Hi, we've talked a lot about nutrition and building blocks, and today we're gonna go into digestion, and why that's really important as well for the whole picture.So surely we just chew and swallow the food, and that's kind of it. Well actually we start when we're looking and we're smelling the food and we're seeing the food. And that, you can sometimes feel it gets your saliva going and you're, kind of, ready to, kind of, start eating the food. So that chewing, that mechanism to start, to mechanically start breaking down the food is really important, and it mixes it with that saliva I've just mentioned, to start pulling apart some of the carbohydrates, and start kind of breaking up those molecules to get towards these building blocks that we've been talking about. So you will then want to make sure you're chewing your food really well, we're kind of almost looking for a sort of like a baby food consistency. I know, particularly children, my kids are terrible, they kind of look like snakes are kind of swallowing these huge lumps and kind of bolting down their food. But we really want to try and get it as broken up as we can in the mouth to really get a head start on it to allow our stomachs and the rest of our intestines to kind of really, really do their job well and get, get the nutrients out of what we're putting in.So once we've swallowed this lovely chewed food, it gets down to our stomach, and then it's the acid in our stomach which starts doing some important jobs. The acid can act, kind of, almost as a steriliser, if you think, for any pathogens that we might have taken in with our food, which is brilliant, but then the other really important job that the acid does is, when our, particularly our protein molecules when they're, when we've eaten our protein, you could kind of think of them as big strings of pearls, long strings of pearls that have kind of been twisted all up. And what the acid does is kind of gently untwists that, that string, it's called denaturing. And it just un-twizzles it just a bit, so then all the enzymes that can kind of come and snip it up to do the digestion allows that to work.So the next stage is that the food goes from our stomach down into our small intestine. Now the digestion that started with us smelling and seeing the food also starts the gallbladder contracting and kind of releasing all its all its digestive juices, which will then start helping complete digestion with digesting the fats, and the carbohydrates and getting those proteins these pearls we were talking about earlier, we've kind of snip them up a little bit in the stomach, but that continues until we get smaller and smaller and smaller strings of these pearls, ready to be absorbed by the body.So sometimes when we're having heightened periods of stress, for example, or if we take medications such as Gaviscones, and the antacid medications, or maybe even the PPI medications, the omeprazoles designed to lower our stomach acid, they're very useful for the reason that they've obviously been prescribed from the doctor. But they have a side effect that the lowering of the acid means that our proteins are not able to, kind of, get that start with their digestion, which could be impacting the ability to digest protein, and kind of get all these building blocks from them as well as, as well as we'd want to, need to.So what are the kind of signs that maybe that things might not be going quite so well, with digestion? Well, we could look at things like gas and bloating, indigestion kind of the refluxes, maybe even slight nausea could be some signs that maybe we're not quite digesting that food properly, not quite breaking up how we need to. But you could also look at our stools, they're really useful for evidence of how things are gone through really, such as if they're floating, then that could indicate issues with the fat digestion maybe, and lighter colour stalls or food lumps in the stool, could then indicate things like we're not really chewing the food as much if we still got quite large lumps when we're coming out the other end. So another sign that things might not be quite so happy are food sensitivities. We talked about the molecules and the strings of pearls, if we're not snipping up everything to the size that our body's expecting, so it doesn't recognise it as food to be absorbed, it can kind of sometimes think it's an alien thing that we, it needs sorting out and causing an immune reaction. And we talked in episode two about these kind of heightened immune reactions that could be causing sort of collateral damage. And that is some thought of what could be happening with these food sensitivities that the body is reacting in a similar way to these molecules and causing issues.So what can we do to support ourselves? Well, I know it sounds really basic, but chewing. You can kind of now understand it a bit more that chewing actually is quite an important thing to start our digestion. Trying to take time to eat. I know that's really hard in these days, I think with the just everything's so busy, everything's very rushed. So at least try for some meals in the day to stop and be conscious of what you're eating. Even if you're taking 10 minutes out to stop, breathe, take a few deep breath in, deep breaths out to kind of really get in a more relaxed state rather than this kind of quick, we need to just throw it in, get it in our bodies move on as quick as we can. Another thing we could do to support our digestion is digestive bitters, or bitter foods. And as the name suggests, the kind of the bitter flavour is really good, it's been known for centuries to support our digestion, it stimulates the gallbladder and gets all those digestive juices going. So you can buy over the counter kind of Swedish bitters from herbal shops which you can kind of have kind of teaspoons, apple cider vinegar is a really great, useful vinegar because it's got the mother and it's it's got some natural bacteria and that in a little bit of water or used in a salad dressing, salad dressing on some leaves such as rocket and watercress, which are bitter foods but also we know has the folate, things like that can be used kind of part of a meal, maybe for your evening meal or something like that can be quite a useful things to kind of incorporate now and again to support yourself. And lastly, we can kind of think about the medications. We shouldn't stop anything without speaking to a doctor of course, but if you're taking over the counter antacids quite often, maybe sort of being slightly more conscious of why you're taking them, when you're taking them kind of what foods are maybe causing more issues than others. And kind of being aware of that it may be even keeping a diary, a food diary of what was triggering it. That could also be really helpful to understand what's going on and maybe start figuring out what's going on for you.