No Diet Liquid Protein Are You Regular Liable to Heartburn An Inside Look at Constipation, Dyspepsia and Fibre.
Not an after lunch topic -- or is it?
Maybe after lunch is when it all comes up!
Judging by the shelves in the supermarkets, druggists and chemists' shops, we have an obsession with constipation and dyspepsia. Why? Maybe it's got something to do with what we eat.
Fibre and Digestion
Here's an interesting fact. A minority of people eat a Western diet which is more than half low-starch vegetables, and most of their other food is high-fibre. They have a progress time of food in their digestive system from entry to exit (putting it delicately) of 1-2 days. By contrast, people on ordinary Western diets have a typical progress time of 5-7 days -- today's lunch will take a week for the remains to appear at the other end.
This has a huge effect on general health.
The clue to the problem is that nearly all of us eat an unnatural diet of highly processed food, with most of the fibre removed. Low fibre means low volume, and your gut has a struggle shifting the food along. That's why your food takes so long to get from one end to the other.
What do most people do about it? Generally, nothing but complain, and put down the whole constipation thing as normal. If things get too bad, they take some kind of laxative or even a purgative, which forces your gut into emergency action. Some people use laxatives and enemas as a weekly or even daily routine.
But should we live so much on the edge? Is it healthy to be always forcing our bodies into spasm?
Dyspepsia
You know the feeling -- swollen, uncomfortably full stomach, belching, acid vomit in the mouth, or maybe even further! That's dyspepsia. For a lot of people, it's a normal part of life and the pills are there in purse or pocket to give relief. They work -- the cheap ones as well as the highly-advertised, high-price ones, and the liquids, too. So does plain, cheap chalk.
Dyspepsia is caused, essentially, by gas in your stomach. And that's usually a result of fermentation of yeasts. The usual remedies that I've mentioned aim to reduce the stomach acid level enough so that the yeasts don't thrive. There's more to it, but that's the basic mechanism. But there's a serious problem with this remedy. It stops your digestion of proteins.
When you eat a typical meal, your stomach digests proteins first, and that needs a highly acid environment. Only when the signal comes that proteins are sorted, does your stomach become more alkaline and begin to digest starches and sugars, before moving it all to the gut for the next stage. So, what happens when we artificially stop digestion? Yes -- It all waits around until the process can be restarted.
An ordinary mixed food meal should take about 6-8 hours to process in the stomach. That could double if we keep stopping digestion with antacids. Really, a dosed stomach needs an overnight rest to get back to normal, as long as we leave it alone. But think -- how often do you eat a meal? If you spend your day eating at the usual intervals, you're piling one meal onto a partly-digested one again and again all day. And snacking will make this worse. Your digestive system will have to put a lot of energy into this, and still not be efficient. And the energy used won't be available for such things as running or thinking. There's a good reason why we tend to get sleepy after a big mixed meal.
The Best Antacid
So, what's a better fix for all this discomfort? Simple. Eat foods with plenty of roughage and, better still, don't mix a lot of concentrated carbohydrates with a lot of proteins in one meal. Try the roughage first, and if that's not enough to fix the dyspepsia or constipation, go for the food separation. Dyspepsia will magically go away and constipation is replaced by normal service.
You have to ask, 'why don't people do it, then?' The answer is simple. If we're controlled by greed and want, rather than by common sense, we'll stuff ourselves with addictive foods we know aren't healthy. And mass advertising encourages us to do just that. The profitable, widely advertised foods we see peddled all around us every day end up being the ones we eat for convenience. It's no surprise that those are the highly refined, low-roughage, fat-and-meat-and-sugar-and-starch junk foods that cause the biggest problems.
It's a personal choice: eat sensibly, or be unhealthy. Which do you choose?
No Diet Liquid Protein.