Let’s get to work regarding the process of Digestion.
The first bit of the human apparatus of digestion to be considered by us are the Teeth. Mother Nature has provided us with teeth so as we can bite, chew, and grind our food into fine bits. This very first act of biting, chewing and grinding will render the food we place into our mouth to become a duly convenient size and consistency to be effortlessly acted upon by our Saliva and Digestive juices of the stomach, (after which it will have been reduced to a liquid form with nourishing qualities that may be easily assimilated and absorbed by the body).
But do you really act as if you know what purpose your teeth have been given to you? Do you honestly use your teeth for the performance of which they were given? Shockingly, the majority of you bolt your food as if your teeth are merely for show, furthermore generally acting as if Nature had given you a [1]gizzard, by the aid of which it could, like the fowl, grind up and break into small bits the food you had bolted. Remember this hard knock detail for your general health and wellbeing – ‘your teeth have been given to you for a purpose and if Nature had intended for you to bolt your food she would have indeed provided you with a gizzard instead of teeth’.
The next organs to be considered are the Salivary Glands. These glands are six in number, four of which are located under the tongue and jaw and two in the cheeks in the front of the ears, one on each side. Their best-known function is to manufacture, generate and secrete Saliva, which, when needed, flows out through numerous ducts in different parts of the mouth and mixes with the food which is being chewed or masticated. When your food is being chewed and masticated thoroughly, the Saliva is able to reach all portions with a correspondingly increased effect. Your Saliva moistens the food allowing it to be easily swallowed – this function however, being a mere incident to its more important ones. Saliva’s best-known function (and the one which Western science teaches is the most important one) is its chemical facilitation for it converts starchy food matter into sugar, thus performing the first critical step in the process of digestion.
Here is an ‘awareness signal’.
Do you eat in a manner which allows Nature to put the Saliva to work as designed? Do you bolt your food after a few perfunctory chews and thus defeat Nature’s plans for which she has gone to so much trouble to perfect. If you bolt your food, worry not, Nature will manage to ‘get back’ at you for your contempt and disregard of her plans – Nature is the higher intelligence and will always make you pay your debt for your ignorance.
Now let us talk about your ever faithful friend, the Tongue – this tongue of yours, which is so often made to perform the shameful task of assisting in your utterance of angry words, repetition of gossip, possible lying, nagging, swearing and last but not least, complaining.
And yet your tongue has a most important work to perform in the process of nourishing the body with food. Besides a number of mechanical movements which it performs in eating, whereby helping move your food along together with its service in the act of swallowing, it is the organ of taste and passes critical judgment upon the food asking admittance to your stomach.
If you neglect the natural, normal, and healthy use of your Teeth, Salivary Glands, and Tongue then consequently they will all fail to give you the best service. But, if you trust them and return to sane and ordinary methods of eating you will find them gladly and optimistically responding to your trust and they will once more give you their full attentive share of service. They are good friends and servants, but they need a little confidence, trust, and responsibility to bring out their best points and full potential.
After your food has been chewed/masticated and then saturated with Saliva it passes down the throat into the stomach.
The lower part of your throat (the gullet) performs a peculiar muscular contraction, which pushes downward the particles of food, which act forms part of the method of ‘swallowing’.
The process of converting the starchy portion of the food into sugar, or glucose, which is begun by the Saliva in the mouth, continues as the food passes into and down the gullet. This conversion then nearly or entirely ceases once the food reaches the stomach – this fact must be importantly considered when one studies the subject of the advantage of a deliberate habit of eating. If the food you put into your mouth is hastily chewed and swallowed before it reaches the stomach, it will only have been partially affected by the Saliva and will therefore be in an imperfect condition for Nature’s subsequent work, and because of this, you are opening yourself up to the wider arena of discomfort of improper digestion.
The Stomach itself is a pear-shaped bag with a capacity of about [2]one quart or slightly more in some cases. The food enters the stomach from the gullet on the upper left-hand side, just below the heart. The food afterwards leaves the stomach on the lower right hand and enters the small intestine by means of a peculiar sort of valve which is constructed ingeniously so that it allows matter from the stomach to pass easily through it but refuses to allow anything to work back from the intestine into the stomach. This valve is known as the ‘pyloric valve’ or the ‘pyloric orifice’ (the word ‘pyloric’ being derived from the Greek word which means ‘gatekeeper’) and indeed this little valve acts as a most intelligent gatekeeper, always on the watch, never asleep.
The stomach is your great chemical laboratory in which the food you have put into your mouth, and then bitten, chewed, and masticated undergoes chemical changes which allow it to be taken up by the system and changed into a nourishing material which is then converted into rich, red blood. This rich red blood will then course all over your body, building up, repairing, strengthening, regenerating, and adding to all parts and organs. So, you really are what you eat.
The ‘inside’ of the stomach is covered with a lining of delicate mucous membrane which is filled with minute glands, all of which open into the stomach, and around all of this is a very fine network of minute blood-vessels with remarkable thin walls from which the wonderful fluid, the Gastric Juice is manufactured and secreted. The Gastric Juice is a powerful liquid acting as a solvent upon what is called the nitrogenous portions of the food you have imbibed. It also acts upon the sugar or glucose which has been produced from the starchy food by the Saliva, as previously described. The Gastric Juice is a bitter sort of liquid, containing a chemical product called Pepsin, this is its active agent and plays a most important part in digestion of your food.
In a normal, healthy person the stomach manufactures/secretes about one gallon of Gastric Juice in every 24 hours and uses the same amount in the process of digesting the food you have eaten. When the food reaches the stomach the little glands, before mentioned, pour out a sufficient supply of the Gastric Juice which mixes up with the mass of food in your stomach. Then the stomach sets to work with a ‘churning’ motion which moves the pulpy food round and round, from side to side, and end to end, turning, twisting, kneading constantly until all Gastric Juice has penetrated every part of the food mass and all is well and truly mixed in. The Instinctive Mind does some wonderful work in the stomach movements and works like a well-oiled machine. And if the stomach has been treated to properly prepared, well chewed/masticated, in salivated food then the machine is able to turn out a fine job. But if, as so often occurs, the food is of a quality not fit for the human stomach – i.e. has been bolted, half chewed, not fully salivated, or ‘stuffed’ by a ‘gluttonous’ owner – then there is going to be trouble. This trouble is shaped by the fact that instead of the normal process of digestion being performed, the stomach is unable to do its work properly and therefore fermentation results and the stomach becomes the holder of a fermenting, putrefying, rotting mass – a ‘yeast pot’. If you could form an idea of what a cesspool you might well maintain in your stomach (through incorrect digestion) then you might cease to shrug your shoulders at the subject of rational and healthy eating habits.
Let’s delve into this further.
This putrefying ferment, arising from abnormal eating habits often becomes chronic and results in a condition which manifests itself in the symptoms of what is called ‘dyspepsia’, or similar troubles like IBS, gastroesophagealreflux, lactose intolerance and more. Because of all of the above mentioned incorrect digestion, your food mass remains in your stomach for a long time after each meal, and then when the next meal arrives the stomach, barely having dealt with the previous bolted matter, then has further food to deal with and consequently fermentation continues with the result of a perpetually active ‘yeast pot’ taking up residence. This condition will in time result in a diminishing normal functioning of your stomach, the surface of which will become slimy, soft, thin, and weak. The glands will get clogged, and your complete digestive apparatus will become impaired and broken. In this event your ‘half digested’ food will pass out into your small intestine tainted with acids arising from fermentation, and over time will result in your entire system becoming gradually poisoned and imperfectly nourished.
The food-mass saturated with the Gastric Juice which has been poured onto it, kneaded, and churned, will leave the Stomach by the Pyloric orifice on the lower right-hand side of the Stomach, and will enter your small intestine.
Your small intestine is a tube-like canal ingeniously coiled upon itself to occupy a comparatively small space, but which is actually more like 20 to 30 feet in length. Its inner walls are lined with a velvety substance, and through the greater part of its length this velvety lining is arranged in transverse shelf-like folds, which maintain a ‘winking’ motion, swaying backward and forward in the intestinal fluids, retarding the passage of food, and providing an increased surface for secretion and absorption. The velvety condition of this mucous lining is caused by numerous minute elevations, which are known as the intestinal ‘villi.’ As soon as the food mass enters the small intestine it is met with a peculiar fluid called Bile. The Bile saturates the food mass and gets thoroughly mixed up and into it. The Bile is a secretion of the liver and is stored and ready for use in a strong bag called the Gall Bladder. About two quarts of bile per day is used in saturating the food as it passes into the small intestine. Its purpose is to assist the Pancreatic Juice in preparing the fatty parts of the food for absorption and to aid in the prevention of decomposition and putrefaction of the food as it passes through the small intestine, it also contributes to the neutralization of the Gastric Juice which has already performed its work. The Pancreatic Juice is secreted by the Pancreas, an elongated organ situated just behind the stomach and its purpose is to act upon the fatty portions of the food and to render them possible of absorption from the Intestines along with the other parts of the food nourishment. It is about one and one-half pints used daily in this work.
The hundreds of thousands of plush-like ‘hairs/villi’ upon the velvety lining of the small intestine maintain a constant waving motion, passing through and in the soft, semi-liquid food which is passing through the small intestine. They are constantly in motion, licking up and absorbing the nourishment that is contained in the food-mass and transmitting it to the system.
The several steps whereby the food is converted into blood and is carried to all parts of the system are as follows:
Mastication, insalivation, deglutition, stomach and intestinal digestion, absorption, circulation, and assimilation.
Let us run over these again so we remember their high importance:
Mastication: performed by the teeth – this is the ‘chewing’ process – the lips, tongue and cheeks assist with this work. Mastication breaks up the food into small enough particles to enable the Saliva to reach in more thoroughly and get a major part of digestion happening before left to the stomach to do all the work.
Insalivation: this is the process of saturating the masticated food with the Saliva. It pours into and onto the food-mass from the Salivary Glands. Saliva acts upon the cooked starch in the food, changing it into dextrin and then glucose, thus rendering it soluble. This chemical change is rendered possible by the action of the Ptyalin in the Saliva acting as a ferment and changing the chemical constitution of those substances for which it has an affinity.
Digestion: performed in the Stomach and Small Intestines and consists in the conversion of the food-mass into products capable of being absorbed and assimilated. The crux of Digestion begins when food reaches the stomach. The Gastric Juice pours out copiously and, becoming mixed up and churned into the food-mass, it dissolves the Connective Tissue of meat, releases Fat from its envelopes by breaking them up and transforms some of the [3]Albuminous material, such as lean meat, gluten of wheat and white of eggs, into Albuminose, in which form they are capable of being absorbed and assimilated.
The transformation occasioned by stomach digestion is accomplished by the chemical action of an organic ingredient of the Gastric Juice, called Pepsin, and connection with the acid ingredients of the Gastric Juice.
While the process of Digestion is being performed by the stomach the fluid portion of the food-mass, (both that which has entered the stomach as fluids which have been drunken, as well as the fluids liberated from the solid food in the process of digestion) is rapidly taken up by absorbents of the stomach and is carried to the blood. At the same time, the more solid portions of the food-mass (those which have been impaired at the ‘chewing’ and ‘masticating’ state of the process) are further being churned by the muscular action of the stomach. In about a half-hour from time of eating, the solid portions the food-mass begin slowly to leave the stomach in the form of a grayish, pasty substance, called Chyme, which is a mixture of some of the sugar and salts of the food, of transformed starch or glucose, of softened starch, of broken fat and connective tissue, and of albuminose.
The Chyme, leaving the stomach, enters the small intestine, and encounters the Pancreatic and Intestinal Juices and with the Bile and intestinal digestions ensures. These fluids dissolve most of the food that has not already been softened. Intestinal digestion resolves the Chyme into three substances known as (1) Peptone, (2) Chyle, from the emulsion of Fats, and (3) Glucose, from the transformation of the starchy elements of the food. These substances are primarily carried into the blood and become a part of it, while the undigested food passes out of the small intestine through a trap-door-like valve into the large bowel called the Colon.
Absorption, by which name is known as the process by which the above-named products of the food, resulting from the digestive process, are taken up by the veins and [4]lacteals, is affected by endosmosis.
The water and the fluids liberated from the food-mass by the stomach digestion are rapidly absorbed and carried away by the blood in the portal vein to the liver. The Peptone and Glucose from the small intestines also reaches the portal vein to the liver through the blood-vessels of the intestinal villi. This blood reaches the heart after passing through the liver where it undergoes a process which we will speak of when we reach the subject of the liver. The Chyle, which is the remaining product of the food-mass in the intestines after the Peptone and Glucose have been taken up and carried to the liver, is taken up and passes through the lacteals into the Thoracic Duct and is gradually conveyed to the blood which will be dealt with in greater detail in the worksheet ‘Circulation’. The facts regarding Circulation it will be explained how the blood carries the nutrients derived from the digested food to all parts of the body, giving to each tissue, cell, organ, and part the material by which it builds up and repairs itself, thus enabling the body to grow and develop.
The liver secretes the bile, which is carried to the small intestine. It also stores a substance called Glycogen, which is formed in the liver from the digested materials brought to it by the portal vein. Glycogen is stored in the liver and is gradually transformed in the intervals of digestion, into Glucose or a substance like grape sugar. The Pancreas secretes the Pancreatic Juices which it pours into the small intestine to aid intestinal digestion where it acts chiefly upon the fatty portions of the food. The Kidneys are located in the loins, behind the intestines. They are two in number and shaped like beans. They purify the blood by removing from it a poisonous substance called urea and other waste products. The fluid secreted by the Kidneys is carried by two tubes, called ureters, to the Bladder. The Bladder is located in the Pelvis and serves as a reservoir for the urine, which consists of waste fluids carrying with it refuse matter of the system.
Before leaving this important subject it should be called to attention that when the food enters the stomach and small intestines improperly masticated and insalivated – when the teeth and Salivary Glands have not been given chance to do their work properly – digestion is interfered with and impeded and the digestive organs are overworked and rendered unable to accomplish what is asked of them. It is like asking one set of workers to do their own work in addition to the work which should have been previously performed by another set of workers.
The absorbents of the stomach and intestines must absorb something – that is their business – and if you do not give them the proper materials, they will absorb the fermenting and putrefying mass in the stomach and pass it along to the blood. The blood then carries this poor material to all parts of the body, including the Brain, and it is little wonder that humans complain of biliousness, trapped wind, IBS, headaches etc., when they are the perpetrators of their own self-poisoning.
[1] noun
noun: gizzard; plural noun: gizzards
- a muscular, thick-walled part of a bird’s stomach for grinding food, typically with grit.
[2] The imperial quart, which is used for both liquid and dry capacity, is equal to one quarter of an imperial gallon, or exactly 1.1365225 litres
[3] albuminous
Adjective: albuminous consisting of, resembling, or containing albumen. Egg white protein
plural noun: lacteals
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