Weekly Healthy Advice From VÄXA

• Watching not only what we eat but HOW we eat it.
• Paying attention to our body's digestive capabilities, and assisting ourselves naturally.

How we eat our food

With our busy lives, it's very common to eat on-the-run without properly chewing. This often leads to a need for heartburn or gas medicine. That's because our Digestive System actually begins the process of digestion with chewing. But various medical opinions say to chew each piece of food anywhere from 32-100 times! Who's got time for that?!

Saliva contains the important Amylase digestive enzymes - lactase, maltase, and sucrase - which begin the breakdown of sugars from starches and carbohydrates into usable glucose instead of simple sugar - empty calories - that can cause blood sugar imbalances and weight gain.

Many foods besides candies and pastries contain sugars we don't think about like salad dressings and ketchup, tomato sauce on pizza and pasta, commercial peanut butter, even some canned soups and beans. Since saliva activates digestive enzymes, chewing is very important.

Moving downward in the Digestive System, most antacids work on the assumption that acid reflux and heartburn are caused by having too much stomach acid to digest our food properly (hydrochloric acid HCL, also called gastric acid). This may be the case, or the opposite could be true. We may actually be lacking enough HCL to do the job.

Or, we might be deficient in other important digestive enzymes. There are Lipase, an enzyme produced mainly in the pancreas and stomach to digest fats, oils and vitamins; Cellulase to digest fiber, Lactase to break down dairy, and Protease to break protein into smaller amino acids which, as we learned last week, perform many bodily functions. Protease also assists in warding off parasites, yeast overgrowth and bacteria.

HCL and these other digestive enzymes may be missing from our bodies when:

• we reach or pass middle age
• we've been on medication
• we have other illnesses or intestinal problems

The Digestive System works with our Immune System. Improper digestion makes us prone to many infections, allergies, irregularity and intestinal challenges like irritable bowel, or colitis.

You can improve your Digestive Enzymes!

Prescription medications that aim to repair reflux damage in the esophagus or stomach contain chemicals which our body considers foreign. They may help the immediate problem but have dangerous side effects like lowering our immunities, making us dependent on the drug and endangering key organs like the liver, very important during digestion.

One of America's best kept secrets is supplemental digestive enzymes especially when naturally derived and combined with the best bioavailable herbs and other nutrients which will be recognized by the body as belonging there.