Nutrition as Medicine for Balancing Weight Part Two

I want to comment about supplements at this point. If you read Part 1 of this series, you know that we are challenged in terms of obtaining the most nutrition from our food due to poor digestion and assimilation. I would like to make a few more points along this line now:

• Our organisms are under a lot of stress these days and this will impair digestion/assimilation in many ways.
• Our food sources are not what they were in the past. Much of our food is being grown on depleted soils. Most food sources contain added chemistry ranging from pesticides, herbicides, and fertilizers. In animal food sources we have hormones, steroids, and antibiotics.
• Our food tends to be increasingly farmed or ranched in giant centralized agrabusiness facilities, then shipped long distances. Of course, it is picked before it is ripe in the first place, which further reduces available nutrition.
• We eat diets increasingly composed of refined and processed food-like substances which are often devoid of nutritional value, and which introduce substances into the body which further stress the organism.

So our food is of poor quality and our bodies are extremely taxed. We are not getting the cellular nutrition we need to repair and fortify against these onslaughts to our health. This is why I believe that a certain level of supplementation is generally necessary for optimal health. I also believe that each one of us would be much better off if we could eat 100% fresh, ripe, local organically grown, unprocessed whole food 100% of the time. Given the parameters of most people's lives, this is a hard standard to meet.

So, if you are going to supplement, what should you use? This is a long and complicated subject, which will not be fully covered in this blog post. However, there are a few supplements that are important for the optimal functioning of the digestive tract, and I would like to begin with these.

In the first part of the series I mentioned that saliva is crucial to good digestion. The ancient Chinese system considered saliva to the be 'elixir of life.' They even have a special exercise for stimulating the flow of saliva, which I may include later. For now, because I am focused on supplements, let me talk a minute about bitter herbs. In folk medicine, 'bitters' are often taken before a meal to stimulate saliva production and aid digestion. You can still find bitters in the health food store. There are many versions, and it is not my intention here to push one brand or another. You can also grow bitter herbs yourself in containers if you are limited on garden space, or eat a salad with robust bitter greens for the same purpose. Gentian is one of the most common herbs in bitters formulas. These are generally in the form of a tincture, which is often an alcohol based extract of the herbs' main principles. You can generally find non-alcohol forms of tinctures as well, or as I mentioned, grow the fresh herbs yourself, or eat the tangy, bitter salad greens.

One of the other things our diets are sorely lacking in are the enzymes which are in the foods themselves that are crucial to good digestion. These enzymes are destroyed by just about everything including long transportation times, heating, freezing, processing, refining, washing too vigorously and so forth. For optimal health we need whole raw produce in our diets every day for the enzymes (and other reasons). Lacking consistency in this, we can consider supplementing with a high quality digestive enzyme formula which contains a wide spectrum of enzymes. Enzymes are vital for the proper break down of the food into its nutrient constituents.

Next, in the lower gut, we need special organisms to continue the digestive process. These are called probiotics and include things like Lactobacillus acidophilus. These good organisms also help to keep the pathogenic organisms in check. This symbiotic relationship within the gut is imperative to good digestion and good health. Again, these organisms are easily off-balanced by stress, incorrect eating habits and other factors. Supplementing with a good wide spectrum pro-biotic can restore balance in the intestinal tract, improving digestion and assimilation. This in turn can reduce cravings and hence, excess weight.

Another area of supplements for the digestive system concerns the cilia mentioned in part one of this series. These cells are susceptible to stress, so taking a high caliber multi-vitamin/mineral supplement with extra B vitamins for stress and trace minerals for strengthening the cilia is another consideration. When we can optimize our digestive system to make the most of what we are eating, we will find it easier to eat less, since there will be fewer messages from the cells triggering the hunger response.

Final notes:

1. If you are going to take supplements, do some research and find high-quality supplements by reputable companies. It makes no sense at all to buy a supplement for $5 a bottle, when the good stuff costs you $15. Why? Because the $5 bottle is not going to help you, so you just threw that $5 away. Invest in your health if you are going to spend money on supplements. Make sure you are getting value for what you are investing. Do your research. To save on taking so many tablets, find sources that offer a wide spectrum coverage.
2. Also, if you would like to see an excellent documentary on the difference between conventional and organic farming (and what that means in terms of the nutritive value of the food), find a copy of My Father's Garden.
3. In case you did not read the 'About Me' section in the sidebar, let me reinterate here that I am not a doctor, and nothing in this blog should be taken as either a diagnosis or a prescription.

BONUS! Here is the saliva generating exercise mentioned above: use the tongue as a toothbrush, and vigorously scrub all the tooth surfaces in the mouth. This will stimulate the salivary glands and you will wind up with a mouthful of saliva in a short period of time. Traditionally, you are then to divide this into thirds and swallow each third separately.