Digestive System

What I do in your body...

A fine automobile needs good fuel (gasoline) if it's to run as well as it was designed to run. Your body is no different. As you've learned, each cell must have sugars, vitamins and minerals as well as other materials. While you may see the food you eat as chicken fried steak, mashed potatoes, carrots, ham sandwiches and so on... your body sees these foods as amino acids, fatty acids, alkaloids, carbohydrates and other naturally occurring chemicals.

It is the job of your DIGESTIVE SYSTEM to take food you put into your mouth and through the process of DIGESTION, break the food down into its component parts. This is necessary in order to see that each cell in your body gets a constant supply of fuel and raw materials needed for repair and rebuilding. You've heard people say... "You are what you EAT?" That's not exactly true, a more accurate statement would be, "You are what you DIGEST."

The process of digestion breaks down proteins into amino acids, carbohydrates into simple sugars, and fat into fatty acids and glycerin. In this process, minerals enter into a colloidal suspension and become chelated to amino acids to aid in absorption. Vitamins like E and A (fat soluble) must be made water soluble.

Digestion is responsible for breaking down the food we eat into a form and size that can be distributed by our blood stream. In other words, our bodies are totally dependent upon what we put into our mouths for its fuel and the materials it needs to keep us going. That's a very important job. You can be putting the best foods in the world into your mouth, but if you're not digesting that food, you might as well be throwing it down the drain. In fact, no pun intended, but that's where it ends up!

ENZYMES

Most of this process is dependent upon enzymes to do the job. There are a lot of enzymes in the body and they are specialized. A starch enzyme will not digest a protein, a fat enzyme will not digest a starch, and so on. Enzymes are so important because not one single thing happens in your body without an enzyme. Food enzymes are just one type of enzyme we need. There are Metabolic Enzymes and Digestive Enzymes as well as Food Enzymes.