Therapeutic Nutrition Part 1

Once you have your diet right i.e you know and are eating to your metabolic type, there are 4 fundamentals to nutritional therapy that you need to optimise. Get these right along with your diet and you should not need to count calories or do anything extreme. You should get healthier, thinner, and sexier with more energy, strong hair and nails and clear skin if after following your metabolic type and maximising the list below you are not moving in the right direction it is time for you to look a bit deeper and possibly get some lab tests done, NOT cut calories!

These 4 fundamentals are;

1. Hydration
2. Digestion
3. Assimilation
4. Elimination

Hydration

Are you drinking 1.5 to 2 litres of water per day? Rain or shine the basic Metabolic processes that occur in each of your 3 trillion cells require 4oz of pure water every 30 mins to run efficiently! ‘Remember nothing does what water does in your body!’ So fruit juice, tea and coffee don’t count as they all require further metabolic process to retrieve the water or to digest and assimilate them to get the nutrients out of them.

Bottled water is generally better than tap water but if you want to go one step further then look into getting a reverse osmosis water filter here;

www.healthy-house.co.uk

At this site you can get many other health products I recommend spending some time going through it and making a shopping list so that over time you can reduce all the blocking factors to your health that reside in your environment. First steps though, the water you drink and shower/wash in!

Digestion

‘You are what you eat!’

Is this a true statement?

Personally I think it’s a great line to get people to start thinking about food and what they are placing in their mouths but is it accurate…… NO.

You are only what you can DIGEST and ASSIMILATE, in other words, you are what you can break down and absorb into your blood stream and therefore use to build and fuel your body. You can eat the healthiest organic foods and take the best supplements but if you don’t have the digestive capacity to break stuff down into small enough elements so that they can pass through the wall of your small intestine then it really does not matter and you are probably waisting your money.

With this in mind we started to talk about supplementation primarily Hydrochloric acid (HCL) and digestive enzymes.

The stomach’s ability to produce HCL and pepsin is often inadequate.  It is affected by high carbohydrate diets, medication; particularly pain relief meds and allergy medication and it also reduces with age.

You will often hear people refer to this or that as the bodies first line of defence against parasites, bacteria, viruses, yeast, mould and fungi. The first step in your defence against invaders is the acidic condition of your stomach as most can’t survive the low pH of this environment.

HCL helps in the digestion of proteins along with pepsin so that it can be ASSIMILATED by the intestines. If too larger protein molecules are absorbed by your intestines then you immune system is called into action. This can lead to allergies such as hay fever or if you have continued exposure you could end up with an autoimmune disease.

HCL also triggers the pyloric sphincter to open (exit of the stomach), so that the pre-digested contents can pass into the small intestine. The pyloric sphincter is pH (acid/alkaline) sensitive. This means that it only opens when the pH of the stomach gets low enough or acidic enough.

Inadequate HCL causes many health problems and is a very important issue that is not addressed by mainstream diets, doctors or many other health professionals. As this is a big issue, a root cause of disease, we will be talking about HCL, HCL supplementation and a condition called hydrochloride in the future.

But in a nut shell…. If you don’t have enough HCL you can’t provide the right environment to maximise digestion, if you can’t maximise the breaking down of food you CANNOT therefore maximise assimilation which means you can’t give your body the nutrition that it needs. As you can see from this, inadequate HCL can be one of the root causes of all disease.

Digestive Enzymes

Breaking down food particles into small enough pieces that they can pass through the wall of your small intestine and be assimilated into the body. We have a finite ability to produce enzymes but have many environmental factors that inhibit or use up our enzyme capacity. Taking a digestive enzyme is beneficial as it will relieve the stress on our bodies digestive capacity as well as slowing the use of our enzymic capacity.

Digestive enzymes should not be taken with your meal, unless otherwise directed they should be taken about 20 minutes after eating.

I think that that’s probably enough information for one post. We’ll cover probiotic and elimination real soon.

If you’re struggling with your diet or your health then contact me for a free consultation.

Committed to your health and success

Keith, Clare and the Absolute Training team.