This Is Why ‘You Are What You Eat’ Is Not The Whole Truth

You are not what you eat. You are what you digest. You are what you absorb. You are what you do not excrete.

You would not believe the number of clients that come to me and say, ‘I have quite a healthy diet, so why do I have so many symptoms or health issues?’ Digestion and diet are two different things. Diet is the food that you eat regularly. The health of your digestive system determines your ability to digest food, absorb nutrients and expel waste. It is often that clients will have an issue in all three of these areas. 

Reasons For Poor Digestion:

  • Lack of enzymes produced by the pancreas
  • Low stomach acid
  • Chronic stress, resulting in inadequate nerve impulses to break down foods mechanically

Reasons For Poor Absorption:

Absorption is the ability to move nutrients from the digestive tract into the blood and lymphatic system. 

  • Digestive issues: The digestive system needs to break down the foods adequately so that it is easy to be absorbed. If this isn’t happening, optimal absorption will be inhibited. 
  • Pathological issues: The surface area where nutrients are absorbed might be damaged, such as leaky gut.
  • Nutrient deficiencies: Various nutrients play a key role in the absorption of other nutrients (aka synergists). So, if you don’t absorb nutrients well, it will further exacerbate this issue, as you won’t have the co-factors required to absorb nutrients in the first place. This creates a vicious cycle of nutrient deficiencies! 

What Happens When You Have Poor Excretion:

Excretion manages ALL waste, not just the waste products accumulated from food that has gone through part of the digestive process. It can also be the waste products that your body wants to remove. 

Remember, the digestive system is one of the main means for excretion, so if there are digestive issues, there is likely to be issues with excretion. The skin and urinary tract are other means to remove toxins and waste. But, today, we are talking about the digestive system, which is an essential part of toxin elimination. 

Individuals with poor excretion can begin to absorb the waste products back into the body, which is extremely harmful and will lead to many health issues down the line. 

I have worked with hundreds of individuals that had poor bowel movements and were not excreting waste properly. A symptom that seemed to be a common denominator for these clients was inflamed skin: acne, rashes, and oily skin. This is due to poor excretion, so waste is trying to find a different exit route. 

There are other issues that both cause, and be a result of, poor excretion. For example, breast cancer is often driven by the hormone estrogen, which promotes the growth of a lot of cells. Estrogen can be the main driver to make tumour cells replicate more and more, creating tumour dominance. That is why we need to be extra careful with HRT!

Estrogen is abundant, circulating the body at high quantities, and the main way to excrete this is via the digestive system. We excrete the estrogen in the intestines and rely on the passing of stools to eliminate excess estrogen. 

Further, fibroids in the uterus and endometriosis are both driven by estrogen. If you have either of these conditions, you need to consider estrogen dominance as potential driving force.

The Bottom Line

It’s not just about what you eat, it is about what you absorb and whether you can effectively excrete waste. 

It is also a domino effect: If you have poor digestion, you have poor absorption. If your digestion and absorption are not good, you will struggle with effective excretion. When you cannot excrete, there is a build-up of toxicity in the body, as well as hormonal imbalance, which negatively impacts the function of your digestive system. You need to break this cycle! 

A good diet is imperative, and I recommend that, if you’re not already, you implement an anti-inflammatory, healthy and diverse diet. There are heaps of recipes on Synergised Nutrition to help you do it. 

However, if you’re making a conscious effort to improve your diet, you might as well receive the optimal benefits from it, right? So, you need to improve the health of your digestive system. The surface area where nutrients are absorbed might be damaged, such as leaky gut. To do this, reduce internal and external stress and follow a gut health protocol such as the GI Protocol. These are the two best things you can do for your digestive health – and it is incredible how quickly you will reap the benefits. 

Resources:

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/20522896/


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