We have discussed earlier about the bi-directional relationship between our gut & brain. Gut & brain interact with each other through vagus nerve, also referred to as Gut Brain Axis. It is important to realise there that this bi-directional relationship also has an impact on our digestion. Through the vagus nerve, our gut releases various hormones & neurotransmitters to tell the brain when they are hungry & when they are full. On the other hand, the brain tells the gut when to start the digestion process. For this process to take place smoothly, our gut has to be healthy & balanced. As such these interactions or gaps in interactions impacts our overall physiology & health.
The moment you put food in the mouth, your body immediately releases digestive enzymes-amylase -a digestive protein that degrades starch & sugar. As you start chewing the food, a number of chemical & biological processes start to break down the food. Your teeth grind together to tear down the food into small pieces, ripping apart difficult to digest protein & carbohydrates until they pass down to our stomach through the esophagus. From there our stomach starts process of digestion by sensing food that enters it & releasing hormone- Gastrin.
used to communicate to parietal cells in our stomach lining to release highly acidic gastric juice supported by the hydrochloric acid. Our stomach produces around 6 cups of gastric acid per day. This is our stomach’s power of degrading the food we eat. You must be wondering this must have a lot of acid in our body but that’s the dynamics of our body. It does a balancing act to neutralise the pH level of stomach acid. This neutralising effect takes the form of bicarbonates in our pancreas- neutralizes the acidic, digested food entering our small intestine after the stomach has done its work.
Once the food we eat is neutralised, we start the process of absorption of nutrients. This is where our gut comes into action & our gut-brain axis takes over. Our liver begins secreting bile acids & in coordination with pancreatic juices & bicarbonates- our body begins concluding the digestion process & starts to absorb whatever we have broken down & passes into our bloodstream & lymphatic system for energy. Our gut or digestive tract motility that helps pass the digestive food through it for absorption is controlled by our gut-brain axis. This entire process from mouth to gut takes from 24 to 72 hours.
You must be wondering where the gut microbiome comes into picture? Now comes the most important part.
No matter how efficient our body is, we cannot digest everything we eat & therefore we have outsourced this job to trillions of microbes living in our digestive tract. Whatever finally gets passed on to our large intestine is fair job for our gut microbes. Activity of microbes help provide beneficial nutrients which otherwise is not possible through the normal digestion process. This remaining food also feeds our microbes who have a beneficial role to play in influencing our immune system, strengthening our intestinal lining & fending off pathogens. However, these all activities take place when you are consuming the food that your microbes are hungry for & support healthy & balanced gut microbiome.
However when we follow popular fad diets or adopt a one solution fits all dietary routine approach, we end up consuming foods that not only are difficult to digest but also support opportunistic microbes & pathogens waiting to take control & harm beneficial microbes. When your dietary choices are feeding these opportunistic folks, they dominate good ones & start doing activities or releasing harmful byproducts that harm our health. If this was not enough, disruption in the gut-brain axis( through the harmful gases these bad folks release when we feed them with wrong foods) that mediates digestion process & most of the food which we were able to breakdown finds its way into large intestine, creating havoc in our health.
This disruption in normal functions from our gut-brain axis has been responsible for various gastrointestinal disorders such as bloating, constipation & IBS. One example is high protein consumption. Protein is a thing for the small intestine & our body takes only that much which is required for normal functioning. Rest it leaves for our large intestine to take care & here the problem starts. The folks in our gut do not know what protein is & some of these are protein fermenters who break down protein & release harmful gases- Ammonia, Methane or sulphide causing inflammation & blocking communication between gut & brain which leads to digestive issues.
One of the most important reason for gastrointestinal disorders is gut dysbiosis or imbalance in our gut microbiome which impacts the bi-directional communication between gut & brain by promoting inflammation & harming our intestinal lining- thereby making it permeable & allowing food particles, bacteria & antibodies to pass through the tiny holes between cells on the gut wall.
Besides, gut dysbiosis also muddles the communication between gut & brain by changing length of time of digestive motility & sometimes even slowing down food motility. This means that gut dysbiosis may make more foods enter the large intestine undigested, leaving our gut microbes a feast that can result in painful consequences such as bloating, constipation, gas or abdominal pain. Most of us face this issue since we follow a standard dietary approach &/or trial & error approach & therefore most of the clinical practitioners & doctors find it hard to figure out exact source of such GI issues.
No person experiencing symptoms of IBS has the same cause, nor should they be treated the same. Changes in how we assess our gut health can mean more than just trying different diet. It requires a scientific approach to decode our unique biology. In simple words, using microbial science technology to enter your biology world inside your body & talking to good folks in your gut to know what food they like & restructuring your meal plate based on suggestions given by beneficial microbes.
We, at Genefitletics, are doing exactly that! We are using multi-omics sequencing technology to decode, sequence & analyse your microbial genes expression to learn what dietary recommendations would feed the good folks in your gut & enable them to release beneficial compounds upon digestion of food we eat. If you are suffering from gastrointestinal issues & trial & error approach or medication as suggested by your doctor/nutrition coach has done more harm than good, it is time now to discover your unique biology & learn what food should be on your meal plate that can maintain a state of gut microbiome balance. Hop on for a free discovery call here to know more:
Sources: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6039952/
