the food and then number two in the stomach the stomach adds
hydrochloric acid and more enzymes so that you can break down the food into
smaller and smaller pieces and then into the small intestine where it sits for a
little bit longer and now there's even more enzymes to break it down even
more and once that breakdown is done then in the small intestine there is
absorption we have to get the smaller components out of the intestinal tract
and into the bloodstream so they can be distributed and then once they're being
distributed we have to assimilate them we have to get them out of the blood and
into the cell and once it's in the cell we have to use the nutrients for
anabolism for rebuilding for growth and repair so why does all this matter so
much and what does stress have to do with it
well every one of these steps is very very expensive have you ever thought
about how you feel after a big meal so you put all this food into your body
that should give you energy right how do you feel on Thanksgiving or you after
stuffing yourself or you just all energized no you're comatose
because you put all that stuff into the body and it's very very expensive for
the body to make all the enzymes and to start all these processes so it can use
up as much as a third of your entire energy production just to process a meal
so oftentimes we don't think about these things that just sort of happen for us
but it really helps to understand what's involved that none of these things
happen by themselves and every time there's an enzyme involved if we ate
whole food then that enzyme would already be contained and alive in the
food but if we process the food then we killed off that enzyme and now the body
has to produce the enzyme inside and now we're using up resources that we
wouldn't have to use if we ate the whole fresh live food so all of these steps
and stress is something that interferes with your parasympathetic nervous system
so go back and revisit the videos that we've done previously on
sympathetic and parasympathetic and on stress but essentially you have a fight
flight system and a feed breed system and anything that makes you feel
stressed anything that makes you feel tense frustrated overwhelmed upset
fearful is going to increase your fight flight response at the expense of your
feed breed response so anytime that you have stress you're going to turn off all
the resources in your body that are associated with digestion immune system
growth and repair so when you have stress you're gonna make less enzymes
you're gonna make less hydrochloric acid in the stomach and you make less enzymes
in the stomach you are going to make less enzymes in the small intestine and
absorption doesn't happen by itself that's an active cellular process it's a
transport mechanism that uses energy it's like little shuttles that have to
take each molecule grab it and transport it across all of these things are very
expensive they use up energy same thing with assimilation to get it from the
blood into the cell again active transport it uses up energy and finally
anabolism building growth putting all these things together it's like a little
machine it's like a factory the the enzymes all these intracellular
component they're like factory components and workers they have to work
to put this together and it costs energy so the energy can either be allocated to
survival meaning fight flight deal with things that you are stressed about or
they can be used for this digestion process but you can't do both at once so
as soon as you increase your stress you're gonna shut down your digestion so
once I explained this to my patient then the light really went on for him and he
all of a sudden he realized everything that had been going on with
him that week was due to his stress levels his stress has shut down this
digestion so even the things that he normally could eat all of a sudden they
didn't agree with him he couldn't process them fully and when you can't
completely break something down that's when you develop sensitivities to it so
I hope this has been helpful and help shed some light and increase your
overall picture on what's what's going on and why it's so important so by
practicing some relaxation exercises doing some meditation doing some
breathing exercises you can actually undo a whole day of stress you can
dampen that stress response you can increase your parasympathetic your
digestive your immune system your your uh anabolism function to get all
of that working better again so leave me any questions any comments at all and
we'll try to get back to you and answer those questions if you're new to this
channel and you enjoy this sort of content then make sure that you
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your way thanks for watching