Do you know how the food you eat is broken down and assimilated? The process is called “Digestion”. If any problems occur to disturb this process then Indigestion may result.
Medical Literature calls Indigestion dyspepsia. Indigestion is one of the health problems facing mankind today. Understanding how the food we eat is broken down and integrated into our cells, can help the understanding of how to overcome indigestion. Knowledge of this process will help us in choosing what to eat, how to eat, and when not to eat.
Quoting from the book “Health Power“ by Hans Diehl and Aileen Ludington–" Digestion is the process by which the body breaks down food into its major constituents, which are proteins, fats and carbohydrates.” p 92. So digestion is what follows the swallow. So digestion carry’s the food’s energy to the body. Our gut, i.e., gastrointestinal organs, digests each in a methodical manner. There are different chemical environment in the gastrointestinal tract. The human stomach is acidic, while the small intestine is alkaline. The methodical manner of breaking food down is not just mechanical but chemical. Chewing our food in our mouth is a very important process in digestion or indigestion.
How can we describe indigestion then? One can say it’s the opposite of digestion but then it goes a little further; it is pain or discomfort in the stomach associated with difficulty in digesting food. So it may come with such symptoms as heartburn- burning or pain in the upper part of the stomach, as stomach ache, or/and upset stomach. It is called dyspepsia. There is hyperacidity, that is, acidity where it should be alkaline and super acidity where acidity should be active. Indigestions often have underlying problems such as gastro esophageal reflux disease (GERD), ulcers or gall bladder disease
This means that each of the constituent part of our food is digested at different rates. Simple carbohydrates (sugars) are digested very fast. Fats take a longer time in digestion and proteins and complex carbohydrates (starches) fall somewhere in between.
This fact made some to come to the idea of eating starchy food at one meal and protein food at a different time to help with rates of digestion. Does this help?
There is no provision for this idea in nature. The reason being that all plant foods and some animal foods are combinations of carbohydrate, protein and fat. Take beans for example, it has quite a large amount of protein, but corn has a good amount of fat. If you want to eat only pure carbohydrate in a meal, then you will have only white sugar or the starchy residue that is left when you remove gluten from white flour. A pure protein meal could be egg whites. For a fat meal you would need a few tablespoons of butter or cooking oil. These pure foods in this sense do not occur in nature, they can only be manufactured. So it is not possible to find such in natural foods. And if you try eating the manufactured as just described, that will be recipe for disaster.
The stomach is very well able to handle these different food constituents. Sugars and starches of the carbohydrates become glucose, fats become fatty acids and proteins become amino acids. The blood can pick up these smaller substances from the intestines. Note carefully that it's only part of the digestion that occurs in the stomach. Digestion actually starts from the mouth. There is order in the process of digestion. First carbohydrates digestion starts in the mouth with the saliva and continues in the stomach. Protein digestion begins in the stomach and continues in the intestines. Fat is largely digested in the intestines.
Foods do have degree of acidity and alkalinity, but the digestive organs handle the situation very well. The stomach has three basic functions.
It breaks down food particles to a more uniform size by muscular action.
It brings food mass to the needed consistency by adding or absorbing fluid.
It also brings its contents to the necessary degree of acidity by secreting acidic digestive juices. Therefore giving the food the required acid medium for foods that need to be so.
When the stomach content goes into the intestine however, they become alkalinized by the juices that the pancreas secrets. The digestive process is actually completed in the intestines.