4 Simple Ways to Improve Digestion
Digestion is your body’s way of breaking down food into nutrients it can absorb and use for energy, healing, and cellular repair. A healthy digestive system ensures you're actually absorbing the nutrients from the foods you eat and getting rid of toxins instead of them accumulating in your body. When digestion is off due to stress, poor hydration, low stomach acid, or inflammation, you might experience bloating, fatigue, nutrient deficiencies, irregular bowel movements, and toxin build up. Supporting digestion helps your whole body function better, from your brain, to your hormones, to your energy, to your blood sugar, etc.
How to Improve Digestion and Absorption?
Practice mindful eating. Mental power is often underestimated as a digestive aid. Did you know our digestion actually starts in the brain? When you think about and visualize your food, your brain is capable of sending signals to the rest of the body about what you are about to ingest and to start preparing. For example, if you know that you are going to eat chicken and think about it and visualize how it will taste and feel – the brain starts stirring up the enzymes needed for protein breakdown.
Increase stomach acid is such an important part of our gut health. It not only helps to directly start breaking down food when it falls into it, but it also kills bad bacteria and pathogens from entering into the intestines. When the bad bacteria and pathogens/viruses get past the stomach they can negatively affect our good gut bacteria leading to other issues within the body. Listed below are ways to increase stomach acid. The best time to take these is 15 minutes before you intake food.
Apple Cider Vinegar with some warm water before every meal can stimulate stomach acid and digestive enzymes aiding in breakdown and absorption of food.
Acids / Bitters in general have the same mechanism. These include: Digestive bitter drops, lemon, lime, and ginger.
Digestive Enzymes can also be very helpful in aiding digestion. However, these need to be taken with caution because overtime the body will start to depend on them.
Keeping the stomach environment acidic before and during eating. This means not drinking anything that can interfere with the acidity of the stomach, such as water and other liquids. This is a hard one for people at first, but I promise it can make a big difference!
Aid mechanical digestion. Chewing thoroughly is a big part of mechanical digestion and the more you can break it down at the start of the cascade, the easier it will be for the rest of the process.
