A lot of people are a little confused about how our body actually works.
I can remember looking at a plate with chicken and vegetables and knowing that it was food for our body but not knowing how the body actually converts that food into a form where the body can actually use it and then gets that food to our cells.
To understand how nutrition supplementation can affect our health we need to start with this basic information about how this all works. (If you have a nursing or medical background this is so basic that you can just skip it as you will have done it all in College in biology 101!)
Okay, take a plate of food and cut it up.
You then chew it and this breaks down the size of the food particles.
When you are chewing the food is mixed with saliva that has enzymes that start to break down the food.
You swallow the food and stomach acids break it down to a soup like consistency.
It then passes through the small intestine, large intestine and the residual is passed out of the body.
That is fairly simple but I used to have trouble understanding how this nutrition soup gets to your cells.
The answer is that the body is an amazing thing.
The majority of nutrition is absorbed through the small intestine.
The walls of the small intestine are covered by a hair like/finger like protrusion called villi and and that is coated with then even finer micro-villi.
Villi make a huge difference to the surface area of our small intestine.
Cambridge university did a study many years ago that showed the surface area of a normal healthy adult male to be around the area of two soccer fields.
If you stress and damage the villi they become energetically impaired and that surface area of the villi can be reduced to as little as the area of one tennis court.
This is frightening if you envisage a liquid lawn fertilizer being poured over 2 soccer fields then pouring the same volume of fluid over a tennis court where, obviously, a lot of the liquid would just run off. If we have energetically impaired villi then our body just cannot absorb enough nutrition from what we eat for us to maintain full health.
A few years ago I was sitting on a rooftop in New Delhi giving a little presentation and one of the chaps there was a doctor who nodded his head to say this is just too obvious while his wife, sitting at his side, just did not get it
I explained it twice then the doctor turned to his wife and said This of the villi like kelp/seaweed in the ocean. They wave in the water drawing nutrition into the plant. Then a storm comes through and churns up the water and rips up the seaweed and throws it up on the beach. When the storm is over things settle down and the seaweed re-grows and thing come back to normal.
Imagine your intestine as having a seaweed forest growing out from all sides and when the liquid food passes through the seaweed draws the goodness out of it and passes it through walls of the intestine into the blood stream for delivery to the cells.
It makes sense.
Now imagine that you have stresses the villi. When that happens they get brittle. If they break off but do not re-grow you have stumpy little things rather then long healthy finger like villi. If we eat some high fat food and coat the intestine with a fatty layer then we prevent the body from absorbing any worthwhile nutrition and the body starts to die.
This is called Energetically Impaired villi and is a common complaint in modern society.
How do we damage our villi?
Poor diet
Irregular eating times
Broken sleep patterns (this problem is very common in shift workers)
Toxins (including food colourings and preservatives as will as thinks like coffee, tobacco, alcohol, smog we breath, environmental chemicals basically just living!)
The two things that will damage the villi quickest are;
1. Antibiotics and
2. Stress.
If you are living a busy life and not getting regular healthy meals and decent sleep, if you smoke, drink, work with chemicals then you are at risk.
If you have been on antibiotics in the last 18 months or so you are at risk.
If life is just stressful, too much to do, not enough time, pressures of work or study, too many people needing your time then you are at high risk.
How do we know this is a problem for us?
The initial symptoms would be;
tiredness,
waking up feeling you are not fully rested,
energy or concentration drop outs during the afternoon,
coming home and just wanting to sit and do nothing,
food allergies,
not having energy or interest to do sports or other activities you used to do,
low immune system (getting coughs and colds easily)
other health issues being worse than normal
just not feeling like yourself.
Its for this reason that more and more medical authorities are advocating the use of vitamin and mineral supplements. However, finding them in the right combination can be both confusing and costly.
If some of these issues sound like you then I suggest you look at our article on rebuilding your villi. We have a nutrition range that is designed to do just that and so we are biased but if you are a normal health person then you can turn all this around within a week.
The 3 Functions of Cellular Nutrition
Cleansing:
Help repair the damage we do to our system so that absorption of nutrients is possible
Absorbtion:
Absorb those nutrients in a balanced form and transfer those nutrients into the blood circulation system
Injestion:
Use the finest nutrients available to rebuild the body at a cellular level.
It makes sense that, if nutritional deficiencies and excesses are causing malfunctions and disease states; if we reverse the process our body has the best possible chance to create optimum health.
If you have core health issues then we will need to talk together a little to find out the best way to support you on your road to better health.