Stress And Digestion

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